Cllr Fran Belbin, Leader of the Sheffield Council’s Labour Group, has followed the Labour Party leadership’s instructions to condemn the Green Party for passing a resolution at its annual conference that characterises Zionism as racist. She issued an ultimatum, saying that the Council’s Labour group will end Sheffield Council’s joint administration with the Green Party unless they renounce the newly adopted policy on Israel’s Zionism.
Labour’s line of attack is that criticising Zionism is an attack on Jewish people. It is not. There is nothing inherently Jewish about a political project that has led to establishing Israel as a settler colonial, apartheid state, that uses ethnic cleansing and now genocide to achieve its goals.
Just three weeks after Ed Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, told the Labour party Conference, to rapturous applause, that those who had been protesting over Israel’s war on Gaza had been right, the implied Burnham reset to the Starmer government’s complicity with Israel is turning out to be nothing of the sort.
The ferocity of response to the Green Party policy reflects the challenge it presents to the dominant position of successive governments regarding Israel; the Green Party’s new policy opens up again a debate on what can and cannot be said about the nature of Israel’s rule over all of historic Palestine. It does this by focusing attention on the material manifestations of Israel’s Zionist project, centring it on the lived experience of Palestinians across all the areas it controls.
Ample supportive evidence exists. The Palestinian Human Rights Centre, Al Haq, published a report entitled, “Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Zionist Settler-colonialism.” Other prominent human rights organisations, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and two Israeli ones, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, have also published detailed reports illustrating how Israel’s rule is based on a system of apartheid, which is racial discrimination embodied in the institutional structure of the state.
Amnesty International’s General Secretary, Agnès Callamard concluded: “Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights. We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act.”
The Greens are also re-stating the principle established in UN Resolution 3379, in 1975, which determined that “Zionism is a form of racial discrimination and racism.” This too met with fierce criticism and was only taken down in 1991 under intense pressure from the US and an Israeli ultimatum that it would refuse to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference, which many hoped would result in a lasting settlement in the region. History shows this was a false hope, a mistake that should not be repeated by capitulation to pro-Israel pressure.
The Sheffield Palestine Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, salutes the Green Party’s courage and initiative in relaunching a debate that questions the basic political principles of Zionism, which underpin Israel’s relentless pursuit of a Jewish supremacist state and the oppression and expulsion of the Palestinian people
