There is a familiar political vanity in which a movement becomes so convinced of its own moral righteousness that it loses sight of the people it is trampling on. The Green Party of England and Wales has just offered a particularly stark example.

At its conference in Brighton, members voted by 1,022 to 813 to adopt a motion declaring that “Zionism is racism” and supporting the creation of a single Palestinian state in place of Israel. The decision came despite warnings from Jewish members and opposition from four of the party’s five MPs, as well as former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas.

The question is not whether Israel should be criticised. Of course it should. Governments deserve scrutiny, armies must be held accountable, settlements can be opposed, and the conduct of Israel’s war in Gaza can be condemned. Palestinian rights can be defended vigorously without demanding that Jews accept the proposition that Jewish national self-determination is inherently racist.

For many British Jews, Zionism is not some abstract doctrine borrowed from a political seminar. It is rooted in something considerably more personal: the belief that the Jewish people possess the same right to national self-determination as other peoples, and that Israel has a right to exist. Research published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in 2024 found that 65 per cent of British Jews identified as Zionist, while a substantial majority expressed an attachment to Israel.

This is why the Green Party’s choice of language matters. When a British political party declares Zionism racist, it is not merely passing judgement on an obscure ideological position. It is passing judgement on a belief held by a substantial proportion of Britain’s Jewish population, many of whom consider it inseparable from their history, identity, and understanding of Jewish security.

Supporters of the motion will insist that they are criticising an ideology rather than Jews themselves, and the distinction deserves to be acknowledged.

Zionism and Judaism are not interchangeable, and Jewish anti-Zionists certainly exist. But politics does not unfold in a laboratory, where ideas can be conveniently separated from the people who hold them. Political convictions are embedded in families, memories, religious communities, schools, institutions, and loyalties. A movement cannot declare one of the most widely held beliefs in contemporary Jewish life morally objectionable and then profess astonishment when Jews take that judgement personally.

The contradiction becomes harder to ignore when Jewish members explicitly warn a political party about the consequences of its language, only to watch those concerns brushed aside. Reporting before the vote raised fears that Jewish members could face complaints over their associations with synagogues regarded as “Zionist.” An amendment intended to protect such affiliations was rejected.

Here, then, was a political movement that prides itself on respecting minority experiences. Members of a minority warned that the proposed policy could leave them feeling unwelcome or vulnerable. The party heard those objections, weighed them against its ideological ambitions, and proceeded anyway. Whatever one thinks of the underlying political dispute, that is an uncomfortable result for an organisation that places inclusion at the centre of its identity.

The broader pattern is becoming depressingly familiar. Jews are welcome in progressive spaces, provided they hold the approved opinions about themselves. They may embrace their Jewish identity, but preferably without excessive attachment to Israel. They may discuss antisemitism, provided they do not connect it too closely to anti-Zionist rhetoric. They may participate in political movements committed to diversity, but increasingly find themselves subjected to ideological tests that would rightly provoke outrage if imposed on almost any other minority.

Other minorities are generally encouraged to speak for themselves when describing the prejudice they encounter. Jews, by contrast, too often discover that their understanding of hostility directed at them is subject to correction by people who insist they know better.

Nor is the language adopted in Brighton particularly new. In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination. Sixteen years later, the same body revoked that judgement through Resolution 46/86, by 111 votes to 25. One might have expected a political movement committed to confronting discrimination to exercise greater caution before resurrecting the vocabulary of one of the Cold War’s most divisive ideological battles.

The Green Party’s defenders will argue that the motion concerns equality, Palestinian liberation, and opposition to racism. They will contend that a single democratic state could replace the existing political order while guaranteeing equal rights to Jews and Palestinians alike. Those arguments deserve to be heard and debated. But their supporters should also be candid about what their preferred outcome entails.

A single Palestinian state replacing Israel would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish nation-state. That is not an incidental detail or a technical constitutional adjustment. It is a fundamental transformation of the political arrangement through which many Jews understand their collective security and national self-determination. One may advocate such an outcome or oppose it, but the anxiety it inspires among Jews cannot simply be dismissed as hysteria, dishonesty, or evidence of political backwardness.

For British Jews, moreover, this is hardly a distant constitutional debate confined to the Middle East. Its implications are felt much closer to home: in synagogues, schools, communal organisations, workplaces, political parties, and family conversations. These are places where Jews are already asking whether caring about Israel has become something for which they must apologise before being permitted to participate in public life on equal terms.

That is why the decision in Brighton matters well beyond the Green Party’s conference hall.

Britain is already experiencing an alarming period of antisemitism, and political parties have a responsibility to consider the consequences of the language they legitimise. There is an essential distinction between condemning the policies of the Israeli government and treating Jewish national identity as a moral failing. By adopting such sweeping language, the Green Party has moved perilously close to erasing that distinction.

Its members may genuinely believe they have taken a courageous stand against racism. Many British Jews, however, will see something considerably colder: a political party informing them that a belief central to their understanding of Jewish identity is beyond the pale, while expecting them to regard that judgement as an expression of tolerance.

A movement cannot credibly champion inclusion while reserving for itself the right to decide which deeply held convictions make members of a minority acceptable. Nor can it claim to listen to marginalised communities while dismissing their objections whenever those objections interfere with its preferred political narrative.

The Green Party may have convinced itself that it has drawn a principled line against racism. The more troubling possibility is that, in its determination to define the limits of acceptable belief, it has forgotten what tolerance is supposed to mean.