Key Takeaways
- The Green Party has officially declared Zionism racist, and rejected safeguards for Jewish members who attend “Zionist” synagogues.
- “Zionism is racism” originated as Soviet propaganda and was enshrined in UN Resolution 3379 in 1975.
- The UN repealed the resolution in 1991, but its language and ideas continue to shape anti-Zionism today.
Yesterday in Brighton, members of the Green Party of England and Wales were asked to decide whether they thought Zionism is racism. They voted yes.
Motion E02, tabled by Greens for Palestine with more than 700 co-proposers, passed by 1,022 votes to 813. It defines Zionism as the pursuit of “an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine” and commits the party to a single Palestinian state in its place. Zionism will now be treated as a form of racism and handled through the party’s disciplinary procedures. The Greens have become the first mainstream party in Britain to make anti-Zionism official policy, and in doing so they have adopted a policy for the replacement of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, with a single Palestinian state.
Let that sink in. This is the official policy of a major British political party.
And this was not an academic debate about the meaning of Zionism. It was a political decision with practical consequences. The Greens have made anti-Zionism party policy. Zionism will now be treated as racism through the party’s disciplinary procedures, while the party itself is committed to replacing Israel with a single Palestinian state.
Before they voted, members also rejected an amendment that would have protected Jewish Greens who belong to synagogues describing themselves as Zionist. This is the overwhelming majority of synagogues. It fell by 1,026 votes to 684. Read that again. A British political party, polling in third place and with more than 200,000 members, declined to promise its Jews that going to synagogue would not make them suspects.
The motion’s supporters present this as moral courage. It is not. It is also not new. “Zionism is racism” was manufactured in Moscow, exported through the Kremlin’s propaganda machine and stamped with the authority of the United Nations on 10 November 1975, the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Made in Moscow
The Soviet Union did not begin as Israel’s enemy. In 1948 Moscow recognized the new state and armed it through Czechoslovakia. However, within a few years Israel had chosen the West, and Stalin’s regime turned on the Jews. The 1952 Slánský trial in Prague cast “international Zionism” as a worldwide conspiracy against socialism. Zionist became a word that could get you killed.
The decisive moment came in 1967. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War humiliated Moscow’s Arab client states and also awakened a national consciousness among millions of Soviet Jews who now wanted to leave. The Kremlin needed an enemy that could explain both. On 7 August 1967, an article titled “What Is Zionism?” appeared simultaneously in several Soviet papers. Its author, Yuri Ivanov, was a KGB and Central Committee functionary, and he presented Zionism as a hidden international power gripping world finance and the media.
Ivanov’s 1969 book Caution: Zionism! opened with a print run of 70,000, was reprinted repeatedly and translated into sixteen languages. Over two decades, a small circle of state ideologues produced some fifty books and nine million copies of what the historian Andreas Umland called paranoid, conspiratorial anti-Zionism laced with Jew-hate. Trofim Kichko’s Judaism without Embellishments had already argued that the idea of the chosen people made Judaism a racist religion. Zionism, in this perspective, was simply Judaism with an army.
Two pillars sat at the heart of the campaign. The first was the equation of Zionism with Nazism, a charge designed to provoke a visceral reaction in a country that had lost tens of millions to Hitler. The second was the equation of Zionism with racism, colonialism and imperialism, all of which the Soviet Union officially opposed, despite itself being an empire. Both were lies. Both were repeated until they became the common sense of the Soviet press.
The Soviets insisted none of this was anti-Jewish. Soviet Jews knew better. This propaganda unfolded alongside a campaign of cultural genocide that sought to erase Jewish identity from Soviet life, suppressing Jewish religion, culture, language and collective memory. By 1977, Soviet Jews were warning of “the smell of pogrom” in the air, as the Kremlin’s anti-Zionist campaign intensified.
And the Kremlin did not keep its product at home. Radio Moscow and English-language outlets such as Soviet Weekly, aimed squarely at Britain, carried the same message abroad, tailored to each audience: in Africa, Zionism was the twin of apartheid; in Latin America, the tool of American imperialism.
The UN was the obvious stage. As early as the mid-1960s, when the General Assembly was drafting its convention against racial discrimination, the Soviet delegation answered a proposal to name antisemitism by trying to insert Zionism into the list of racisms instead. The convention was adopted with neither. Moscow would wait a decade for its prize.
A Day of Infamy
The ground was prepared carefully. In 1973 the General Assembly condemned an alleged “unholy alliance” between South African racism and Zionism. In the summer of 1975, the UN’s women’s conference in Mexico City listed Zionism alongside apartheid among the evils to be eliminated, and in August the foreign ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement, meeting in Lima, declared it a racist and imperialist threat to world peace.
Then came Resolution 3379. Sponsored by twenty-five states, it passed on 10 November 1975 by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions. Its operative clause was a single sentence: Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Soviet bloc, the Arab states and much of the Non-Aligned world delivered the majority. The indigenous rights movement of one of the oldest peoples on earth had been declared a crime.
Israel’s ambassador, Chaim Herzog, had spent his war liberating Europe from the Nazis. He reminded the Assembly that Arab citizens of Israel served in its parliament and commanded Jewish troops, and that Arabic stood beside Hebrew as an official language. Then he held up the text of the resolution and declared that, for the Jewish people, it was “no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” He tore it in half.
The American ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, rose after the vote. “A great evil has been loosed upon the world,” he told the Assembly, and he announced that the United States would never acquiesce in what had been done. His speech remains the finest rebuttal of the libel ever delivered, and it should to be read in full.
Moynihan made two points that still matter today. The first was about logic. The UN had declared Zionism racism without ever defining racism. Worse, in a 1968 committee debate the Soviet delegate had insisted that racism was a form of Nazism. Put the two together, Moynihan observed, and the United Nations had just proclaimed that Zionism is a form of Nazism. That was always the point.
The second was about history. The idea that Jews are a race, he reminded the room, was not a Jewish idea. It was invented by nineteenth-century Jew-haters who needed a new reason to hate Jews once the religious ones lost their force. Zionism, by contrast, welcomed anyone who joined the Jewish people, by birth or by conversion. A movement that open could not be a form of racism. In Moynihan’s words, the resolution was simply a lie.
And lies have consequences. In Britain, student unions took the UN at its word. If Zionism was racism, then Jewish societies that supported Israel were racist, and several unions moved to restrict or ban them. As Dave Rich has shown, what began as anti-racist conviction ended as an anti-Jewish campaign against Jewish students. Fifty years later, a British party has voted to do the same to its own Jewish members.
Repealed, Not Refuted
The resolution survived its author by days. On 16 December 1991, as the Soviet Union dissolved, the General Assembly revoked Resolution 3379 by 111 votes to 25, with 13 abstentions. The former Soviet bloc voted for repeal, the newly independent Baltic states among them. Nigeria, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico all switched sides.
It was a victory, but barely. The repeal came only after Israel agreed to sit down with the PLO at the Madrid Peace Conference, and its text was a single line revoking the earlier determination. It never said the original claim was false. The UN withdrew the libel without ever apologizing for it.
Remarkably, Moscow itself had already confessed. In July 1990, a year before the Soviet collapse, a Pravda editorial admitted that writers posing as opponents of Zionism had revived the anti-Jewish propaganda of the Black Hundreds and of fascism. By then, the Soviet state was beginning to acknowledge what its anti-Zionist campaign was at its core. But the ideas it had spent decades manufacturing and exporting were already far beyond Moscow’s control.
It survived in the vocabulary. Settler-colonialism, apartheid, genocide, the Nazi analogy: as the scholar Izabella Tabarovsky has documented, every one of these was a staple of the Soviet campaign, and every one is now standard on the Western far left. In 2001 the NGO forum at the UN’s anti-racism conference in Durban revived the equation almost word for word. Since then it has travelled through campuses and trade unions. The Soviet Union is gone, but its talking points are, as we saw in Brighton, thriving.
The Same Costume
At the Green Party conference, the motion’s authors insist they are opposing an ideology, not a people. They repeat that not all Jews are Zionists. That is technically true, but the overwhelming majority of Jews, in Britain and around the world, believe that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in our indigenous homeland. That is what Zionism is. Declare it racism and you have declared most Jews racists.
The motion’s lead proposer, Lubna Speitan, has been candid about where this leads. Asked whether Jewish members of Zionist synagogues would face action, she said she wanted them to sever their ties, and she told the same interviewer that Israel has no legal, moral or ethical right to exist. This is is a demand that Jews renounce their own communal life as the price of political membership and a call for the destruction of the State of Israel.
Some defend the Green’s clear Jew-hatred by reminding us that Zack Polanski is Jewish and he called for safeguards. Polanski did ask for protections. He also told Times Radio that if Zionism means what the Israeli government is doing, then it is racist and he would vote for it. When the vote came, he was not there to cast one. A leader who wants to protect Jews in his party does not begin by conceding the libel’s premise. And the members’ answer to the safeguard for synagogue-goers was no.
Apply the test to any other people. No serious party would declare Irish or Kurdish nationalism inherently racist and then ask Irish or Kurdish members to prove their innocence before they could pray among their own. Only one people’s national movement is singled out for this treatment. Only one people’s houses of worship are treated as potential evidence. That is not anti-racism. It is the oldest prejudice in Europe wearing anti-racism’s clothes.
This is how Jew-hate has always survived. It borrows the language a society holds sacred and turns it against the Jews. In medieval Christendom the charge was deicide. In the age of race science it was racial contamination. In Moscow it was imperialism and fascism. Today it is racism and settler-colonialism. The costume changes, but the accusation does not.
Tear It Up
In 1975 the libel needed a superpower and the General Assembly of the United Nations. In 2026 it needed only a conference hall in Brighton. That is the measure of how far the Soviet project has travelled, and how little those repeating it know of where it began.
I have spent years writing about how our people are made to answer for the crimes others invent for us. This is the same story. A KGB functionary wrote the script in 1967. A General Assembly read it aloud in 1975. Even its authors were forced to disown it, and the world revoked it in 1991. Now a party that calls itself progressive has made it policy.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews, an indigenous people returning to our homeland. It is not racism. It never was. Chaim Herzog knew what to do with that piece of paper fifty years ago. British Jews, and every decent person who stands with them, should treat this policy the same way.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
