Must Read: Putting the Greens In Their Place Over Zionism

The row over the passing of the UK Green Party’s Zionism is Racism resolution at their annual conference rumbles on. It’s quite clear that too many Green Party members, as well as the wider public, have no idea what Zionism actually is beyond the lies they’ve absorbed online and in the media.

But if you are looking for a great response, it’s well worth reading Adam Lebor’s “These poisonous lies about Zionism need to die” in The Telegraph:

If only it were possible for Israel to arrange a trip for Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens – and for the 1,022 party members who voted for a motion (which Polanski didn’t turn up to vote for) declaring that Zionism supports an “ethnonationalist Jewish state” based on the “exclusion and/or domination” of non-Jews, while Israel must effectively be replaced by a “democratic Palestinian state”. The lie that Zionism is racism has long outlived its Soviet creators. Zionism is the movement to establish a democratic, non-exclusive Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

Do the Greens know that 21 per cent of Israel’s 10.3 million population are Muslim, Christian and Druze Arabs? These minorities in Israel are diplomats, judges on the supreme court, members of the Knesset, military officers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen and women, part of a thriving professional middle class. Sometimes they suffer discrimination. Modern Israel, like every democracy, is a work in progress. But the overwhelming majority of Israeli-Arabs would live nowhere else.

Nor is Zionism a “settler-colonial” ideology. In truth, the Jewish connection to Israel reaches back millennia to the time of Abraham. Jewish kings and dynasties exercised centuries of intermittent sovereignty from the Davidic era, around 3,000 years ago, until 70AD. Even after Titus’s soldiers destroyed the Temple the Jews rose again against the Romans, in 132AD, before being exiled. The Jewish connection to the Holy Land continued through religious and spiritual Zionism.

Read the full piece here.

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