United Kingdom leftist parties vie over who hates Israel more

Almost two weeks after Britain’s Labour government announced a boycott of Israeli products from Judea and Samaria, another UK left-wing party, the Greens, on Sunday passed a resolution calling Zionism a form of racism.

To some analysts, the moves suggest a downward spiral that risks painting a target on the backs of ordinary British Jews.

“Basically, they’re competing for Islamist votes,” Lance Forman, a Jewish business owner from London and former Brexit Party member of the European Parliament, told JNS of the Greens and Labour.

“The Greens had allied with Islamists over the last couple of years and Labour realizes that it’s sort of taken a lot of votes away from them, so they’ve been showing how they can lecture Israel,” he said.

Financial Times columnist Stephen Bush argued on Monday that Labour shifted its Gaza policy partly because of electoral losses to the Greens, who have now adopted a position “whose full implications are much more radical.”

The resolution, passed 1,022 to 813 at the party’s conference in Brighton, says Zionism “will be treated as any other form of racism.” The party, led by Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, now backs “the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine.”

Members defeated, 1,026 to 684, an amendment specifying that Jewish institutions should not be targeted. Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust (CST), British Jewry’s antisemitism watchdog, warned that this would be read as license for Green activists to target “Zionist synagogues.”

This “really will bring the Green Party into accusations of downright racism,” Jonathan Arkush, a former president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told JNS.

Protesters have already targeted synagogues over alleged “Zionist” activity, including a June 14 Israeli property fair at Edgware United Synagogue in northwest London, where police made 14 arrests. Last November, activists outside St. John’s Wood United Synagogue projected “Stolen Lands Sold Here” onto the building.

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council called the resolution “an attack on the Jewish community.” Noting that Labour and the Conservatives had also condemned the resolution, the two groups said the Greens have become “an extremist party with a platform of anti-Jewish racism.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said that with the resolution, “the Green Party in Britain ceased to act as a political party and became a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism.”

The Greens hold five of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. Four of the party’s MPs said they opposed the resolution, as did several Jewish party members. Polanski did not condemn it.

Despite its small parliamentary presence, the party is a rising force. In May’s local elections in England, the Greens won 587 council seats, a gain of 441, many of them flipped from Labour. Former Labour leader Keir Starmer had distanced his party from the more radical policies of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, whom critics accused of encouraging antisemitism.

Under Starmer’s successor, Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Labour has hardened its stance on Israel. On Sept. 23, the government announced a ban on importing products from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

These changes have coincided with a surge in antisemitic incidents. CST recorded 3,700 in 2025, the second-highest annual total on record — up 4% from 2024 and 123% from 2022, the last full year before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Almost half showed explicitly anti-Zionist motivation.

While Forman described the two parties’ anti-Israel policies as feeding off each other, Arkush said the trends are independent, with politicians in both parties using Gaza “to appeal to Muslim voters, and, sadly, in effect, to antisemitic elements and people who have an irrational hatred of Israel.” The Greens’ refusal to protect Jewish institutions shows “the majority of the Green Party members didn’t want to water down the anti-Israel policy,” he said.

Arkush predicted the shift will backfire, costing the Greens support where they owe their success to environmentalism. The party is also popular in some areas with substantial Jewish communities, including Hackney, where it won control of the council from Labour in May.

“I think it’s more likely that the anti-Israel shift will actually just emphasize the fact that the Greens are irresponsible, extremist and not to be trusted,” Arkush said.

Forman countered that the Greens’ radical turn had already paid off at the polls, and that the new policy aims to protect those gains against Labour’s competing appeal to Muslim voters.

“The Greens are now competing and they’ve gone one stage further to try and hold on to those votes,” Forman said. “It sort of worked for them because they were a tiny party. They had very, very little support until they started aligning themselves with the Islamists.” —JNS