PSC extends its solidarity to the Green Party of England and Wales and its members who are facing a barrage of media smears and abuse following their democratic conference decision to pass the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion.
This is not new. The Green Party has been subject to consistent attack from supporters of Israeli apartheid due to its track record of standing up for the rights of the Palestinian people. Under its current leadership, this principled stance has helped to carry the party to unprecedented success, winning more votes and electing more MPs, councillors and mayors than ever before.
The motion supports the call from Palestinian civil society to impose boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel similar to those applied to apartheid South Africa and calls for the release of all Palestinian political prisoners, the de-proscription of Palestine Action and the release of all those currently imprisoned in Britain for nonviolent direct action in support of Palestinian rights – all of which we fully endorse.
It also formally declares the party to be anti-Zionist and calls for the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine.
PSC is an anti-Zionist organisation. As a solidarity campaign, it is our core aim to support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice – to end the systems of oppression that prevent the Palestinian people from realising their inalienable rights, including their right to self-determination and right of return. Our longstanding policy, shaped in dialogue with our Palestinian partners, is that it is for the Palestinian people as a whole, rather than the solidarity movement in Britain, to decide what form Palestinian self-determination should take, but this does not diminish our opposition to Zionism.
Critics of the Green Party motion have stated that Zionism is nothing more than the desire for self-determination for Jewish people. That is just not true. Zionism as a political project has been used to justify over a century of Palestinian dispossession and continues to underpin Israel’s genocide in Gaza today. Palestine was never ‘a land without a people.’ Zionism’s founding ideology and political movement entailed the violent colonisation of Palestine and the establishment of a ‘Jewish state’ by removing or eliminating the indigenous Palestinian population from some or all of their homeland. Since its creation, consecutive Israeli governments have enacted a raft of policies that aim to take control of the maximum amount of land with the minimum number of Palestinians, denying their fundamental rights. No other interpretation is consistent with the history and reality of Zionism. Anti-Zionism is our opposition to that project and support for the rights of the Palestinian people.
Any political project that relies on ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism and the imposition of a system of apartheid, which Zionism fundamentally does, and which is responsible for genocide, is self-evidently racist. We welcome the decision of Green Party conference to declare this truth.
We send our solidarity to the Green Party and its members in the face of these smears. Together, we must continue to build the broadest possible movement in support of the rights of the Palestinian people and for a complete end to all British diplomatic, economic, political and military support for Israel’s crimes.
Join us on Saturday 10 October when we march in London to mark the horrific milestone of three years since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
End the genocide
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