Greens vote 1,022 to 813 to call Zionism a form of racism

Britain's Green Party has voted 1,022 to 813 to class Zionism as a form of racism, and Israel's foreign ministry has barred party leader Zack Polanski from entering the country.

The motion, passed on Sunday, describes Zionism as an ethnonationalist political project and calls for a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine. Polanski did not vote. The Israeli foreign ministry called the text clearly antisemitic and said the bar on Polanski followed from it.

The margin is 209 votes in a ballot of 1,835. That is a clear win and not a landslide. A party that splits 55 to 45 on a foreign-policy motion has a majority for the text and a large minority against it. The number is the fact that will matter inside the party when candidates are asked, on a doorstep, whether the line is theirs.

Polanski's abstention is the second fact. A leader who does not vote on the defining motion of his conference leaves the text in force and keeps a personal distance from it. Israel's response ignored that distance. The foreign ministry treated the motion as the party's position and the leader as the person barred. Entry bans are a state tool. They do not require the named person to have voted.

The wording does two things. It attaches the word racism to Zionism, the movement that founded Israel and that most Israeli parties still claim. And it replaces a two-state formula with a single state across historic Palestine. Green policy had long sat nearer the first of those arguments in activist circles and nearer the second only at the edge. Sunday's vote puts both in the party record.

British party conferences bind candidates more loosely than a manifesto does. A motion passed by members can be softened in a programme, ignored by a council group, or made the first line of a leaflet. The vote still gives opponents a number and a quote. It gives supporters a text they can say the party has adopted.

The Israeli bar is specific to Polanski. It does not, on the ministry's statement, extend to every Green member. A party leader who cannot enter Israel cannot meet Israeli officials, visit the places the motion concerns, or take a delegation. That is the practical effect, separate from the argument about the motion's language.

Antisemitism is the charge the ministry used. The party text does not use that word. It uses racism, ethnonationalist, and a constitutional demand. The argument between those two descriptions will run in British media this week. The vote count will not change while it runs.

Sunday's ballot is the largest foreign-policy vote the Greens have taken this conference season. The figures are 1,022 for, 813 against, a leader who did not vote, and a foreign ministry that has shut the border to him. Those are the facts the next Green candidate will be asked to explain.