Israel bars Green leader Polanski after conference calls Zionism racism

Israel's foreign ministry said it was banning Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, from entering the country after the party's conference adopted a motion on Sunday declaring Zionism to be racism. The motion describes Zionism as an ideology supporting an ethnonationalist Jewish state, and it backs a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine. Polanski is not an MP. He wanted changes to the wording. The conference rejected those changes. He did not take part in the debate or the vote.

Four of the party's five MPs opposed the motion. Adrian Ramsay, the MP for Waveney Valley, was the most vocal. He was co-leader for four years until September last year, when he and his running mate lost the leadership to Polanski by a wide margin. The split on the conference floor is therefore also a split between a new leadership and most of the parliamentary party. A motion the leader did not vote for, and that four of five MPs voted against, is now the party's stated position, because conference is the body that adopts policy.

The Israeli ban is a travel measure aimed at a politician who holds no UK executive office and no seat. It does not bind British courts, and it does not stop the Greens sitting in the Commons. It does put a foreign ministry on the record against a British party leader by name, which is unusual for a party of five MPs. The BBC's Henry Zeffman noted that party conferences of the smaller British parties do not usually draw this kind of government response abroad. The response followed the text of the motion, not a speech by Polanski. He had tried to amend it and then stood aside from the vote.

That sequence limits how far the ban can be read as a reply to the leader's own words. Polanski's problem inside the party is the reverse of the problem the ban creates outside it. Members passed a line he did not want in that form. MPs opposed it. The chair of the Jewish Greens has said she could leave over the motion. A leader who loses the wording and keeps the title has to decide whether to defend a policy he tried to change, or to reopen a fight with the conference that elected him. He has not published a reversal.

The text itself is specific. It does not stop at a criticism of the Israeli government or of settlements. It names Zionism, defines it as support for an ethnonationalist Jewish state, and substitutes a single state in historic Palestine. That is a different proposition from a two-state line, and it is the proposition conference adopted. Parties that use the word racism for a national movement are choosing a category that, in British political argument, carries disciplinary and diplomatic weight. Israel's foreign ministry treated it as grounds for a personal ban on the leader. The Commons party treated it as a motion to vote down. Both readings start from the same Sunday text.

Ramsay's position is the internal count that will matter when the Greens next face an election question on this. He represents Waveney Valley, a seat the party won in the general election, and he has already lost a leadership ballot to Polanski. Opposing the motion does not restore the co-leadership. It does put a sitting MP on the record against a conference decision. If four MPs remain opposed and one does not, the parliamentary party is not the author of the policy it will be asked about. Conference is. British parties live with that gap often. They live with it less easily when a foreign state has already named the leader.

Polanski's absence from the vote is the fact that keeps the story from being a simple leader-versus-Israel piece. He asked for changes. He was refused. He did not vote. The ban arrived anyway, because foreign ministries answer party policy, not the leader's private preference. The next Green statement either owns the Sunday wording or tries to qualify it. Qualification after a conference vote is a procedural argument. The wording is already on the books. The entry ban is already announced. The four MPs who voted no are already on the other side of both.