A HOLOCAUST survivor has welcomed the English and Welsh Greens’ decision to class Zionism as racism.
Stephen Kapos, who was born in Hungary before the outbreak of the Second World War, gave a speech backing the motion after it passed at the Green conference in Brighton on Sunday.
Speaking about the “horror” of seeing the genocide in Gaza play out, the Jewish retired architect said: “I felt a strong resonance with our own suffering and it is now visited upon and still visited upon the Palestinian people.
“It is the Zionist ideology and tactics that led to this, inevitably and therefore I feel that Zionism is linked up with an ultimate conclusion which is a genocide and therefore Zionism self-destructed, in my opinion. And from now on, I don’t think that we can accept and tolerate Zionism.”
Speaking to the media at the conference, Lubna Speitan, a backer of the motion, said: “Our Jewish allies have stood here, side-by-side with us Palestinians, as they have in our homeland, alongside us as Muslims, Christians and otherwise and this motion is a unifying one and conference has spoken and indeed we are unified.”
Kieran Andrieu, a backer of the motion and a Novara Media contributor told reporters, that Zionism had “indoctrinated” people into backing the Israeli state even as it dispossessed Palestinians, ethnically cleansed them and waged a genocide against them.
He said: “It says, instead of blaming people because of their culture or their ethnicity or their religion for the violence and the genocide and the horror that have been meted out upon Lubna’s family and my family and every other Palestinian family, instead of blaming it on those categories, we say it’s because of a political ideology that indoctrinates people and has indoctrinated them from the day they were born, that’s the reason that they are behaving in the way that they’re behaving towards our ancestors, our families, our community.
“Not because of anything that they are or born with but because of something that they’re indoctrinated into, a political ideology, a material ideology that came along at a specific moment in history and has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewishness.
“And there is immense virtue in naming exactly the nature of that ideology and calling it racist and calling it dehumanising because without the racism and without the dehumanisation, the genocide against Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians could never have happened.”
The motion commits the Greens to being an “anti-Zionist party”, formally opposed to the state of Israel and instead calls for “single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital”. It also commits the party to treating Zionism “as any other form of racism”.
While grassroots supporters backed the motion 1022 votes to 813 and members who spoke to The National characterised the debate as civilised and respectful, the motion has exposed divisions among senior members of the party, with four of its five MPs opposed.
Ellie Chowns, Sian Berry and ex-leaders Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer all said they were against the motion.
Chowns said in a social media post that she was concerned the motion “risks fuelling division and risks undermining the party’s ability to advocate effectively for justice and peace”.
The position will become party policy but the Greens do not require all their politicians to back it.
