No one can deny it now: anti-Zionism is an ideology of hatred

The most striking thing in those leaked WhatsApp messages from the Greens for Palestine group was the activists’ searing irritation at having to say ‘Zionists’ rather than ‘Jews’. I’m sick of it, said one. The monsters who laid waste to Gaza ‘were Jews’, the activist said. ‘They were Jewish supremacists’, that lowest, most vile category of human being, which loves to ‘murder, bomb and starve children’. We have been ‘scared into using the word Zionists because of the fear of being labelled anti-Semites’, said these digital lowlifes.

It gets worse. Not only were these Green Party activists hell-bent on truthfully naming the object of their bilious hatred – Jews – they also wanted to preach to the world what a demonic people these Jews are. These supremacists, these slayers of innocents, are ‘an abomination to this planet’, said one.

The 1930s card is played way too often these days. But I honestly cannot recall the last time such Nazi-level bile was uncovered in a mainstream political party in the UK. Greens for Palestine is a faction in the Green Party of England and Wales, which is led by Zack Polanski. The party is in the ascendancy, building an electoral base from that unholiest alliance of bourgeois genderfluids and Gaza-obsessed Muslim conservatives. And now we know it has within its ranks activists who look upon the Jews as a uniquely wicked people and a pox on the planet.

They lie too, these ‘abominable’ creatures. The Green activists flirted with the idea, rife in the digital sewers of Israelophobia, that the burning of the four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green in London last week might have been a ‘false flag’. That is, the Jews did it to themselves for moral advantage. A Green candidate in the upcoming local elections in England said there is no doubt the attack was an ‘inside job’.

Tellingly, the WhatsApping activists warned each other to watch their words. Our enemies will try to ‘bait us into making statements emotionally’ so that they can ‘say that we are a bunch of unpleasant, vengeful anti-Semites’, one said. ‘Don’t take the bait!’ Can we speak plainly? If you need to remind yourself not to have an ‘emotional’ outburst that might come across as anti-Semitic, then you might well be anti-Semitic. I’m old enough to remember when being anti-racist meant challenging racism, not keeping a lid on your own racism so that no one will find out what a piece of shit you are.

Of course, that’s not how these activists see it. Remember, said one, ‘our cause is a righteous one – we are the good guys’. You know what? Every hater of Jews in history thought this. From the medieval mobs that hunted Jews for ‘killing Christian children’ to the fascists who exterminated Jews for being a typhus-like threat to the Aryan race to the frothing Israelophobes who devote themselves to the destruction of the abominable homeland of this abominable people – all thought they were serving a great, high cause. A burning, untameable, wholly misplaced sense of righteousness lies at the rotten heart of every anti-Semitic crusade.

As rancid as that digital chat was, the Green Party’s response to it was worse. Where was Zack Polanski in the hours after this story broke in the Telegraph? Dad-dancing on the stage in Trafalgar Square at that orgy of bourgeois smugness, the Together Alliance’s ‘march against the far right’. The future satirists of our political moment will be so spoilt for content. They will scarcely believe that a party leader gyrated with BDSM fellas to prove his hatred of ‘the fash’ and yet had not a word to say about the fascist-style banter in his own ranks.

Actually, it was even worse than that. Over the weekend, Polanski aimed his ire not at those Green activists spouting Jew hate on WhatsApp but at a Jewish journalist who had the temerity to interview members of his family about the Green Party’s possible adoption of a ‘Zionism is racism’ policy. Polanski himself is Jewish and the fine journalist Nicole Lampert found that some of his relatives think he is taking the Greens in a very dark direction. They said it would be devastating for Britain’s Jews if the Greens decreed that ‘Zionism is racism’ – a policy they didn’t get around to discussing in the end at their party conference this weekend. Polanski accused Lampert of ‘parasitic behaviour’ – oof – and she swiftly found herself on the receiving end of a shitshow of hate from all those ‘good guys’.

So, a recap. Green activists referred to Jews as an ‘abomination to this planet’. The Green Party is considering adopting a policy singling out Jewish nationalism as racist. Polanski called a Jewish journalist ‘parasitic’. And, going back further, the Greens’ deputy leader, Mothin Ali, made excuses for the anti-Semitic barbarism of 7 October 2023, as did other Greens. Can we say it now – that the Green Party has a very serious problem with that most ancient of bigotries?

The Israelophobic left loves to say: ‘But Polanski is a Jew! How can you say the Greens have a problem with Jews?’ Here I will merely cite the words of Ms Lampert, who has been fighting the Jews’ corner in British journalism for many years. Polanski uses his Jewish heritage, she wrote in the Telegraph, to ‘kosherise the rampant Jew hatred in the Greens’. It’s a devastating line, and one it is increasingly hard to disagree with: that Polanski’s historic role is to provide the middle-class adherents to the new Socialism of Fools with a get-out-of-jail card. They point to his Jewishness as proof of their righteousness even as they engage in truly hateful behaviour against that ‘abominable’ people.

‘We’re not anti-Semitic, we’re anti-Zionist’, they’ll say. The irritation of Greens for Palestine at having to say Zionist rather than Jew surely explodes that crap once and for all. But more to the point, what do people mean when they say they’re anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic? All I hear is: ‘I don’t hate Jews, I just want to deprive them of a right enjoyed by every other people and bring about the destruction of their homeland so that they will once again be scattered across the Earth.’

I’m sick of pussyfooting around this: if you dream of the Jewish nation’s destruction, and chant for the death of Jewish soldiers, and demonise Jewish nationalism as uniquely barbarous, then you have a problem with Jews. It might take 10 years, maybe 30, perhaps longer, but I am confident we will one day look back at the people who said, ‘I’m an anti-Zionist’, in the same way we look at those who said, ‘Round up the Jews’.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.