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Not so long ago, at a packed-out event in North London, I found myself talking to an elderly Jewish woman about the future of Britain.
“If there’s not a change of direction in this country soon,” she said to me, “then I’m going to move to Israel.”
Naively, I asked whether she knew anybody else who was thinking the same way.
She looked at me, smiled politely, and then said: “Honey, everybody in this room is thinking this way.”
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot ever since. And I’ve thought about the question: what must it feel like to be a British Jew today?
To have watched the horrific massacre on October 7th, 2023, when 1,200 of your fellow Jews were brutally killed by the Islamist terrorist death-cult, Hamas.
To have then watched antisemitic attacks and harassment surge across the West. To watch Jewish schools and synagogues require extraordinary levels of security.
To watch thousands of your fellow citizens constantly march through the streets of London and other cities, calling for the destruction of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea”, or openly displaying support for Hamas.
To watch the BBC downplay it all and our second city, Birmingham, essentially become a no-go zone for Jews.
To watch Hamas publicly praise Britain’s Labour government twice in as many years for becoming more opposed to Israel and essentially rewarding Islamists.
And now, this week, to watch a mainstream political party, represented in Parliament, vote to treat Zionism “as any other form of racism”, and endorse a single Palestinian state.
This is what Zack Polanski’s Green Party has just done.
They have decided that the very idea that Jews should have a homeland and a right to self-determination, just as the British people have, is itself a form of racism.
This should force everybody in Britain to ask how on earth we got here.
Earlier this year, after standing for election to the House of Commons in Greater Manchester, I publicly warned my country about the growing threat of Islamo-leftism.
I had just watched Zack Polanski’s Greens win that election while morphing into a Trojan Horse for a deeply troubling mixture of openly sectarian politics, Islamism, and antisemitism.
I watched the supposedly tolerant, empathetic, and inclusive Greens encourage Muslim tribalism.
I watched them pit Muslims against Hindus. I watched them campaign in foreign languages.
I watched the total obsession with Gaza and the complete disregard of local issues.
I watched senior Green politicians turn a blind-eye to illegal family voting within Muslim communities.
I even watched the Green party candidate Hannah Spencer go out of her way to downplay Islamist terror by blaming the Manchester bombing, in 2017, not on the Islamist terrorists who committed the attack but on ‘right-wing politicians’.
At the time, Zack Polanski, Hannah Spencer, and their cheerleaders in left-wing media dismissed my warnings as “divisive” rhetoric from a sore loser.
But just look at what has happened since.
The evidence for my suggestion that the Greens have now fully morphed into a political movement for racists, antisemites, and extremists has become irrefutable.
Only a few days ago, at their annual conference, the Green party voted to treat Zionism as “as any other form of racism” — to essentially view the very existence of Israel, and Jews who support a Jewish state, as a racist endeavour and illegitimate.
In other words, a political party that endlessly talks about rights for minority groups, identity and self-determination has formally adopted a policy that treats the very movement for Jewish national self-determination as racism.
Green party activists, of course, will tell you their new policy concerns a political ideology rather than Jews themselves.
Their motion states that not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. But the implications are clear.
The motion abandons any past support for a two-state solution and instead advocates “the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”.
What does that mean?
It means Israel would fully cease to exist as a Jewish state. The Green party is instead calling for a single democratic state in which everybody will have “equal rights” and, presumably, live in harmony.
What exactly do the Greens think — after decades of conflict and repeated promises from the countless Islamist groups that surround Israel that they will “destroy” it and “murder” all Jews — will happen if the world’s only Jewish state disappeared?
We all know what will happen. We saw just a glimpse of it on October 7th, 2023.
The Greens, cheered on by their Islamist allies, are now publicly singling out Jewish nationhood as something that must be eradicated, abolished, and done away with, while simultaneously posing as morally righteous anti-racists.
As Brendan O’Neill pointed out yesterday:
“We have awoken to a stark new reality today: there is now a mainstream party in the UK that is constitutionally devoted to the destruction of the Jewish homeland. It’s there in black and white. The Greens support “the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”. So no more Israel. No more Jewish nation. You heard them, Jews – not one square inch of earth will belong to you. You are condemned to wander the planet forever.”
In fact, the Greens are now pursuing a policy that is so blatantly anti-Semitic, so extreme, that not even the most unhinged right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis who the Greens constantly define themselves against would have pursued it.
It is telling, for example, that the likes of “journalist” Owen Jones are now trying to defend a policy which even Nick Griffin and the right-wing extremist British National party, at their peak in 2010, had not dared to advocate.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Because just for good measure, just in case there was any lingering doubt about what the Greens really mean, about who they really are, they went even further.
During the same debate, an amendment was proposed to specifically protect Jewish Green party members from being penalised merely because they belong to a synagogue or another Jewish organisation that identifies as Zionist.
And guess what? The Greens rejected it.
Despite warnings that doing so would increase the risk of discrimination, harassment and violence against Jews, the Greens pressed ahead with it.
“A political party”, to return to O’Neill, “has implicitly green-lighted the harassment of Jews on the basis of the synagogue they attend. We are in 1930s territory”. He’s not wrong.
And then, today, came another bombshell revelation.