The Green Party of England and Wales has formally adopted a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism and calling for Israel's replacement by a single Palestinian state. The vote at the Brighton conference — 1,022 to 813 — overrode opposition from four of the party's five MPs, its former leader Caroline Lucas, and its former co-leader Adrian Ramsay. The motion is now binding party policy. The mechanics matter more than the headline. A campaign group called Greens for Palestine explicitly encouraged non-party members to join the Greens specifically to vote this motion through. This is an entryist strategy — using open membership rules to capture institutional policy-making machinery. The party's democratic structure, designed to give members sovereignty over policy, became the vector for a single-issue takeover. An amendment protecting members affiliated with Jewish community institutions from discipline under the new policy was voted down. Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, missed the vote to campaign in Holborn and St Pancras ahead of a byelection. When asked whether Zionism was racist, he reframed the question around the motion's internal definition — "the displacement and genocide of the Palestinian people" — rather than engaging with the term's contested meaning. Senior Greens privately express frustration that he did not take a firmer stance. The four dissenting MPs were precise in their objections. Carla Denyer warned the wording "risks alienating a significant proportion of Jewish people, including those who vehemently disagree with the Israeli government." Ellie Chowns called Zionism "a contested concept with no single definition" and argued the motion reinforced "zero-sum politics." Ramsay and Siân Berry objected to prescribing the form of a Palestinian state without accounting for the self-determination of both peoples. These are not minor procedural quibbles — they identify the structural problem: a party that prides itself on anti-racism adopted a policy that a major Jewish denomination calls antisemitic. The Movement for Progressive Judaism responded bluntly: "The Green party has made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party." Their argument is that declaring Jewish self-determination inherently racist amounts to telling a minority what their identity means and then weaponizing that definition against them — something the Greens would not do to any other group. Jewish Greens' own polling found 81% of their members do not identify as Zionist, but the group was split on whether to oppose the motion, suggesting the internal picture is more fractured than either side admits. The 20-year trajectory here is clarifying. Parties that allow single-issue entryism to override their parliamentary leadership eventually face a choice: purge the activists or lose the moderates. Labour's experience with Momentum is instructive — the energy that powered Corbyn's leadership also made the party unelectable until it was forcibly reversed. The Greens have four MPs for the first time in their history. This vote puts them on a direct collision course with electoral viability in seats where Jewish voters or centrist voters hold the margin. What actually happened in Brighton is a microcosm of a recurring democratic vulnerability: open-membership parties can be captured by organized minorities willing to pay £5 and show up. The Greens' own statement acknowledged "a serious and deeply felt debate" but offered no mechanism to reconcile a membership policy that four-fifths of their parliamentary caucus publicly opposes. The gap between conference sovereignty and parliamentary reality is now the defining fault line in the party.
