The Green Party of England and Wales passed a binding policy motion at its Brighton conference declaring that Zionism should be "treated as any other form of racism" and calling for Israel's replacement by a single Palestinian state with equal rights. The vote was 1,022 to 813 — a margin of 209 votes on an issue that now defines the party's institutional posture on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The immediate political fact is that party leader Zack Polanski was absent for the vote. He had tried to postpone the entire conference to focus energy on the Holborn and St Pancras byelection for Keir Starmer's former seat. When the executive committee refused, the party apparatus actively encouraged members to claim refunds on conference tickets and go campaign instead. Four of the Greens' five MPs opposed the motion. The arithmetic is stark: a mobilization effort by leadership could plausibly have flipped 105 votes. Vivien Lichtenstein, head of the Jewish Greens, told BBC Radio 4 she may leave the party. Her concern is less about personal targeting than institutional consequences — that Jewish organisations working against the occupation, including joint Arab-Jewish groups, could be branded "Zionist and therefore racist" under the new policy framework. This is the concrete mechanism by which an abstract policy resolution produces real exclusionary pressure. The motion was led by Greens for Palestine and its supporters insist no disciplinary consequences would follow for members of Zionist-affiliated organisations. But Adam Wagner KC, who led the successful case finding Labour had breached equalities law over antisemitism under Corbyn, said a legal challenge would have "a strong risk" of succeeding. The Equality Act 2010 applies to political parties, and Wagner argues the motion would "discriminate against and harass people who hold Zionist beliefs and Jewish people more generally." Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis called the motion "poisonous antisemitism" and "a threat to British Jews and to Britain," claiming it resurrected a "discredited and dangerous slander" first promoted by the Soviet Union. Israel barred Polanski from entering the country in retaliation. The international diplomatic response is already escalating faster than the party's internal process can manage. The structural problem is that the Greens have adopted a maximalist position — not a two-state framework, not a call for Palestinian rights within existing diplomatic parameters, but a binding policy calling for the dissolution of Israel as a state — while their leadership was literally elsewhere. Conference sovereignty produced a result that the parliamentary party opposed 4-to-1. The gap between the activist base and the elected leadership is now a formal, binding policy contradiction. What matters now is whether the legal challenge materialises and whether the Equality and Human Rights Commission takes interest. The Labour antisemitism precedent is directly relevant: a party policy that functionally targets members of a protected group can trigger enforcement regardless of stated intent. The Greens have created a live legal and political liability at the exact moment they are trying to win a high-profile parliamentary seat.
