The Green Party of England and Wales passed a motion at its autumn conference declaring Zionism a form of racism. The vote was taken by those present at conference — not by the full membership — and has triggered an immediate backlash from members who share the party's pro-Palestinian positions but reject the motion's definitional sweep. Multiple letter-writers, including a professor, a former party activist from the 1990s, and a Jewish member who has worked on the West Bank, describe the vote as counterproductive to the very cause it claims to serve. The structural problem here is not the Israel-Palestine debate itself. It is the Green Party's conference sovereignty model, in which binding policy can be set by whoever shows up. Lyn Dade, a member since the early 1990s, identifies the pattern explicitly: this is the same participatory governance weakness that fragmented the party after its 1989 EU election surge. A gathering of self-selecting attendees can produce policy that the broader membership would reject — and the party has no internal mechanism to correct it. The motion's critics are not defending the Israeli government. Simon Lawson condemns Israeli actions against Palestinians. Prof Benjamin Selwyn calls Israel an apartheid state. Raymond O'Brien argues that Zionism's practical manifestation in the Israeli state is legitimately described as racist. Yet all four letter-writers — including O'Brien, who comes closest to supporting the motion's logic — identify the blanket declaration as politically damaging, historically reductive, or both. The core extraction here is factional: a conference bloc captured a binding policy position that hands ammunition to the party's opponents while alienating members who hold the same substantive views on Palestine. As Selwyn notes, the Greens had carved out a distinctive position among UK parties — willing to use terms like apartheid and genocide — and this motion obscures that position behind a definitional fight the party didn't need to have. Dade's historical parallel is instructive. The 1989-1991 cycle saw the Greens gain visibility, attract entryists, fragment over governance, and become irrelevant for a decade. She warns the same dynamic is underway under Zack Polanski's leadership, with conference sovereignty again serving as the vector for capture. Her proposed fix — an internal membership referendum — would at least test whether the motion reflects the party's actual base. The deeper question is whether participatory governance structures without safeguards are generative or extractive. In theory, conference sovereignty is radically democratic. In practice, it allows a motivated minority to bind the majority — the opposite of the democratic principle it claims to embody. The Green Party's repeated inability to reform this structure, despite living through its consequences before, suggests the problem is load-bearing: the party's identity is built on a governance model that periodically destroys the party's viability. None of the letter-writers dispute the substance of Palestinian rights. The fight is entirely about whether a definitional maximalism serves or undermines the cause. When your own members — including those who have physically worked for peace in the region — say the motion is counterproductive, the extraction is running from the party's own base toward a conference faction's ideological purity.
