With anti-Zionist motion, Britain's Green Party shifts the Overton window on antisemitism - opinion

The Green motion has done something politically very consequential: it has made an antisemitic proposition respectable enough to become party policy.

Anybody with half a brain can see that the motion passed by the Green Party of England and Wales is disgraceful. 

By 1,022 votes to 813, a British political party decided that Zionism – the national liberation movement of the Jewish people – should be “treated as any other form of racism.” It also endorsed one Palestinian state across all the territory on which Israel now stands.

Others far more erudite than I have dismantled the motion’s ignorance and malice. Jonathan Freedland, writing in The Guardian, exposed its central conceit: yet again, non-Jews have decided to tell Jews what Zionism means and which parts of our identity are permissible.

Almost every synagogue movement in Britain has some connection with Zionism. The Greens are therefore placing much of organized Jewish life under suspicion.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the decision “a stain on the history of the United Kingdom.” It is. But I want to focus on something even more ominous: a shift of the Overton window.

The Overton window, named after the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, describes the range of ideas considered politically acceptable at any given time. Inside “the window” are opinions that respectable politicians and institutions can advocate without being dismissed as extremists. Outside “the window” are the ideas regarded as beyond the pale – too offensive, absurd, or dangerous to merit serious consideration.

The window moves through argument, crisis, repetition, and institutional endorsement. An idea that begins as unthinkable is aired as radical, discussed as controversial, then accepted as one legitimate view among others.

The public need not embrace it. The crucial change occurs when a mainstream institution says the unsayable and everyone else is required to debate it.

That is what happened in Brighton. “Zionism is racism” did not remain on a placard at the edge of a demonstration or in an anonymous social media post.

A party with elected MPs and serious electoral ambitions debated it, voted on it, and adopted it as official policy. The unthinkable became a conference motion, and the conference motion became party policy. The genie is out of the bottle.

Thankfully, there has been wide condemnation. Four of the Greens’ five MPs opposed the motion. Liberal Democrats condemned it. Labour MPs referred it to the police and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The co-leader of the German Greens called it “intolerable and unacceptable.” A society protects its moral boundaries only when decent people defend them loudly.

But condemnation does not put the genie back in the bottle. From now on, another activist, councilor, or party will not introduce a wholly unthinkable idea. They will be citing an existing British party policy.

The next proposal will seem less shocking because the first boundary has already been crossed. That is how the window moves, and why British Jews will feel less secure even if the Greens never come near government.

The political climate has been brewing for a considerable time. Last year, then-UK prime minister Keir Starmer recognized a Palestinian state whose borders, capital, government and security arrangements had not been agreed with Israel.

Last month, Foreign Secretary Edward Miliband banned trade in goods from Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and accused “settler terrorists” of ethnic cleansing.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham apologized for Labour’s earlier approach to Gaza, as though the principal moral failure after October 7 was excessive sympathy for Israel.

Words and policies do not cause every act of violence. Individuals remain responsible for their crimes. But public language creates an atmosphere.

Giving permission to antisemites 

When Israel alone is turned into a pariah, when Zionism is declared racist, and when Jewish attachment to Israel is treated as evidence of moral corruption, antisemites hear permission even if politicians insist they never gave it.

Look at Britain, where this motion was passed. Two worshippers were killed in the terrorist attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester on Yom Kippur last year.

In April, two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green in an attack declared to be terrorism, after Jewish ambulances in the area had been set ablaze. Counterterrorism police foiled an Islamic State-inspired plan to attack a march against antisemitism and then Jewish neighborhoods in Manchester with automatic weapons. The plotters wanted to kill hundreds.

Just days ago, a court heard allegations that two Iranian men had watched Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue as part of a chlorine-bomb plot. Thank God for the police and security services who foiled these plans.

Then there is the BBC. Journalist Patrick Christys recently highlighted again the evidence concerning BBC Arabic, which is supported by the license fee and government money.

A leaked dossier by former BBC standards adviser Michael Prescott described contributors with documented antisemitic or pro-Hamas views presented repeatedly as neutral witnesses. One appeared 522 times; another, who had written that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did,” appeared 244 times. This is institutional failure on a grotesque scale.

For many months after October 7, I resisted comparisons with pre-war Germany. Britain is not Nazi Germany, and careless historical analogies weaken the argument. There are still democratic institutions, courageous police officers, and political leaders willing to condemn antisemitism.

But institutional antisemitism does not arrive one morning in a familiar uniform. It advances when institutions mark Jews out, when a national broadcaster platforms hatred, when governments apply standards to the Jewish state that they apply to no other, and when violence becomes part of the security calculation of Jewish life.

Britain is not there yet. But it is no longer moving safely away from there either.

On October 24, 2023, less than three weeks after the Hamas massacre, I wrote in this newspaper that it was time for the Jews of Britain to leave. I wrote with a heavy heart and, perhaps, with a hope that events would prove me wrong.

They have not. What I did not foresee was how quickly the deterioration would come.

The Green motion has done something politically very consequential: it has made an antisemitic proposition respectable enough to become party policy. The Overton window has shifted. British Jews can feel the cold air coming through it.

The writer is a rabbi and physician who lives in Netanya. He is a co-founder of Techelet-Inspiring Judaism. For more of his work, go to: rabbidrjonathanlieberman.substack.com