It did not pass. That is the first thing to understand about Motion A105, introduced at the British Green Party’s spring conference on March 28. The Zoom conference, attended by roughly 1,000 members, ran out of time before the motion could be debated due to procedural delays, a filibuster of no-confidence votes and repeated platform failures.
The motion, however, was not rejected; it was deferred. It will return.
Motion A105 was proposed by Lubna Speitan, a British-Palestinian member of the Greens for Palestine Steering Group, and drew more than 330 co-proposers, a record for a Green Party conference motion. Party leader Zack Polanski gave it conditional support on Times Radio: “If the definition of Zionism is what is happening right now by the Israeli government, then yes, absolutely, that’s racist, and I’ll vote for it.” By that logic, Polanski, who grew up in what he himself describes as a “very Zionist household,” could meet the criteria for proscription under the motion he endorses.
The motion defines Zionism as an ethno-nationalist, settler-colonial ideology. It calls on the party to treat Zionism as it treats any other form of racism, meaning members who publicly identify as Zionist could face disciplinary action. The motion proposers confirmed to Jewish Greens that they expected it to result in the proscription of Zionist members.
The motion calls for a single, democratic Palestinian state across all historic “Palestine,” effectively dissolving Israel as a Jewish state. It endorses armed Palestinian resistance “by all available means,” calls for full U.K. sanctions on Israel and seeks the de-proscription of Palestine Action. It also rejects, in their entirety, both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism definitions of antisemitism.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which was adopted in 2016 and endorsed by more than 40 governments, provides institutions with a framework for identifying anti-Jewish discrimination. Its examples include characterizing Israel as a racist endeavor and applying double standards to it that are not applied to other states. U.K. tribunals have found these examples legally vulnerable, and the Forde Report (2022) documented their weaponization within the Labour Party. The critique has merit.
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) was proposed in 2021 as a more permissive alternative, explicitly excluding criticism of Israel and Zionism. It retained one claim that Motion A105 rejects: that denying the right of Jews in Israel to exist and flourish as Jews may be antisemitic. The motion argues that this protects a state built on inequality.
Motion A105 proposes no replacement for either definition.
The motion creates a practical basis for expelling almost any Jew from organized communal life.
Jewish Greens have warned that the motion would leave Jewish members “uniquely exposed.” Moreover, most Jewish institutions in the U.K. have some connection to Zionism. If the motion proscribes Zionists, it creates a practical basis for expelling almost any Jew from organized communal life. The Jewish Labour Movement wrote to Polanski, stating that the motion would render the Green Party “a potential space for antisemitism to go unchecked.”
The motion’s distinction between Zionism-as-ideology and Jewish identity is coherent in the abstract. In lived experience, for a large portion of world Jewry, the two are not separable. Zionism is bound up with post-Holocaust survival logic, with having family in Israel and with the conviction that Jewish existence requires the existence of a place that cannot become a site of expulsion. Declaring those convictions racist by party doctrine is not a neutral act.
Removing both the IHRA and JDA definitions without replacement in a party that has simultaneously declared Zionism racist, endorsed “armed resistance” without limits and had members on WhatsApp describe Jews as “an abomination to this planet” creates an institutional vacuum at exactly the wrong moment.
The Green Party is not a fringe operation. Its membership surpassed 126,000 in late 2025. In February, the Greens won their first Westminster by-election in Gorton and Denton, running explicitly on Gaza. At the same time, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents last year in the United Kingdom. A synagogue attack in Manchester on Oct. 1, during the holiday of Yom Kippur, left two people dead.
Though Motion A105 is not overtly antisemitic as written, structural outcomes do not require intent. A motion that classifies a belief held by the majority of world Jewry as racism; removes the main institutional frameworks for identifying anti-Jewish discrimination; and creates enforcement mechanisms applicable to virtually any Jew in communal life does not need bad faith to produce conditions in which bad faith becomes impossible to challenge.
The motion will return, and the question now is simple: Will the Green Party become the first mainstream British political party to enshrine as official policy the claim that Jewish national self-determination—the foundation of the only Jewish state—is, by definition, a form of racism?
No other national movement has been asked to justify its existence as a precondition for political legitimacy. Motion A105 does not explain why Jewish self-determination alone fails that test.
