How the UN declared Zionism a form of racism - Britain then lobbied against revoking the resolution

Submitted by Imran Mulla on Tue, 10/06/2026 - 15:01 In the 1970s, it was the UN which defined Zionism as racism. Today it's the Green Party of England and Wales

Pro-Israel rally faces off against a counter-demonstration of pro-Palestine protesters outside the Green Party’s Autumn Conference on 3 October 2026. (Reuters) Off

The Green Party of England and Wales has triggered an international uproar by voting to declare Zionism a form of racism at its party conference in Brighton over the weekend.

The vote by party members on Sunday makes it the first major party in the UK to recognise Zionism as a form of racism - and to back a single democratic Palestinian state with equal rights for all ethnic and religious groups, rather than a two-state solution.

The Israeli government responded immediately by banning the Green Party’s leader, Zack Polanski (who is himself Jewish), from entering Israel, accusing the Greens of antisemitism.

The United States said it would make “representations” to the British government over the issue, suggesting it could amount to antisemitism.

And the European Green Party “unequivocally” distanced itself from the vote, denouncing the motion and reaffirming its support for the two-state solution.

Domestically, the Greens have been roundly condemned by opposing parties. More than a dozen Labour MPs even reported the party to the police over its “Zionism is racism” policy.

Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice labelled the Green Party antisemitic.

But the Green ranks themselves are divided on the question. Co-Deputy Leader Mothin Ali told Middle East Eye on Sunday that he was strongly in favour of the motion, unlike Green MPs Ellie Chowns, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, who criticised it.

"As defined in the motion," Ali said, "Zionism is an ethno-nationalist state. Zionism is resulting in ethnic cleansing, in the belief that one group of people is superior to another."

He told MEE he believed the motion would shift political discourse in Britain.

Green Party recognises Zionism as a form of racism and backs single Palestinian state Read More »

Yashad, the progressive Jewish organisation which is critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, denounced the motion, saying Zionism “is a fiercely debated and contested word. But for most British Jews, belief in Jewish peoplehood and self-determination is core to their Jewish identity, and this is what they understand to be the basic premise of Zionism.”

Yashad added: “Telling Jews they are acceptable only if they give up that understanding of collective Jewish identity, is not, as some have sought to explain it away, an attack on a political ideology. It is an attack on Jewish identity.”

The motion was endorsed at the conference by prominent Holocaust survivor and activist Stephen Kapos, but the Jewish Greens group did not take an official stance on the motion, saying its members were divided on the issue.

Amid the furore and extensive coverage of the topic in the British national press, a crucial episode from world history has been almost entirely forgotten.

This was when the United Nations adopted a resolution in 1975 determining that Zionism was a form of racism, an idea backed at the time by most member states.

The UN would later revoke the resolution, but not before the British government lobbied the United States not to try and have the resolution overturned.

'A form of racism and racial discrimination'

The resolution was itself built on multiple previous resolutions, which it referenced in its text.

This included a contentious UN General Assembly resolution in 1973 condemning “the unholy alliance between South African racism and zionism”, which took aim at the warm relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa.

In the summer of 1975, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organisation of African Unity adopted a resolution declaring that “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being".

In August 1975, a conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, a group of 120 states that professed to support neither the US nor the Soviet Union in the Cold War, condemned Zionism as a “threat to world peace and security”.

These events were cited in the resolution to declare Zionism a form of racism. It was proposed in 1975 by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Cuba.

In the lead up to the vote, attempts by some Arab countries to have Israel ousted from the UN failed.

On 10 November 1975, the vote took place at the UN General Assembly session in New York.

The resolution said the General Assembly “determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.

The atmosphere in the hall was tense.

Belgium’s chief delegate, Edouard Longerstaey, made a last-ditch attempt to have the vote postponed until the following year, but member states voted against this by 67 to 55, with 15 abstentions.

Four and a half hours of debate preceded the actual vote on Zionism. Kuwait’s representative Fayez Abdallah Sayegh, declared that Arabs had “reverence for Judaism”, saying that “many Jews” were also against “Zionist policies”.

Sayegh added: “We reject the equation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”

'A great evil has been loosed upon the world'

But Chaim Herzog, Israel’s permanent representative to the UN (who would later become Israel's president), dramatically tore up the document of the resolution during his speech.

“I do not come to this rostrum to defend the moral and historical values of the Jewish people,” Herzog proclaimed.

He argued: “To question the Jewish people’s right to national existence and freedom is not only to deny to the Jewish people the right accorded to every other people on this globe, but it is also to deny the central precepts of the United Nations.”

Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US permanent representative to the UN, said that the US “rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in, this infamous act.

“A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.”

At 8:30 in the evening the resolution passed by a vote of 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions.

It was mostly former colonies voting in support of the resolution, as well as the Soviet Union, communist nations and others allied with the Soviets.

Arab and Muslim-majority countries uniformly supported the resolution, as did many African countries and non-aligned states including India.

Against the resolution were the US, Canada, most European countries, Australia, New Zealand, several Latin American nations and four African nations.

UK warns against revoking resolution

The UK voted against the resolution, but the British government would later lobby the Americans not to try and have it overturned.

In December 1989, US Vice President Dan Quayle started a campaign to revoke the resolution.

According to declassified documents from the time, British diplomats at the UN privately described Quayle’s campaign as “naked political opportunism”, saying he was appealing “to Zionist feeling” and that the cause was “irresistible to right-wing Republican sentiment”.

'We're waiting to sweep up their votes': Three days inside the Green Party conference Read More »

Crispin Tickell, the head of the British mission, argued that the campaign would “provide an opportunity for the extreme Arabs to make mischief” and could draw international attention to racially discriminatory Israeli policies.

He advised that Britain should convey to the US “at a high level” its “deep misgivings about the political damage that any campaign on this issue could do to the UN and to the peace process generally”.

The British government did so, with Conservative Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd telling his staff to convey to the US the UK’s “firm wish that no action will be taken in the near future”.

But just two years later, in 1991, the resolution was revoked.

By then, the Cold War was over and Israel made the revocation a precondition for its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference that year, which opened up negotiations between Israel and the PLO for the first time.

Some 111 countries voted in favour of revoking the resolution, while 25 opposed it and 13 abstained.

Arab states voted against it, although seven of them - including Egypt and Kuwait - were absent.

Decades later, another international row has broken out over the question of whether Zionism ought to be defined as racism.

Once more the Israeli and American governments are issuing condemnations.

The difference this time is that the contentious definition has been adopted not by the United Nations, but by a left-wing opposition party in Britain.

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