Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of the Conference of European Rabbis. (center). Credit: Conference of European Rabbis (CER)
A Soviet Libel Returns: On the Green Party’s “Zionism is Racism” Resolution - Statement of Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of Conference of European Rabbis
In October 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre at Babi Yar, I stood בס״ד Munich, 5 October 2026 with a delegation of Jewish leaders, among them Edgar Bronfman, President of the World Jewish Congress, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. After walking the ravine where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered, we met with Leonid Kravchuk, the leader of Ukraine. We asked for one thing: that Ukraine support the repeal of UN Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a form of racism. We received that commitment. Two months later, the United Nations revoked the resolution.
"What we witnessed this weekend in Britain, as the Green Party voted to resurrect this Soviet-engineered antisemitic doctrine, is nothing less than extraordinary."
I served as Chief Rabbi of Moscow for nearly three decades, and I know what “antiZionism” meant in the Soviet Union. It was the respectable euphemism for state antisemitism. Under its banner, Soviet Jews were barred from universities, denied professions, refused the right to emigrate, and stripped of the freedom to learn Hebrew or practise their faith. “Zionism is racism” was not a moral argument. It was a tool of persecution, exported to the world by a totalitarian regime.
That a political party in a Western democracy should now choose to pick up this same lever is nothing short of a disgrace. It tells British Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom feel a deep connection to Israel, that a core part of their identity is to be treated as a form of bigotry.
This resolution does not stand alone. It comes at a time when Jewish writers, musicians, and artists across Western countries face boycotts, cancelled invitations, and pressure to publicly denounce Zionism before they are allowed to take part in festivals, exhibitions, and cultural life. When a person’s work is judged by their connection to the Jewish state rather than by its merit, that is not political protest. It is the exclusion of Jews from public life, the very pattern Soviet Jews knew so well. The Green Party’s vote gives this campaign of exclusion the stamp of a democratic political party.
In reviving a slogan the world rejected in 1991, the Green Party is doing nothing different from Vladimir Putin, who seeks to return Europe to the days of the Soviet Union. Both are reaching back to a dark chapter that should remain closed.
I call on the Green Party to repeal this resolution, and on all democratic parties in the United Kingdom and across Europe to reject it unequivocally.
