Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party, has said he is an anti-Zionist As his party conference prepares to debate a motion that “Zionism is racism”, what precisely is Zionism and what is the history of the claim that it is racist? What is Zionism? Modern Zionism developed in the late 1800s out of several strands of thinking on the future of Jewish collective and cultural identity, emerging from a millennia-old religious yearning to return to Zion, which runs through Jewish holy texts. The term came, however, to be most associated with Theodor Herzl’s brand of political Zionism, the movement for Jewish self-determination and statehood in the context of rising European antisemitism.

Although Zionism tends to be seen by critics as a monolithic political idea, its history has encompassed multiple, often contradictory, intellectual strands including the notion – proposed by the philosopher Martin Buber before the foundation of Israel – of a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. Since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, the debate over Zionism inside the country has largely centred on liberal and rightwing, or “revisionist”, camps – the latter represented by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. Issues such as settlement, occupation and whether Israel should be defined as an ethno-nationalist Jewish state moved to the core of political contest.

However, as Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel studies at the University of California, wrote in the Conversation last month the issue is further complicated by the fact that, despite contested definitions, the idea of Zionism for many Jews represents something more amorphous: “Jewish liberation and sovereignty, a safe haven from persecution, a revival of the Hebrew language, and a renewed sense of collective pride, especially after the Holocaust.”

What is the criticism of Zionism? One critique of Zionism – used as a shorthand for the state of Israel – is that it is a “colonial” project.

Those critics, in parts of the left, in the wider Arab world and among some anti-Zionist Jews such as Polanski, would point to three pieces of evidence. First, the violent displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba, or “catastrophe” for Palestinians, that accompanied the founding of the Jewish state.

Second, they argue Israel has created an apartheid system of unequal rights in the occupied territories that denies Palestinian ambitions to statehood and their own self-determination and, third, that within Israel those of Palestinian origin are discriminated against.

Before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Palestinians had a vibrant society across British Mandatory Palestine, but their connection to historical Palestine has often been dismissed or diminished by significant strands of Zionist thinking. At the heart of academic debate is how widespread the use by some early Zionists was of the notion of a “land without people” for a “people without land”, which critics have used as evidence that Zionism was a colonial enterprise at its very beginning.

In contrast, Zionists point to the evidence of a historical presence of Jews in the Holy Land, as well as for many a promised biblical patrimony in a homeland from which Jews were displaced and that many hold up as a refuge in a hostile world.

What is the history of the claim that ‘Zionism is racism’?

The argument that Zionism is racism, while controversial, is not new. The phrase came to particular prominence during the cold war, when the UN passed resolution 3379 in 1975. The so-called“Zionism as racism” resolution compared “the racist regime in occupied Palestine” to apartheid South Africa. Sponsored’ by the Arab League and promoted by the Soviet Union, it passed with support from countries in the developing world but was later revoked in 1991 under pressure from the then US president, George HW Bush.

Proponents of the argument say Zionism privileges the rights of Jews in Israel over non-Jews via a discriminatory system.

Opponents of the framing describe it as antisemitic as it singles out Jews as a group to deny them alone the right to self-determination.

They argue that, by delegitimising the basis for Israel’s founding as a Jewish homeland, it acts as a cover for antisemitism.

The war in Gaza has intensified arguments about the nature of Zionism, in part driven by the overtly racist framing of senior Israeli political figures towards Palestinian society after the 7 October deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel in 2023. What does British law say about the argument that Zionism is racist? An employment tribunal two years ago found that the views of David Miller, a former professor of political sociology who was sacked by the University of Bristol in 2021, that “Zionism is and always has been a racist, violent, imperialist ideology premised on ethnic cleansing” amounted to a protected philosophical belief under the 2010 Equality Act, a case upheld on appeal.

A highly controversial figure Miller has also argued in social media posts that Zionists have worked as “infiltrators and subversives”, gained access to not just all UK political parties but also “the media, entertainment industries, the law, financial institutions, sports and all sorts of apparently obscure parts of the UK”. Miller is a key figure in the anti-Zionist Movement and has links to Greens for Palestine, which is proposing the Green party motion on Zionism is racism.