Zionism is Racism: The Unexpected Return of UNGA Resolution 3379

Two years before his assassination, the Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani was interviewed by the Australian journalist Richard Carleton:

Carleton: Why won’t your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?

Kanafani: You don’t mean exactly peace talks; you mean capitulation, surrender.

C: Why not just talk?

K: Talk to whom?

C: To the Israeli leaders.

K: That kind of conversation is between the sword and the neck.

C: Well, if there were no swords and no guns in the room, you could still talk.

K: No, I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement.

Generations later, and Western interlocutors still insist on Carleton’s way: talking, appeasing, and conceding. But not this week.

On 4 October 2026, the UK Green Party declared itself anti-zionist. Its motion defines zionism as “a political ideology which called for the creation … of an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and / or domination of the non-Jewish population,” and explains that the “practice of Zionist ideology, promoting ethnonationalism, privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others.” This is descriptive and not polemical, with much of the Israeli legal framework — including its 2018 Basic Law — structured to advance this very ambition. From there, the motion concludes: “Zionism has created and seeks to maintain — and where possible — expand, an apartheid regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, designed to cement the supremacy of one group, Jews, over another, Palestinians. As such, Zionism is racist.” It closes by calling for a single democratic state with equal rights for all.

Since the motion passed, much commentary has focused on the reactions of the party’s leadership and of Israel, consistently sidestepping the proposition itself. In this post, I take up the argument that informs the motion: that zionism is a settler-colonial project, premised on an ethno-chauvinist ideology of Jewish supremacy, and is eliminationist in character (as Patrick Wolfe explained so well, and as zionism’s founders acknowledged). I conclude that the Green Party is seeking a renewal of UNGA Resolution 3379, albeit with a vital addition.

Zionism is Colonialism, Say Zionists and Jews

Today’s defenders of zionism decry the settler-colonial label as offensive or even antisemitic. This is a curious claim since zionism’s founders boasted about their colonial aspirations. When Theodor Herzl sought Cecil Rhodes’ endorsement of the zionist project, he explained that he wanted it precisely “because it is something colonial” — and Rhodes knew a thing or two about colonialism. Last month, Israel Katz declared that Israel is “organised and prepared to get them out — by sea, by air.” In fact, ethnic cleansing was first mooted by Herzl, who wished to “spirit the penniless population across the border” by denying it employment in its homeland.

Colonial vocabulary prevailed in zionism’s institutions as well: many of the land purchases were undertaken through the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. A generation later, with the Balfour Declaration firmly in place, whatever pretence remained was abandoned, with Vladimir Jabotinsky declaring in “The Iron Wall” (1923): “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.” Justifying the essay’s title, Jabotinsky advocated for building a wall of force the natives could not breach. I am left to wonder whether Gideon Sa’ar would label Herzl and Jabotinsky as antisemites for these admissions.

As colonialism gradually lost its sheen in the 20th century, proponents of zionism rebalanced their narrative; they no longer focused on the removal of the indigenous population through coercive measures but on the business of populating empty lands. In On Zionist Literature (1967), Ghassan Kanafani showed that a feel-good story ran alongside colonial candour from the start, and soared once Israel established itself by displacing three-quarters of a million people. He details the development of a body of fiction that represented zionists not as dominant settler-colonists but as benevolent settler-visionaries: George Eliot, Herzl himself, and Leon Uris are characteristic examples. In Altneuland, for example, Herzl fantasises about a sympathetic Palestinian character who embraces his own dispossession: “The Jews have enriched us. Would you call a man a robber who takes nothing from you, but brings you something instead?” Conquest needs narrative; epistemological arguments are essential to naturalise material dispossession and ontological subjugation. In a forthcoming book, I describe this pattern as consistent with practices of epistemic domination, in which the contours and content of the frame are dictated in advance to validate an otherwise abominable outcome.

As the Green Party observed, zionism’s colonial aims have nothing to do with Judaism. Rather, zionism is a shrewd political project that capitalised on Judaism’s idiom of exile and return to champion a settler-colonial project. Jewish opposition to zionist ambition is as old as the movement itself. The General Jewish Labour Bund, another political project established the same year as the First Zionist Congress, advocated equal rights in the many states where Jews already lived. The Bund regarded zionism’s ethnonationalist premise — that Jews must be segregated from the world — as antisemitic in its own right. In Vayoel Moshe (1961), Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum argued that zionism was incompatible with Judaism because it violated Talmudic oaths against forcing the end of exile. His voice is one of many Judaic scholars showcased in Yakov Rabkin’s A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism. To declare that zionism must be defended because some Jews are zionist in political commitment is nothing more than a canard devised to inoculate zionism’s racist fanaticism against criticism.

A Structure, Not an Event

To borrow from Patrick Wolfe, zionism is a structure, not an event (nor an identity). Wolfe explains that settler-colonialism is “inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal;” settlers are motivated by land, a project that demands the elimination of the native population. As we have witnessed with zionism and other ethno-chauvinist movements, a variety of eliminatory strategies is available: expulsion, assassination, apartheid, confinement, and legal assimilation, with mass killing usually pursued when these other methods fail. Questions of intent (do Israeli soldiers deliberately target children), of leadership (Netanyahu is a monster), or of dialogue (why don’t you just talk to them) are thus red herrings; the structure of zionism, and of Israel, begins and climaxes with the elimination of the Palestinians.

In a subsequent text, “Purchase by Other Means”, Wolfe explores zionism’s strategies of elimination. Since the Jewish Colonial Trust and other similar outfits were unable to buy sufficient land, they proceeded to establish apartheid-type policies: Hebrew-only labour on Jewish-owned land was applied to deny Palestinians the basics of subsistence. Kanafani had made the same argument decades earlier in his study of the 1936-39 revolt, showing how land purchases were almost always followed by the exclusion of Palestinian labour, leading to an exodus of the peasantry. In 1936, the Palestinians organised a rebellion, which was crushed by the British with the support of an emergent zionist militia, a forerunner of the settler militias terrorising Palestinians in the West Bank today. Again, each strategy is part of an encompassing structure developed to further elimination, with mass violence a common terror tactic always within reach.

The structure of zionism reaches beyond land and labour to who counts as a people or a human and to what type of liberty they might enjoy. In 2018, Israel adopted a Basic Law declaring that national self-determination, guaranteed in the UN Charter, and foundational for Palestinian statehood — not to mention survival — is, henceforth, “unique to the Jewish people.” Under this law, Palestinians are no longer a people pursuing self-determination but a demographic problem. In March 2026, Israel followed its Basic Law with a death penalty law that, through the military courts, is available for Palestinians only. And since apartheid is racism in neon lights, zionism has sought to police what can be said about Israel. The IHRA working definition, for example, lists “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” among its examples of antisemitism.

As Wolfe argued, zionism is not uniquely wicked among settler-colonial projects. European settler colonialism devastated indigenous populations in Australia, Canada, and the United States, among others. Each of these new states secured its lands and self-determination through the dispossession of others, campaigns that began incrementally and, with structure in place, turned toward genocidal violence whether through residential schools, internment camps, or open-air prisons. It is no surprise that these three states have, historically, been fervent advocates for the zionist project. By contrast, Israel remains in its “frontier phase” where the violence is still plain to see, and the demographic dynamics are such that overwhelming the indigenous population through settlement is impossible.

With ethno-chauvinist projects, what changes is not the structure but the level of violence each period is willing to tolerate and each settler population is willing to commit. In 1982, Ronald Reagan condemned Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon, demanding that Menachem Begin stop immediately, which he did. From 2023, Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, and, once in government, Keir Starmer, defended Israel’s genocide. Appetites change, and the tolerance for Palestinian death, in Israel and among Euroamerica’s political class, has reached a uniquely morbid threshold.

The Long History of Recognising Zionism as Racism

The UK Green Party is not the first institution to recognise zionism as racism. In 1973, in Resolution 3151 G, the UNGA condemned what it called an “unholy alliance” between South African racism and zionism. Two years later, the World Conference of the International Women’s Year adopted a principle that “international co-operation and peace require…the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, zionism, apartheid, and racial discrimination in all its forms.” A month after that, the Organisation of African Unity, predecessor to the African Union, declared “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.” The Non-Aligned Movement went further, condemning “zionism as a threat to world peace and security” and calling “upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology.” We find all of the above in the preamble to Resolution 3379, adopted by the UNGA in 1975, which determined in a pointedly simple phrase, “that zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” To the world’s majority, zionism has always been racist, sitting alongside the racist and apartheid structures of Rhodesia and South Africa.

On the same day the UNGA adopted 3379, it also adopted Resolution 3375, calling for the PLO’s participation in UN deliberations on the Middle East on an equal footing with all other parties, and Resolution 3376, which established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Each resolution was valuable, to be sure, but none came with a means of enforcement nor a proposed solution. This absence created opportunity for zionism to reassert itself.

In the lead up to the Madrid peace conference in 1991, Israel conditioned its participation on the revocation of Resolution 3379. Rather than abandon its racist ideology, Israel and its allies demanded that the world tear up its recognition of zionism as racism. Under pressure from the USA, the UNGA obliged, passing Resolution 46/86. The language is telling: the Assembly opted “to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379.” In contrast to 3379, we find no preamble of substance and no rationale. Rather, 46/86 was a perfunctory gesture to withdraw the resolution without refuting its essence.

Nevertheless, the damage was done: thirty-five years after the concession, the Palestinian state is still under occupation, its population is still fighting for its very survival, and its refugees still languish in camps. What we have instead are tens of thousands of dead Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of injured and maimed, and a finding of genocide, all of which flow directly from the racism of zionism, its eliminationist structure continuing to cause mayhem at pace. Kanafani foresaw this as well: a negotiation between a colonial project and the peoples it seeks to dispossess is a conversation between the sword and the neck.

The Banality of Racism

The Green Party’s motion is strong on its face. It defines zionism as an ethnonationalist political project, dismisses the nonsense that anti-zionism is antisemitism, while also rejecting the conflation of zionists with Jews; the latter is a religious identity, likely a social one as well, but the former is first and foremost a violent political ideology. The motion also goes further than Resolution 3379 did, setting aside the two-state apartheid formation in favour of a single liberal democratic state across historic Palestine, with equal rights for all its inhabitants. Ironically, the Green Party is advocating for nothing more than the very characteristics Euroamerica regularly celebrates itself for: liberalism, democracy, and equal rights.

None of this should be read as an endorsement of the Green Party itself. Immediately following the vote, four of the party’s five MPs distanced themselves from the motion. Their reaction is consistent with the epistemic domination highlighted earlier, and party leaders within the Green Party are not exceptional in their timidity. Ultimately, it is vital to underscore that the Green Party was merely revisiting what has been common knowledge for over two generations. Its position is now consistent with determinations made by the Organisation of African Unity, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the UNGA; it is also bolstered by a plethora of Talmudic scholars who continue to oppose zionism on Judaic grounds.

Moreover, consider that the party adopted the motion two years after the ICJ concluded that Israel was in breach of Article 3 of the CERD, two years after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, and one year after a UN Commission found Israel responsible for genocide. Yet, despite this mountain of evidence, despite Israel’s continued brutalisation of Palestinians, the question that followed the adoption of the motion was not how do we combat zionist racism, but whether we are permitted to say this at all.

Such is the disingenuous nature of political debate that many commentators have sought to shift discussion away from the structure of zionism toward questions about whether individuals can be zionist without being racist. This is a spurious deflection. Should we ask individual members of the Ku Klux Klan or Hindutva organisations about their feelings toward their ideologies? Are personal feelings sufficient to rehabilitate a political ideology? Frankly, the deflection is also grotesque. The Israeli state was founded through massacres and expulsions. It has since kept itself afloat through endless wars, occupation, apartheid, the imprisonment and terrorisation of a population, and now a genocide. To imply that an ideology that generates generations of cataclysmic violence can maintain any legitimacy because of the sense of belonging it stimulates in its members is unserious and immoral, and should be dismissed as the distraction it is.

The Greens have not said anything inaccurate. To the contrary, they have pointed out the obvious, and what international legal institutions have declared for decades. Rather, it is the banality of what they have observed that rankles political sentiment. Many international lawyers know full well that zionism is racism but, just like the journalist who interviewed Kanafani, they keep hoping for a solution that does not compel them to confront the racism in our midst.