Green Party US Declares Zionism Is Racism

The adoption, in brief

The Green Party of the United States has adopted Proposal 1332, “Zionism Is Racism: Green Party Opposition to Zionism and Support for Palestinian Liberation.” Voting closed at midnight Pacific time on November 8, 2026, and the proposal page on the party voting site now reads Closed, Adopted. The result was announced on November 9.

The final count, from the official Green Party voting results page, was 77 Yes, 4 No, and 4 abstentions, with 85 votes cast from 35 states and caucuses. The page records the presence quorum as 29, two thirds of 43 active accredited states and caucuses, and the consensus quorum as 41, a majority of the 81 Yes and No votes. It cleared both, and the result date shown on the page is November 9, 2026.

The proposal takes effect immediately. It makes the Green Party the first major American political party to declare Zionism a form of racism and to declare itself an anti Zionist party. It binds the party public communications on the subject to the position, commits the party to Palestinian self determination and the right of return, reaffirms support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and calls for an end to United States military aid to Israel.

The proposal was presented by the Green Party of Colorado and cosponsored by the Maine Green Independent Party. Its floor manager was Wissam Charafeddine, a Michigan delegate to the National Committee and a Dearborn resident, who wrote the proposal. All six Michigan delegates voted Yes.

What the proposal says

The proposal has seven sections. Together they define the position, draw its limits, and set out what the party will do with it.

First, Zionism Is Racism. The proposal defines Zionism as the political ideology and project that seeks to establish and maintain Jewish ethnonational sovereignty and political supremacy in historic Palestine through structures that privilege Jewish nationality, settlement, land claims, and political power over the indigenous Palestinian population. It states:

The Green Party of the United States recognizes Zionism, as defined in this proposal and manifested through ethnonational supremacy, displacement, dispossession, segregation, occupation, and the systematic privileging of one population over another, as a form of racism.

And it adds, in the same section: “The Green Party of the United States therefore declares itself an anti Zionist political party.”

Second, Anti Zionism Is Not Antisemitism. The proposal rejects the equation of anti Zionism with antisemitism, and it states that the party simultaneously and unequivocally opposes antisemitism and all hatred, discrimination, harassment, collective blame, or violence directed against Jewish people. It repeats the point three ways: Jewish identity is not synonymous with Zionism, not all Jewish people are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jewish. No person, it says, shall be subjected to discrimination, hostility, or collective responsibility on the basis of Jewish identity, religion, ethnicity, or ancestry.

Third, Palestinian Self Determination and Liberation. The proposal affirms what it calls the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self determination, liberation, equality, and freedom from occupation, apartheid, colonial domination, dispossession, and forced displacement. It supports the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return in accordance with international law, and a democratic political future throughout historic Palestine founded upon equal civil and political rights, human dignity, freedom of religion and conscience, and equal protection under law regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or religion. It states that no political settlement should institutionalize racial, ethnic, national, or religious supremacy.

Fourth, Resistance and International Law. The proposal recognizes the right of the Palestinian people, and all peoples living under occupation or colonial domination, to resist occupation and struggle for self determination and liberation, including through armed resistance, consistent with international law and international humanitarian law. In the same section it states that the party does not support intentional attacks against civilians, collective punishment, hostage taking, or other violations of international humanitarian law, regardless of the perpetrator. International law and the protection of civilian life, it says, must be applied universally and without exception.

Fifth, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The proposal reaffirms support for Palestinian led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions as nonviolent means of applying political and economic pressure to achieve Palestinian rights and compliance with international law. It calls upon the United States government to end military aid, weapons transfers, and other military assistance to Israel and to end diplomatic protection for Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and international law. It supports appropriate economic and diplomatic sanctions against governments, officials, corporations, and institutions responsible for or materially contributing to occupation, apartheid, illegal settlement, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, or other grave violations of international law.

Sixth, United States Complicity. The proposal recognizes what it calls the particular responsibility of the United States government in providing military, financial, diplomatic, and political support that has enabled the occupation and violations of Palestinian rights. It calls for an end to the use of American taxpayer resources to finance occupation, apartheid, settlement expansion, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, or violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Seventh, International Green Solidarity. The proposal welcomes the decision of the Green Party of England and Wales to confront Zionism as a political ideology, and encourages Green parties internationally and the Global Greens to examine the relationship between Zionism, colonialism, apartheid, occupation, Palestinian liberation, and the Green movement commitment to anti racism and universal human rights. It adds that the Green Party of the United States adopts the position independently as an expression of its own principles and policy, rather than as an endorsement or incorporation of another Green Party resolution.

On implementation, the proposal says it shall constitute an official position of the party on adoption, that party public communications concerning Zionism and Palestinian liberation shall be consistent with its principles, and that the International Committee is encouraged to communicate the decision to the Global Greens, Green Party federations, and Green parties internationally. It says implementation is expected to require no significant additional expenditure.

How the vote went

The final count, from the official Green Party voting results page, was 77 Yes, 4 No, and 4 abstentions, with 85 votes cast from 35 states and caucuses. The page records the presence quorum as 29, two thirds of 43 active accredited states and caucuses, and the consensus quorum as 41, a majority of the 81 Yes and No votes. The result date shown on the page is November 9, 2026.

The four No votes were Mary Rooker of Maryland, Howie Hawkins of New York, Cassandra Lems of New York, and Tamar Yager of the Women Caucus. The four abstentions were Jan Hillegas of Mississippi, Margery Hanson and Robert Hanson of Nevada, and Steve Welzer of New Jersey. Every other vote cast was a Yes.

Counts circulating while voting was still open showed different numbers, including a fifth No vote attributed to Arizona delegate Liana West. The final official record lists four No votes, and West is not among them.

The floor manager was Wissam Charafeddine of Michigan, and all six Michigan delegates voted Yes: Jim Becklund, Wissam Charafeddine, Rita Jacobs, Douglas Marsh, Louis Novak, and Paul Ragan.

The discussion window ran from October 19 to November 1, 2026, and voting ran from November 2 to November 8.

The dissent inside the party is worth naming plainly, because it shows the vote was a real argument and not a formality. Howie Hawkins, the party 2020 presidential nominee, voted No. He has said publicly that he does not think Zionism is racism. The New Arizona Green Party, which is not affiliated with the national party, passed its own Zionism Is Racism motion on October 9, 2026, and its interim chair, William Pounds, wrote on November 6 celebrating the national passage and demanding the reinstatement of the Green parties of Georgia, Rhode Island, and Alaska into the national federation.

The land and its people

The argument of Proposal 1332 is not an abstraction. It is a claim about a specific history, and the history is the evidence. The charge that Zionism is racism rests on a simple fact that the founders of the movement never hid: the land they claimed as the site of a Jewish national home already had a people living in it, continuously, for centuries.

In 1917, when Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, Jews were about 6 percent of the population of Palestine and Arabs about 94 percent, according to the historian Rashid Khalidi. The first hard count, the British census of October 1922, counted 757,182 people: 589,177 Muslims, about 78 percent; 83,790 Jews, about 11 percent; and 71,464 Christians, about 10 percent. By 1947, after three decades of immigration under the British Mandate, Jews were about 630,000 people, about 32 percent of the population. Land ownership tells the same story. In 1922 Jews owned about 3 percent of the land of Palestine. By 1947 Jewish ownership was about 7 percent of the total surface area, and about 24 percent of the arable land. Yet the United Nations partition plan of November 29, 1947, Resolution 181, allocated about 56 percent of the land to a Jewish state and 43 percent to an Arab state.

The Balfour Declaration itself, the founding document of the project, is worth reading in full, because it shows the asymmetry from the first sentence. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The declaration never names the Arabs or the Palestinians. The words Arab and Palestinian do not appear in it. The overwhelming majority of the population is called “existing non Jewish communities” and is promised only civil and religious rights, not political rights and not national rights. National rights are ascribed to “the Jewish people,” who in 1917 were a small minority. Khalidi puts it plainly: “Balfour ascribed national rights to what he called ‘the Jewish people,’ who in 1917 were a tiny minority, 6 percent, of the country’s inhabitants.” And he notes that the overwhelming Arab majority “went unmentioned by Balfour, except in a backhanded way as the ‘existing non Jewish communities in Palestine.'”

One correction belongs here, because care with the record is part of the case. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” is often attributed to Theodor Herzl. It was not his. It was used by Christian Zionists such as Lord Shaftesbury and Alexander Keith in the 1840s, and later by Israel Zangwill. The land was never without a people, and the slogan was never an honest description of it. Palestinian Arabs had lived in the land for centuries, in towns and villages, as farmers, merchants, and townspeople, with their own society, their own press, and their own national movement taking shape under Ottoman and then British rule.

This is the core of the charge. Zionism, as a political project, sought to make a land the nation state of one people, a land where another people already lived continuously. A movement that defines a country as the national home of one group, on territory where another group is the overwhelming majority, cannot carry out its program without displacing that majority or subordinating it. The rest of this history is the record of how that necessity was carried out.

The founders said it plainly

The early Zionist leaders understood this. They said so, in writing, and their honesty is part of the evidence.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, wrote in his diary on June 12, 1895:

We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

Three caveats travel with that passage, and honesty requires stating them. Herzl wrote “the penniless population,” not “the Arabs.” He was writing about poor tenants on estates the movement hoped to acquire. In 1895 he was still weighing locations for a Jewish state, including Argentina and East Africa, not only Palestine. And the passage was a private diary musing, not a policy adopted by the movement. But the passage shows how the founder of the movement thought about the people already living on the land: their removal was a problem to be managed quietly, not a question to be asked of them.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, was more direct, and more honest. In his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” he wrote:

Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population, an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.

Jabotinsky called the project colonization, and he said it could only proceed behind force. Two points of nuance belong with him as well. In the same essay he called the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine absolutely impossible in any form, and he wrote that “there will always be two nations in Palestine,” provided the Jews became the majority. He was not advocating expulsion as such. His honesty is the point: he named the project for what it was, a colonizing venture that required armed force against the will of the native population, and he said so openly. Khalidi quotes Jabotinsky from 1925 to the same effect: a movement that wishes to colonize a land where people already live must find a garrison for the land, or find a benefactor who will provide one, because Zionism is a colonizing venture and stands or falls on the question of armed force.

Khalidi, speaking at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn on February 26, 2020, made the point in the plainest terms: “To say that this is a settler colonial movement is not some ideological argument or a kind of anti Semitic slander against Zionism. They called themselves settlers, they called themselves colonialists for the first several decades of the Zionist project.” The early Zionists used the words settler and colonialist about themselves. The words became controversial only later, when the project succeeded and the description became an accusation.

1948: the Nakba and Plan Dalet

The decisive event came in 1948. About 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, most scholars put the figure between 700,000 and 800,000, and more than 400 villages were depopulated. Walid Khalidi documented 418 villages in detail. The broader accounting of the geographer Salman Abu Sitta and the historian Ilan Pappe puts the figure at 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied. By the count of the historian Benny Morris, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians had already been displaced by mid May 1948, before any Arab army entered Palestine on May 15.

The plan that governed the operation was Plan Dalet, Plan D, adopted by the Haganah leadership on March 10, 1948. Pappe, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, describes the meeting: “On a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” The operational orders, as Pappe quotes them from the Haganah documents, read:

Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously… In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

Historians disagree on intent, and the disagreement should be stated, not hidden. Pappe and Walid Khalidi treat Plan Dalet as a premeditated blueprint for ethnic cleansing. Morris documents the expulsions in detail but disputes that there was a single explicit central order for a general expulsion. He concluded there was a systematic pattern of military operations that resulted in the depopulation of hundreds of villages, which the Zionist leadership accepted and encouraged, and he called Plan D a strategic and ideological anchor for expulsions by front, district, and brigade commanders. In a January 2004 interview Morris said units were given operational orders “to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.” Whatever the dispute about a single master order, the outcome is not in dispute: about half the Arab population of Palestine was removed in a matter of months, and the state that followed barred their return.

The intention was stated even before 1948. David Ben-Gurion, speaking to the Jewish Agency Executive in June 1938, said: “I am for compulsory transfer [of Palestinians]; I do not see anything immoral in it.” Pappe puts the logic of the project in one sentence: “The Zionist project could only be realised through the creation in Palestine of a purely Jewish state, both as a safe haven for Jews from persecution and a cradle for a new Jewish nationalism.” A purely Jewish state, on a land where Jews were a minority, could only be created by removing the majority. That is what happened.

The law after 1948

The dispossession of 1948 was then written into law, and the law is where the charge of racism becomes a matter of text rather than interpretation.

The Law of Return, passed in 1950, grants any Jew in the world the automatic right to immigrate and become a citizen: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh [immigrant]… An Oleh’s visa shall be granted to every Jew who has expressed his desire to settle in Israel.” The same year, the Absentees Property Law defined as absentees the Palestinians who had been expelled, fled, or left the country after November 29, 1947, and placed their land, houses, and bank accounts under the control of the Custodian for Absentees Property. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, describes the law as the main legal instrument used by Israel to take possession of the land belonging to Palestinian refugees, inside and outside the country, and Muslim Waqf properties across the state. The Custodian acquired about one million dunums of land by 1950 under this law.

The two laws work as a pair, and the pair is the legal core of the proposal case. One people may come from anywhere in the world and become citizens at once. The other people may not return to the homes they left, even when they remained inside the state. Palestinians who stayed inside Israel but were not in their own village on the relevant date became “present absentees”: citizens in law, but legally absent from their own homes and land, with no legal route to recover them. On June 16, 1948 the Israeli government decided the refugees were not returning. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, adopted December 11, 1948, called for refugees wishing to return to their homes to be permitted to do so, and for compensation for those choosing not to return. It was never implemented. The Nationality Law of 1952 denationalized the Palestinian refugees while the Law of Return privileged Jewish immigration. The combination is a legal system that sorts people by ancestry and grants one group the right to enter and the other group no right to return.

The Nation State Law

In 2018 the state wrote the principle into its constitution. The Basic Law: Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish People, passed by the Knesset on July 19, 2018, by 62 votes to 55. A Basic Law is Israel constitutional tier. It contains no equality clause, and proposed clauses guaranteeing civic equality were voted down during drafting. The law does not mention Palestinians or Arab citizens at all.

Its self determination clause, Article 1(c), reads in full: “The right to exercise national self determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Article 1(b) declares that “The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self determination.” Article 7 declares that “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and to promote its establishment and consolidation.” Israel High Court of Justice upheld the law by 10 votes to 1 in July 2021.

This is the proposal case in the state own words. National self determination belongs to one people alone. Jewish settlement is a national value the state must promote. The other people, who make up about a fifth of the citizenry inside Israel and the overwhelming majority of the population between the river and the sea, are not mentioned, and their national rights are not recognized. A state that defines itself this way, on a land where another people have lived continuously, is a state built on the supremacy of one group over another. That is what the proposal calls racism, and the law is the evidence.

What the human rights organizations found

The charge is not only the Green Party position. The leading human rights organizations that investigated the system reached the same conclusion, and their findings should be reported as a convergence, not as three independent proofs, because the reports cite one another and build on shared documentation.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, published its position paper on January 12, 2021, under the title “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” Its conclusion is that the entire area under Israeli control is governed by a single regime working to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians, and that this qualifies as apartheid.

Human Rights Watch published its 213 page report on April 27, 2021, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” Its conclusion is that the Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, based on an overarching government policy to maintain domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.

Amnesty International published its report on February 1, 2022, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity.” Its conclusion is that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law, wherever it imposes this system, in Israel, the occupied territories, and against refugees, and the report traces the system origins to 1948. The Israeli organization Yesh Din had reached the same conclusion for the West Bank in a legal opinion in July 2020.

Apartheid is the legal term for a system of racial domination. The proposal uses the older word, racism. The findings point the same way: a system that privileges one population over another by law, by land policy, and by force, from the river to the sea.

What the writers say

Five writers were asked for in this account, and each of them bears on the case from a different direction. One correction belongs first. The name as given was Jacob Shapiro. There is no published critic of Zionism by that name. The geopolitical analyst Jacob Shapiro writes about Israel from a sympathetic, pro Zionist standpoint, and citing him as a supporting voice would misrepresent him. The writer meant is almost certainly Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, an Orthodox rabbi and the author of The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft. His case is theological, and it is presented here as a theological case.

Noam Chomsky is the most careful of the five, and the most useful for that reason. Raised in a Hebrew speaking, culturally Zionist household, briefly a kibbutz resident in 1953, he has been a leading critic of Israeli government policy toward Palestinians since the 1970s. He does not call himself an anti Zionist in the sense of opposing a Jewish national home. His position is that a Jewish ethnic homeland is legitimate but a state defined by Jewish supremacy is not democratic. In a 2004 interview he described what the word Zionism had come to mean: “By the 1970s, when Israel chose expansion and dependence on the US over security and integration into the region, the concept ‘Zionism’ was narrowed to refer, in effect, to support for the policies of the government of Israel.” In 2021 he put the long term goal of the dominant Zionist tendency in the bluntest terms: “For what became the dominant tendency in the Zionist movement, there has been a fixed long term goal. Put crudely, the goal is to rid the country of Palestinians and replace them with Jewish settlers cast as the ‘rightful owners of the land’ returning home after millennia of exile.” He called the legalistic pretexts for expelling Palestinians “100 percent racist.” In The Fateful Triangle he cites the King Crane Commission 1919 finding that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, and he cites Ben-Gurion 1938 admission: “politically, we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… the country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to take it away from them.” Chomsky has not commented on Proposal 1332, and he supports a Jewish ethnic homeland and a two state settlement in the short term. He is cited here for his analysis of dispossession and of what Zionism became, not as an endorser of the proposal.

Jill Stein is the figure on the graphic for this article, and her position is the position of the party itself. The Green Party presidential nominee in 2012, 2016, and 2024, she made Gaza, an arms embargo, and ending military aid central to her 2024 campaign, and she was arrested on April 27, 2024 at a pro Palestinian campus protest at Washington University in St. Louis. After her arrest the party press release quoted her: “Zionism is something that needs to be debated and anti Zionism is not the same as anti Semitism.” The party platform, quoted in the same release, calls for a single undivided secular and democratic state where all residents have full and equal rights, and for suspending all military and foreign aid to Israel until it withdraws from the occupied territories, dismantles the separation wall, ends the siege of Gaza, and dismantles settler colonies and systemic apartheid. The platform itself states the point the proposal makes: “We also reject the Zionist concept of an exclusive Jewish homeland at the expence [sic] of the indigenous Palestinian population.” Stein called the war crimes being perpetrated by Netanyahu against Palestinians crimes that “are in a league of their own and have reached genocidal proportions.” She has not commented on Proposal 1332 specifically. Her platform and her statements align with its substance, and they are the reason her photograph leads this article.

Ilan Pappe is the historian of the Nakba, and his work supplies the documentary spine of the case. An Israeli historian at the University of Exeter, he argues in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine that the expulsion of 1948 was planned, and he states his thesis without qualification: “Zionism in Palestine is a settler colonial project, and Israel remains to this day a settler colonial state.” In the same article he writes of Plan Dalet: “In March 1948, this leadership produced Plan Dalet, which I believe was a clear blueprint for the systematic removal of Palestinians from Palestine.” The orders, as he quotes them, were to occupy villages, towns, and neighbourhoods, expel their people, and detonate houses so as to prevent any return. The scale he records is the scale of the Nakba itself: close to 800,000 people uprooted, 531 villages destroyed, eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied.

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro speaks to the identity question at the heart of the proposal, from inside Jewish tradition. His thesis in The Empty Wagon is that Zionism took Jewish identity, which he holds is defined by religion, and reengineered it into a nationality, and that Israel claim to be the state of all Jews is false and endangers Jews. In an interview he put the point as a question: “Israel claims to be the ‘nation state of the Jewish people’; Netanyahu referred to himself as the representative of all Jews… I am an American, how does Netanyahu claim to be my leader and Israel my state?” And he states the transformation directly: “So they tried to reengineer Jewish identity from religious to national.” His case is religious, not a history of dispossession, and it is presented here as such. It bears directly on the point that Zionism favors Jewish identity as its national identity. If Jewish identity is religious, then a state that claims to embody it as a nationality is claiming something Judaism never gave it, and the claim to speak for all Jews is a political invention, not a religious truth.

Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian American historian at Columbia University, frames the whole story as a century of war waged on Palestine, not a war between two equal sides. His book The Hundred Years War on Palestine carries the argument in its subtitle: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 to 2017. He writes that Zionism “could be and was both a national and a colonial settler movement at one and the same time,” and that the contradiction is the point: a movement can build a thriving national entity and still be a colonial settler project. On Balfour he notes that the declaration ascribed national rights to the Jewish people, “who in 1917 were a tiny minority, 6 percent, of the country’s inhabitants,” and that before securing British backing, the Zionist movement “had been a colonizing project in search of a great power patron.” Speaking in Dearborn in 2020 he closed the circle: “This is a war on Palestine, not a war in Palestine.”

A position years in the making

Proposal 1332 did not come out of nowhere. Its own background section places it in a line of Green Party positions that has been building for years, and it names the step that came immediately before it.

On November 10, 2025, the National Committee adopted Proposal 1269, “Designation of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as a Terrorist Organization,” by a vote of 78 in favor, 0 opposed, and 1 abstention. Proposal 1332 states that the earlier decision established an important precedent for National Committee action concerning Israeli military policies, Palestinian rights, and accountability under international law, and that the present proposal builds upon that decision by addressing Zionism as a political ideology.

The party platform already opposed what it calls racism, colonialism, apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing, militarism, and violations of international law, and already supported the human and political rights of the Palestinian people. The proposal grounds itself in the party Four Pillars and Ten Key Values, including Social Justice and Equal Opportunity, Nonviolence, Grassroots Democracy, and Respect for Diversity.

The context outside the party also matters. The war in Gaza dominated the 2024 presidential campaign, when the Green nominee Jill Stein called for an arms embargo on Israel and for investigations of Israeli war crimes. American public opinion on Israel has moved sharply since 2023. A Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey published October 5, 2026 found that 52 percent of Americans supported the establishment of a Palestinian state, 57 percent supported restricting aid to Israel, and 56 percent held an unfavorable view of Israel. Among Democrats the figures were 65 percent, 71 percent, and 70 percent.

The British Greens went first

The Green Party of the United States was not the first Green party to take this step. The Green Party of England and Wales adopted its own anti Zionist policy on October 4, 2026, at its annual conference in Brighton, by 1,022 votes to 813.

The British motion declares the party an anti Zionist party, treats Zionism as any other form of racism, and supports a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine with equal rights for all. It was proposed by Lubna Speitan, a British Palestinian artist. The party leader, Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, did not vote on the motion because he had left early to campaign in a by election, and he has said he will not overturn it, though he would like amendments. The policy stands until 2028 under party rules. Four of the party five members of Parliament opposed the motion.

The reaction in Britain was fierce, and it is a preview of the argument now coming to the American party. The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council called the motion an attack on the Jewish community and said Zionism is anti racism, creating a refuge for Jews in their ancient homeland after millennia of persecution. The Board of Deputies voted 118 to 1 on October 25, 2026 that the party had, by adopting an antisemitic platform, become a racist party. The Campaign Against Antisemitism referred the party to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Israel announced that Polanski would be banned from entering, and the Israeli foreign ministry described the motion as an antisemitic text under the IHRA definition. On November 2, 2026, the Labour Party ended power sharing agreements with the Greens in 11 local councils over the policy.

At the same time, the policy has support inside the British party and among its voters. An Opinium poll released October 10, 2026 found that 74 of 91 Green supporters polled approved of the motion. One hundred and fifteen Green councillors published an open letter supporting it. Polanski has held the line that the policy stays.

The American proposal differs from the British one in one respect the proposal itself stresses: it adopts the position independently, on the basis of the American party own principles, rather than as an endorsement of the British resolution.

A phrase with a fifty year history

The words “Zionism is racism” carry fifty years of history, and the proposal does not pretend otherwise. Readers who hear the phrase for the first time should know where it has been.

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which determined that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. The vote was 72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstentions. The resolution was sponsored by Arab states and backed by the Soviet bloc. The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Chaim Herzog, responded by tearing up a copy of the resolution in the General Assembly hall, calling the act shameful.

Sixteen years later, the General Assembly revoked it. Resolution 46/86, adopted December 16, 1991, by 111 votes in favor, 25 against, and 13 abstentions, decided to revoke the determination in Resolution 3379. President George H. W. Bush had called for the repeal in his address to the General Assembly on September 23, 1991, saying the resolution mocked the principles on which the United Nations was founded, and Israel had made the revocation a condition for its participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 2004, Secretary General Kofi Annan criticized the equation at a United Nations conference on antisemitism.

The Green Party proposal does not cite Resolution 3379. Its references run instead to the United Nations resolutions on the Palestinian right of return and on decolonization, to the conventions on racial discrimination and apartheid, to the International Court of Justice advisory opinion of July 19, 2024 on Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territory, and to the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The proposal defines Zionism in its own terms, as a present political project of ethnonational supremacy and dispossession, rather than resting on the 1975 resolution. But the phrase is the same, and the argument about it is the same argument that has run since 1975: whether Zionism is best understood as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, or as a political project that privileges one population over another in historic Palestine.

The objections, answered

The proposal will be attacked, and the attacks will follow a familiar pattern. Each of them deserves an answer on the record, not a dismissal.

First, that Zionism is only the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self determination in their ancestral homeland, and that calling it racism brands most Jewish people as racists. The proposal does not condemn self determination. It condemns a specific political project: the establishment and maintenance of Jewish ethnonational sovereignty and political supremacy in historic Palestine through structures that privilege Jewish nationality, settlement, land claims, and political power over the indigenous population. Self determination does not require supremacy. A Jewish home, a Jewish cultural and religious life, a Jewish community in Palestine, none of these is what the proposal addresses. What it addresses is a state that defines itself as the nation state of one people on land shared with another, and that has enforced that definition by dispossession, by law, and by force. Chomsky draws the same line: a Jewish ethnic homeland is one thing, a Jewish state that privileges one population over another is another. The proposal also answers the charge in its own text. It addresses a political ideology and a political system, not Jewish people. It says Jewish identity is not synonymous with Zionism, and it opposes antisemitism unequivocally. The charge that the proposal brands all Jews as racists is a charge against a position the proposal does not hold.

Second, that anti Zionism is antisemitism, and that the IHRA working definition of antisemitism treats the claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor as an example of antisemitism. The IHRA definition is a working definition adopted by many governments and institutions, and it is also a contested one. A definition that forbids describing a state structure as racist begs the very question at issue. Whether the structure is racist is a question of evidence, and the evidence is the history in this article: the demographics of 1917, the Nakba, the two laws of 1950, the Nation State Law, and the findings of B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. If the evidence holds, then no definition can make the description antisemitic. And the distinction is lived, not only written. Jews oppose Zionism in large numbers, from Orthodox rabbis like Yaakov Shapiro, who holds that Zionism contradicts Judaism, to the Jewish scholars and activists who document the occupation. A charge of antisemitism that sweeps in Jewish critics of Zionism along with everyone else is a political instrument, not a test of hatred.

Third, that Zionism has many meanings, including a cultural Zionism that sought only a spiritual center, and that the proposal attacks a caricature. The proposal defines the Zionism it addresses, and the definition is the political project of ethnonational sovereignty and supremacy. Cultural Zionism, the Zionism that imagined a center of Jewish learning and renewal without a state, is not that project, and the proposal does not condemn it. Chomsky made the same point in 2004: by the 1970s the word Zionism had been narrowed to mean support for the policies of the government of Israel. The proposal takes the word as it is used in the world, by the state that claims it and by the movement that built that state, and judges that project on its record.

Fourth, that the proposal singles out Israel, and that a double standard is at work. The proposal is about a specific ideology and about the party own complicity in it. The United States gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid every year, and the proposal calls for that aid to end. A party that pays for a system has a particular responsibility to name it. The Greens oppose other systems of supremacy as well, and the test of the description is whether it is true, not whether every similar case is named in the same document. The history in this article is the test, and it holds.

Fifth, that the proposal endangers Jews by stripping away the legitimacy of their refuge. The refuge argument is real, and it deserves respect. Jewish people have a history of persecution that makes the charge of racism a serious one, not a slogan. But a refuge that requires the dispossession of another people is not a refuge, it is a transfer of the suffering. The proposal answer is in its third section: a democratic future throughout historic Palestine founded on equal civil and political rights for all, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Safety for Jews is not served by a state that must maintain supremacy by force, because supremacy by force is permanent war. Safety is served by equality under law, which is what the proposal demands for everyone.

Where Dearborn Blog stands

Dearborn Blog stands with Proposal 1332, unequivocally. The charge is true on the historical record, and the record is the argument.

Zionism, as a political project, is colonialism and erasure by definition, because it favors Jewish identity as its national identity on a land that already had its people living continuously in it throughout history. A movement that seeks to make a land the nation state of one people, where another people are the overwhelming majority, cannot carry out its program without displacing that majority or subordinating it. The history from Balfour to the Nakba to the Nation State Law is the record of that necessity being carried out, by war, by law, and by constitution. The founders said it. The laws say it. The human rights organizations say it. The writers cited in this article say it, each from their own ground: the historian of the Nakba, the historian of the hundred years war on Palestine, the linguist who watched the word narrow into a defense of state policy, the rabbi who holds that the identity claim contradicts Judaism, and the Green nominee who put the position before the American people.

We write openly from Green Party values: peace over war, diplomacy over expulsion, international law over the law of the stronger, opposition to occupation including the Israeli occupation, opposition to one sided American support for Israel, against militarization, for the self determination of peoples including the Palestinian people. We want our foreign policy more nuanced and balanced and fair and aligned with international law. Those values are not a reason to soften the position. They are the reason for it.

Two things must be said together, and the proposal says them together. The Palestinian people have lived under occupation, dispossession, and unequal rights for generations, and their claim to self determination and return is grounded in international law. And antisemitism is real, and the party opposition to it must be lived in practice, not only written in the text. The proposal draws the distinction between opposing a political ideology and hating a people. Dearborn Blog will hold the party to that distinction, and will hold its critics to the record. The record supports the proposal, and we stand with it.

What this means in Dearborn

The adoption lands in Dearborn in a week when this city has already made national history twice over.

On November 3, 2026, Dearborn voted in record numbers. Forty five thousand four hundred and sixty ballots were cast, 56.92 percent of registered voters, a city record. Abdul El-Sayed won 82.16 percent of the Dearborn vote on his way to becoming the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate. Wissam Charafeddine, the floor manager of Proposal 1332, won 4,792 Dearborn votes in his own race for the State Board of Education, 6.36 percent of the vote in that race.

Four days later, the United States ordered Lebanon consul general in Detroit, Ibrahim Charara, to leave the country by November 8 over 2021 social media posts praising the 1983 Marine barracks bombing. Dearborn Blog reported that story in full, including the history of the 1983 bombing, the debate on Al Jadeed television, and the community response.

Now the party Charafeddine helps lead has adopted the position he wrote. The Michigan delegation voted Yes unanimously. The proposal takes effect immediately as official Green Party policy, and the party International Committee is encouraged to carry it to the Global Greens and to Green parties around the world.

For Dearborn, the largest Arab American community in the United States, the adoption is not an abstraction. It is the position of a national party, written by a Dearborn resident, adopted in the same week Dearborn voters set a turnout record and sent the first Muslim to the Senate. Whether the position helps the party grow or costs it allies is the open question. The answer will be written in the campaigns and the councils that follow.

Sources and References

1. Green Party of the United States, National Committee Voting, Proposal Details, Proposal 1332, “Zionism Is Racism: Green Party Opposition to Zionism and Support for Palestinian Liberation.” https://secure.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=1332
2. Green Party of the United States, National Committee Voting, Proposal Result, Proposal 1332. https://secure.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propresult?pid=1332
3. “Zionism is Racism (U.S. motion),” Wikipedia, with the full vote table by delegation and references to the official GPUS voting pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_is_Racism_(U.S._motion)
4. Green Party of England and Wales, announcement of the anti Zionist policy adoption, October 4, 2026. https://greenparty.org.uk/2026/10/04/green-party-adopts-anti-zionist-policy/
5. “Zionism is Racism (motion),” Wikipedia, Green Party of England and Wales, adopted October 4, 2026, 1,022 votes to 813. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_is_Racism_(motion)
6. “United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379,” Wikipedia, adopted November 10, 1975, 72 in favor, 35 against, 32 abstentions; revoked by Resolution 46/86, December 16, 1991, 111 in favor, 25 against, 13 abstentions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Resolution_3379
7. Board of Deputies of British Jews response to the Green Party of England and Wales motion, October 25, 2026, as reported by BBC News, summarized at https://breakingbrexitnews.com/2026/10/25/greens-antisemitism-board-deputies/
8. “Labour to end power sharing with Greens in 11 councils over Zionism row,” BBC News, November 2, 2026. https://web.stage.bbcx-internal.com/news/articles/c63dj21yvjd3o
9. Green Party of the United States, National Committee Voting, Proposal Result, Proposal 1269, “Designation of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as a Terrorist Organization,” adopted November 10, 2025. https://secure.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propresult?pid=1269
10. Dina Smeltz and Lama El Baz, “American Favorability of Israel Drops to Record Low,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, October 5, 2026, survey figures as cited in the Wikipedia article on the United States motion, reference 9.
11. Green Party of the United States, Ten Key Values. https://www.gp.org/ten_key_values
12. Green Party of the United States, National Platform. https://www.gp.org/platform
13. International Court of Justice, “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” Advisory Opinion, July 19, 2024. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/186
14. Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. https://bdsmovement.net/call
15. Dearborn Blog, “Dearborn Voted in Record Numbers and Changed Michigan,” November 6, 2026. https://dearbornblog.com/2026/11/06/dearborn-voted-record-turnout-el-sayed-green-vote/
16. Dearborn Blog, “Detroit Consul Expelled Over a 1983 Post,” November 8, 2026. https://dearbornblog.com/2026/11/08/detroit-consul-expelled-1983-marine-barracks-post/
17. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 to 2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020).
18. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006).
19. Ilan Pappe, “From Balfour to the Nakba: The Settler Colonial Experience of Palestine,” Global Research, November 2020. https://www.globalresearch.ca/balfour-nakba-settler-colonial-experience-palestine
20. Noam Chomsky, interview by Stephen R. Shalom and Justin Podur, “Justice for Palestine?”, ZNet, March 30, 2004. https://chomsky.info/20040330/
21. Noam Chomsky, interview by C. J. Polychroniou, Truthout, May 12, 2021, read in the full reprint by LALIT. https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/2855/chomsky-without-us-aid-israel-would-not-be-killing-palestinians-en-masse/
22. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (1983; updated 1999).
23. Green Party of the United States, “Green Party Outraged at Police Violence Toward Campus Protests, Treatment of Jill Stein, and Campaign Team,” press release, April 30, 2024. https://www.gp.org/gp_outraged_at_police_violence_toward_campus_protests
24. Green Party of the United States, National Platform, “The Palestinian Israeli Conflict,” verified on the party platform pages, November 9, 2026. https://www.gp.org/democracy#Palestine
25. Rashid Khalidi, talk at the Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, February 26, 2020, as reported by the Middle East Forum. https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/professor-rashid-khalidi-illuminates-palestinian
26. Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (Bais Medrash Society, 2018).
27. Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, interview, “8 Reasons Judaism opposes Zionism,” Committing High Reason. https://www.committinghighreason.com/blog/rabbi-yaakov-shapiro-zionism-has-nothing-to-do-with-judaism-prepare-for-change/
28. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” Rassvyet, November 4, 1923. https://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm
29. Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917, full text. https://pal48.ps/en/article/886/the-balfour-declaration-1917-full-text-causes-and-the-road-to-the-nakba
30. British Mandate census of Palestine, October 23, 1922, population and land ownership figures. https://palestinehistorybook.com/chapter-17/
31. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947.
32. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, December 11, 1948.
33. Law of Return, 1950, and Absentees Property Law, 1950, with the Adalah summary of the Absentees Property Law as quoted in the Jewish Voice for Peace research document. http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Preventing-return.pdf
34. Basic Law: Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish People, July 19, 2018, official English text. https://knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/BasicLawNationState.pdf
35. B’Tselem, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” position paper, January 12, 2021. https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid
36. Human Rights Watch, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” April 27, 2021. https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
37. Amnesty International, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity,” February 1, 2022. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/
38. Yesh Din, “The Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid,” legal opinion, July 2020.
39. Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
40. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
41. Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries, entry June 12, 1895.

Editorial Disclaimer

This article reports the adoption of Green Party of the United States Proposal 1332 and summarizes its text as published on the party voting site. The final vote tally is stated from the official Green Party voting results page. Counts circulating while voting was still open showed different numbers; the official final count is the one reported here. Quotations from the proposal follow its published text. The British Green Party reactions and the history of United Nations Resolution 3379 are reported from the sources listed.

The historical case in this article is drawn from the sources listed. Nakba figures are given as ranges, because sources disagree: about 700,000 to 800,000 Palestinians displaced, and more than 400 villages depopulated by the conservative count, 531 by the broader accounting, with Walid Khalidi documenting 418 in detail. Historians disagree on the intent behind Plan Dalet: Ilan Pappe and Walid Khalidi treat it as a premeditated blueprint for ethnic cleansing, while Benny Morris documents the expulsions but disputes a single explicit central order for a general expulsion. The article quotes the operational orders and attributes the characterization to Pappe. The Herzl diary passage is a private 1895 musing about poor tenants, not a formal plan, and Jabotinsky in the same essay called expulsion absolutely impossible and expected two nations in Palestine; both points are stated in the article. The three apartheid reports are presented as a convergence of findings, not as three independent confirmations, because they cite one another and build on shared documentation. Book quotations were checked against published excerpts and reproductions where the book text itself was not directly consulted.

One name correction: the writer named in the commission for this article as Jacob Shapiro is Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro. No published critic of Zionism named Jacob Shapiro exists; the geopolitical analyst of that name defends Zionism as Jewish nationalism. Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro argument is theological, and it is presented as such. Noam Chomsky and Jill Stein have not commented on Proposal 1332 specifically. They are cited for their published analysis and positions, not as endorsers of the proposal. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” was not Herzl, and is not attributed to him here.

Dearborn Blog writes from Green Party values, stated openly in the article, and stands with Proposal 1332. Nothing in this article is a statement by the Green Party of the United States beyond the proposal text quoted and summarized here. Figures from the November 3, 2026 election are unofficial pending certification.