Few Western politicians have spent as long with the Middle East as Tony Blair. He was prime minister from 1997 to 2007, then Quartet envoy to the region until 2015, and now runs the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which he founded in 2016. So when he warns about a vote at a British party conference, people in the corridors of Westminster and beyond pay attention.
What the Greens decided
The Green Party of England and Wales has adopted a resolution declaring that “Zionism is racism.” It also drops the two-state solution in favor of a single Palestinian state covering Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The vote was 1,022 to 813, not a close call.
Blair’s concern goes beyond one policy. Against this backdrop, his point is that denying the legitimacy of a Jewish state used to sit at the political fringe and is edging into mainstream Western politics. He does not say Israel is beyond criticism. Settlements, Gaza, Palestinian statehood and the conduct of successive Israeli governments are all fair subjects for argument. But demanding that Israel behave differently is not the same as demanding that it stop existing as the Jewish state, and he says the resolution crosses that line.
The Jewish community in Britain
The vote lands on a community already uneasy. A new study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that 66% of British Jews identify as Zionists. The same research found that the share calling antisemitism a “very big problem” in Britain climbed from 17% before October 7 to 50% by 2025. A growing party has now labeled the belief of two-thirds of British Jews a form of racism, while insisting this should not be confused with antisemitism. Blair calls that a warning sign.
Why Britain, why now
The wider picture is that Britain is not a faraway laboratory. It is one of the world’s oldest liberal democracies and a close American ally, and its universities and cultural institutions are tied to those in the United States. It also has a particular place in this history, from the Balfour Declaration to the British Mandate, which shaped the circumstances from which modern Israel emerged.
Ideas travel. What starts as activist rhetoric moves onto campuses, into advocacy groups and political parties, and in time into mainstream debate. The danger is not that Britain’s Greens can abolish Israel, which they cannot. It is that “Israel should disappear” becomes a view that respectable people can voice without embarrassment.
The cost to peace
Blair argues that swapping two states for fantasies about eliminating one does nothing for Palestinian self-determination. It feeds the Israeli voices who say territorial compromise is impossible because their adversaries want disappearance, not accommodation.
He is careful to add what the vote is not. The Green Party is not Britain, the resolution is not British policy, and criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Those caveats, in his view, make the warning more credible. What is at stake is where democratic politics draws its boundaries: a Western political party has now ruled that Jewish national self-determination is uniquely racist and that the world’s only Jewish state should eventually give way to something else.
Sources
- Tony Blair
- Editorial: When the Unthinkable Becomes Respectable
- Why Burnham could be the longest-serving PM since Blair
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (No restrictions)
