A motion against Zionism and in support of the Palestinians was filibustered at the UK Green Party’s Spring Conference held this weekend. Fewer than 1,000 members, out of 220,000, took part in the online event.

The motion, “Zionism is racism”, identified Zionism as a “racist ideology”, called for a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital”, and backed “the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation”.

Opponents never even engaged in a debate on the issues. They began by trying to have the motion ruled out of order, with Eleanora Folan, who runs the X account Stats for Lefties, arguing that the call for a single Palestinian state could not be moved because it contradicted the party’s previous support for a “two-state solution”.

A vote was delayed by problems with the party’s online system, which the Canary suggested might have been the result of a deliberate denial of service attack. Participants were eventually able to block the effort to rule the “Zionism is racism” motion out of order by an overwhelming majority.

There were then six spurious votes of no confidence in the chair, which the presiding Standing Orders Committee advised had to be taken, each of which was defeated by roughly 600 votes to 40. But the tactic succeeded in running down the clock on the debate, preventing a vote either on the motion or on several proposed amendments.

This debacle followed weeks of antisemitism smears against Green Party members, from the usual quarters: the tabloid media and the Telegraph, GB News, UK Lawyers for Israel and so on.

All of this will be very familiar to those who lived through five years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Beginning with high-profile figures close to Corbyn, like Ken Livingstone and Marc Wadsworth, scandals were manufactured by the right-wing press and the Blairites equating opposition to the Israeli state with antisemitism and declaring the latter to be rampant in the Labour Party. This was rolled out to the wider party in a campaign of slander, intimidation, suspensions and expulsions.

The Labour witch-hunt was able to gain traction because Corbyn and his allies capitulated, to the point of becoming active accomplices. First, they turned a blind eye to their allies being targeted, refusing to name the Blairite slander campaign for what it was, then they endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, then they began organising and encouraging suspensions and expulsions themselves.

Zack Polanski’s leadership has shown this weekend they will act no differently. Polanski took the excuse provided by the Together Alliance march in London not to be present, consummating a series of evasions on the question of Zionism in the lead up to the conference.

Asked about the subject in an interview with Times Radio last month, he replied, “I can give you some different definitions of Zionism, and we can talk about whether they’re racist or not… If we’re talking about the definition that this Israeli government is clearly perpetrating through a genocide in Gaza, then yes, absolutely, that’s racist.”

After acknowledging that Benjamin Netanyahu and his fascist backers are indeed racist, Polanski said he would “wait to hear the debate” before deciding how to vote on the motion, having already planned to attend the Together march instead.

Speaking to the BBC’s Nick Robinson earlier this month, he said, “What I think is happening right now is a certain type of Zionism, by Benjamin Netanyahu, that I’ve said I believe is genocidal, so it’s clearly racist… But I am reluctant to use a word that has so many descriptions and say that it’s racist.” He added, “I think the nuance needs to happen.”

Focusing solely on the current Israeli government ignores the whole 78-year history of the State of Israel and Zionist project, which has proved its fundamentally apartheid, and ultimately genocidal, character.

As World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) chairperson David North wrote in the essay collection, The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide, “Zionism, which emerged as an offspring of imperialist colonialism and as an enemy of socialism and a scientific conception of history and society, necessarily based itself on the most reactionary elements of nationalist politics and ideology.”

The “establishment of the Zionist state was not only a tragedy for the Palestinians; it was, and is, a tragedy for the Jewish people as well. Zionism never was, and is not today, a solution to the historic oppression and persecution of the Jewish people.”

Polanski holds out the hope of some other form of Zionism as an excuse for shutting down an uncompromising defence of the rights of the Palestinian people. He was therefore very happy to allow the motion to be pushed down the pecking order, then off the table completely. According to Green Party councillor Andrée Frieze, it allowed him and his MPs to avoid being put on the spot to oppose it.

Frieze wrote, cheering the defeat of the Zionism motion, “Green MP Carla Denyer was planning to speak AGAINST the motion on behalf of the MPs, peers, leader Zack Polanski and Deputy Leader Rachel Millward.”

It was clearly insufficient for the anti-Zionist motion to be denied a hearing. To make Polanski’s position clear to those in power, he let it be known, via Frieze, that his own opposed position, delivered by Denyer, was also denied an airing by the chair’s filibuster.

Another critical issue on which Polanski has publicly squirmed, the imperialist NATO alliance, was also kept off the agenda. Even more pressingly, so was the criminal war on Iran, despite motions being submitted on both. Time was found to debate, and pass (by 478 votes to 192) a motion scrapping a previous conference commitment which declared, “The five largest energy supply companies will be nationalised.”

Workers and students should take careful note of these events. The Green Party has garnered unprecedented backing in recent months, above all thanks to popular hatred of the Labour Party and disappointments in Corbyn’s stillborn Your Party. This has extended considerably beyond the Greens’ traditional sources of support in the middle class—especially among young people.

But it has not changed the fundamentally bourgeois character of the Green Party, committed to capitalism and its nation state system. Indeed, it has barely translated into an organised “left” of any sort within the party, if fewer than 1,000 people are motivated to attend its online spring conference.

The political issues posed by the Corbyn phenomenon, which mobilised much larger numbers than Polanski, are not solved simply by switching efforts at a “left capture” from Labour to the Green Party. They have manifested again almost immediately and produced their first major betrayal.

These issues are: the impossibility of mounting a consistent opposition to imperialist war and genocide outside of a struggle against capitalism; the bankruptcy of all purported national solutions to social and democratic questions; the need for a revolutionary offensive against capitalist states impervious to reform; the need, therefore, for an independent party of the working class opposed to all collaboration with the ruling class and its representatives.

The Socialist Equality Party fought and fights illusions in Corbyn on this basis, and does the same today against Polanski and the Greens. Join our revolutionary socialist tendency today.