Hastings Greens in Firing Line After National Zionism Vote
HUGH SULLIVAN
The chair of Hastings Greens Justin Lee Wynne resigned his position and cancelled his membership of the party last Friday citing two “main reasons”.
The first related to a challenge within the local party by another member whom Mr Wynne accuses of bullying and harassing him over an issue of alleged homophobia and ‘hate’ campaigning. No details were given, but the former chair referred to “relentless pressure [which] has taken a significant personal toll”.
Demonstration outside Muriel Matters House 2025
The second was his feeling “deeply uncomfortable” with the motion passed by the national party at their annual conference at Brighton on 4 October declaring themselves “anti-Zionist” and labelling Zionism as a form of racism.
At the time of going to press it is not clear whether there will be further local repercussions. However, the wording of the conference motion and of the briefing paper behind it has clearly divided the party both nationally and locally.
National leader Zack Polanski has said that he would not personally have voted for it (he was absent campaigning in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on the day), while some other local Greens have made public statements of regret.
Leader of Hastings Borough Council Glenn Haffenden endorsed a Facebook post by national deputy leader Rachel Milward stating not that the motion was wrong in principle but that she was “certain that it would have a divisive and distracting impact…It is heartbreaking today to see too many column inches focused on division, and not on calling out Israel’s despicable actions and our government’s complicity”.
LIB DEMS AND LABOUR KICK IN
Those column inches indeed mushroomed over the following fortnight as other political parties piled pressure on local Greens to disown the anti-Zionist declaration.
On 7 October Hastings & Rye Liberal Democrats wrote an open letter to their Green counterparts describing the motion as “reckless, divisive and counter-productive”. They suggested that it might “fuel further polarisation and endanger local minority communities”. Ten days later they described it on their website as “charg[ing] a minority British community with the crime of racism and recklessly implicat[ing] it in Israel’s occupation and genocide…The motion fails to make a clear distinction between the ultra-nationalist Zionism propagated at the barrel of a gun, and the spiritual Zionism of ordinary British Jews practised peacefully in synagogues and around Friday night dinner tables.”
In the meantime, local Labour party councillors spearheaded by Hastings & Rye MP Helena Dollimore wrote an emotive letter to all elected Green councillors on Hastings Borough Council. It described the conference motion as “shameful”, and its adoption particularly harmful “at a time when Jewish people in our local area tell us they feel deeply unsafe, and continue to face unacceptable levels of antisemitism”. Each addressee was asked to make “a clear and unambiguous public statement in the next seven days…that you reject the ‘Zionism is Racism’ policy”.
On the Hastings Decides Facebook stream, a group calling themselves the Hastings and District Jewish Community and identifying as “proud supporters of Israel” claimed that they were “already excluded from much that takes place in Hastings” and questioned whether they should now expect to be discriminated against by Green councillors. “Will you be taking even less notice of our view, comfort levels and, indeed, equal rights as citizens and residents of Hastings? Will you support the anti-Semites in the town even more vociferously than you already have?”
There has been pushback, however, from an opposing Jewish group, Hastings Jews for Justice (HJJ). Five local members signed a statement noting that the Green party “has been at the forefront of confronting the moral aberration of the Israeli State for many years”.
They applauded the “courageous” conference decision, writing: “We object to the weaponisation of anti-Semitism, and do not accept that criticism of the Israeli state or of Zionism, the ideology on which it was based, amounts to an affront to Jews…We want people to know that those claiming to speak for Jews as ‘proud supporters of Israel’ do not represent us or the growing number of Jewish people across the UK and the world campaigning for an end to the genocide in Gaza, an end to ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and an end to the occupation.”
On Tuesday of this week, 20 October, HJJ were due to host at Stade Hall the showing of a film Planet Israel, in which British-American film-maker Gillian Moseley explores the social and political attitudes of Israelis themselves to the Gaza conflict and to ongoing settlements in the West Bank.
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