The Green Party has said it wants to make sure it is not “vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists”, after members backed a motion that described Zionism as racism.
Ellie Chowns, the party’s Westminster leader, told the BBC the motion was a “significant and damaging policy” and said she would work to reform the party.
The motion, put forward by activists, became official party policy after it was approved at the Greens’ conference earlier this month. It has divided party figures and been criticised by Jewish groups.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday, Chowns said: “I don’t know if there are extremists and racists in my party. But I want to make sure that my party isn’t vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists.”
She described Zionism as a “contested concept” and said the motion did not represent the views of the large majority of Green Party members, “nor of people in the country”.
Chowns said the motion risked becoming a “distraction from the very important work” the party has done campaigning for Palestinian rights. She added: “I think it is clear that if we have policy, such significant and damaging policy, made by a vote of just 0.4% of our members, that something isn’t working in our structures and our policy-making process.”
Green Party of England and Wales members endorsed the policy motion by 1,022 votes to 813. The party has 230,000 members in total, and not all of them attended the conference.
Among other statements, the motion “supports the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants”. It defines Zionism as an ideology supporting “an ethnonationalist Jewish state”.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, which criticised the motion, said: “Zionism is anti-racism, creating a refuge for Jews in their ancient homeland after millennia of persecution outside it.”
Caroline Lucas, a former Green leader, told BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on Friday that she believed the party’s structures were failing to protect it from “entryism”, in which people join a party in order to change it.
Lucas did not blame the current leader, Zack Polanski, saying he had done “great things” for the party. She said the constitution was written decades ago, before the Greens had MPs or mayors, or anything like the number of representatives they have today. The party, she added, needed to be made “a welcoming place for Jewish people”.
A Green Party spokesperson said membership had increased since Polanski announced his leadership bid in May 2025, and that unlike other parties its members can bring and set policy. “This is one motion alongside dozens of others that was discussed at our biggest-ever party conference,” the spokesperson said. “Every motion submitted to conference undergoes debate and no single interest group drives policy.”
Polanski has said he would not have voted for the motion. He told BBC Breakfast earlier this week that it was “imperfect” and that he would have voted for an amended version, but he said the “substantial part of the motion” stating that “the displacement and genocide of the Palestinian people is clearly underpinned by a racist ideology” was “obvious”.
Israel has repeatedly denied that its actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
After Polanski’s by-election defeat in Holborn and St Pancras this week, the leader of the Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, said he should resign. She said it had been a “big mistake” for him to avoid a debate on the conference motion declaring Zionism a form of racism.
Polanski did not remain at conference for the vote on the motion or on amendments, leaving early to campaign in the north London by-election, which Labour won on Thursday with the Greens in second place.
Following that defeat, Polanski told BBC Breakfast on Friday that he would “absolutely” stay on as leader and had “of course” not questioned that. He lost Thursday’s contest to Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali, who took 45% of the vote to his 33%, although the Green share was up 22 percentage points on the 2024 general election.
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