Green party MP Ellie Chowns has said she wants to make sure her party is not “vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists”, amid continuing fallout from a conference vote that branded Zionism a form of racism.
Chowns, who leads the party in the House of Commons, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday that the policy did not represent most Green members, nor most people in the country.
The motion, carried at the party’s annual conference by just over 1,000 votes — approximately 0.4% of the total membership — treats Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, as any other form of racism and backs a single Palestinian state over a two-state solution.
Chowns said the ability to pass such a “significant and damaging policy” in that way made clear that the party’s structures and policy-making processes were not working.
“I don’t think that policy, ‘Zionism is racism’, represents the large majority of Green party members, nor of people in the country,” she said.
She added that the party did not wish to be drawn into arguments about contested terms. “We don’t want to be in debates about the meaning of contested terms, we want to be united and focusing in contesting and criticising the horrific actions of the Israeli government,” she said.
Chowns lost a co-leadership run against Zack Polanski in 2025.
The debate over whether the Greens’ decentralised policy-making structures remain suitable for a party whose membership has grown rapidly comes hours after the party’s leader for England and Wales was defeated by Labour in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection.
Polanski, who received just under 33% of the vote on Friday, insisted he intended to remain as Green leader despite calls to stand down, including from the chair of the Jewish Greens. The party normally holds leadership elections every two years, meaning the next contest would be in the summer of 2027.
Chowns said Polanski’s “clear” lack of leadership over the Zionism motion was “disappointing”, but that he had an opportunity to unite the party, having recognised the flaws in the motion.
Tensions between the UK and Israel are heightened after the Labour government imposed sanctions on illegal settlements in occupied Palestine, and Israel retaliated by trying to close the British consulate in Jerusalem.
Research carried out before the motion was passed found that Jewish people who vote for the Greens felt their attachment to Israel had weakened, even as the percentage of British Jews who identified as Zionist rose more broadly between 2022 and 2025.
Asked about extremism and racism within the party — not only in relation to the motion but also comments made by the deputy leader, Mothin Ali, after the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, in which he called for an end to “white supremacist European settler colonialism” — Chowns stressed the importance of the party’s internal processes.
“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, I want to make sure my party’s policies represent the views of the majority of members of the Green party who absolutely are not that sort of person at all,” she said.
She added that it was legitimate to hold differences of opinion, “including on many of the matters that this motion covers”.
Polanski has been accused of abdicating leadership after he missed the debate and the vote at the conference in order to campaign in the byelection, and for giving no clear message about whether or not he backed the motion.
In interviews after the byelection loss, Polanski said he would have voted against the motion had he attended, given that two amendments he supported were voted down. Both amendments said any future structure of a Palestinian state should be decided by Palestinians rather than a one-state system being imposed.
On Friday, Vivien Lichtenstein, the chair of the Jewish Greens, said Polanski, who is Jewish, made a “big mistake” by avoiding the vote. Asked by Times Radio whether he should continue in his role, she said: “No, I think he should resign.”
However, other members of Jewish Greens said Lichtenstein’s comments did not reflect the majority view in the group, and that a vote of no confidence in her had been tabled.
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