‘I was a Green councillor but as a Jew how could I stay?’

Puzzles Challenge yourself with today's puzzles. ‘O n Sunday,” Andrée Frieze tells me, “I gave a talk at a lunchtime meeting at the Green Party autumn conference about faith and the environment, speaking about how our faiths, no matter what they are, mandate us to protect our planet, how we can, as Greens, use that shared connection to build a better home for all. It was an overwhelmingly positive meeting. Afterwards we were crowded around by Muslim Greens, humanists, Christians, interfaith Greens, even pagans, all of us joined by our core Green beliefs. It was amazing.” Now, a couple of days later, she is politically homeless, forced out of a Green Party that has made it impossible for her to stay. “Half an hour ago I resigned my membership of the Green Party,” she tells me when we speak, clearly still slightly in shock. “After nearly 15 years I have left my beloved Richmond Greens, had to step out of the Jewish Greens group that I have been so passionate about for the last two years, said a sad goodbye to my old boss Siân Berry, removed myself from all the WhatsApp groups I was on, exited from Slack, Basecamp, all the many online forums where I used to be a voice.” Most commented 1 New Zohran Mamdani has betrayed us over Israel, say young socialists US politics 24 comments 2 New Niqabs and burqas harm society, says Tory shadow minister Politics 38 comments 3 New Trump: Let Iran take out LA or San Diego US politics 14 comments 4 August Hanning: Ex-German spy chief arrested for espionage and treason Europe 21 comments 5 Asos ‘hacked’: app customers receive alert suggesting data breach Companies & Markets 22 comments Even her job teetered in the balance. “I am employed by the Greater London Authority in the Green group on the London Assembly. I thought long and hard about it, but this is my livelihood and I don’t have to be a Green Party member to do my job. Working on transport policy, it’s my passion, my vocation, to work towards a better environment for Londoners, to hold the mayor accountable for his own strategies and to push him to make his policies fairer, greener, cheaper and cleaner. That’s bigger than party politics.” Israel bans Zack Polanski after Green Party’s ‘Zionism is racism’ vote The grenade that was hurled into Frieze’s life was a motion, “Zionism is racism”, passed into official Green Party policy on Sunday by 1,022 votes to 813, that, in her opinion, slurs Jewish people as racists for even discussing Israeli issues and effectively bars them from being a member of the Green Party at all. Advertisement “If Zionism is racism, then all forms of nationalism are racism, including, by that reasoning, the nationalism of the Palestinians,” Frieze says slowly, careful to be quoted accurately. “What the Green Party has done with this motion is to enshrine a hierarchy of support — the ‘right’ of a Palestinian state above the ‘non-right’ of an Israeli state — that has no place in the party I joined back in 2012. How could I stay? How could I campaign locally and support what is now Green Party policy, when the right of Green Jews to speak freely has been removed?” Top stories 1 Andrew takes Thames Valley police to court over Jeffrey Epstein investigation Royal family Top stories 1 Six thrilling Costa Rica trips with Times Holidays Promoted content Frieze herself is my sister-in-law and a recent Jew. She converted to Judaism in 2018 to share her family’s faith: Shimon, her husband of 33 years, was brought up in Israel and their sons were brought up as Jews. “I grew to love the faith and my 50th birthday felt like the ideal time to convert, that year being a ‘jubilee’ year in the Torah,” she tells me. Zack Polanski Ben Montgomery/Getty Images But her first passion was politics, which she read at university. At the time of her conversion she had already been a Green Party member for six years, had fought as a Green candidate in the 2015 general election against Zac Goldsmith, and had been elected as one of the first three Green councillors in Richmond-upon-Thames. “By 2022 we were up to five councillors and in 2024 I was elected leader of the opposition in the council. I had joined the Green Party in 2012, inspired by the women in the Green Party who were fighting for the same environmental and social justice causes I was so passionate about — and then here I was, one of them,” she says. “Even before I became a Jew myself I had witnessed how ardent pro-Palestinian support spilt over into anti-Israel rhetoric. I joined the Jewish Greens when I converted but I always carefully considered my audience — public and private — before I would admit that I was married to an Israeli and have family there, and I stepped down in 2019 when I got too busy with my local duties. Advertisement “By 2024 I had rejoined Jewish Greens, this time as an officer, trying to work from within to calm and mitigate the voices that were fighting so hard to align opposition to the horrors of Gaza into a polarisation of ‘Zionist’ and ‘non-Zionist’, which all too easily can turn into Jew hatred. For the last 18 months, since early 2025, I have been raising concerns about antisemitism with the chief exec and others in the leadership, about councillors from other parties who had made public antisemitic statements, then defecting to the Green Party to find a home for their openly anti-Zionist views, due to proper defection and vetting processes not being followed.” Scottish Jewish leaders call Greens’ stance on Zionism ‘abhorrent’ Frieze understands how infiltration happens — “having been a co-ordinator and with my long history of local campaigning, I know how much local parties rely on a loose but committed band of volunteers for governance, so I can understand how vetting these candidates could have slipped through the net.” No action was taken — even the Green Party’s leader, Zack Polanski , supported the defections, saying in May 2025, when he ran for leader, in response to a question from The Guardian’s Zoe Williams about pro-Palestinian defectors: “I think it’s the most obvious thing in the world… if you align with our values, join us.” Increasingly, through 2025, as Frieze says, this was when the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism began to get impossibly thin. Throughout our chat she is insistent and careful that I get my terms right, that I understand the nuancing around the very word Zionism. “I am a Zionist, I am not a racist,” she says. “One definition of Zionism is the ideology that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their historic homeland. Another is a more spiritual definition, which I believe, as laid out in the Torah, of the notion of ‘Zion’ as a totemic home for the wandering tribes of Israel. The definition I wholeheartedly reject is the one this motion has now forced on to us, the idea that we have some sort of automatic alignment with the current state of Israel. Advertisement “This makes me sick. No one even has the words to describe what has happened in Gaza — and is happening in the West Bank — and the idea that I’m not viscerally critical of Israeli state policy is insane. We all denounce Russia’s cruelty and the atrocities happening in the Ukraine, but no one questions the right of Russia to exist as a nation, do we? I think [the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin] Netanyahu and his government are as corrupt and murderous as anyone, but I don’t question the right of the Israeli nation to exist. So by that definition I am accused of being a Zionist — and now a racist — which makes me feel attacked, alone and unsafe in the Green Party of today. “What I can’t believe is that, unlike Zack Polanski, who absented himself for his by-election campaigning in Holborn and St Pancras, I was actually in the room when the vote on the motion happened. I roll over the events of the day and I reel back from it. Having to request VIP access because of fears for my safety at the hands of the protesters outside, despite the bristling security, to the session itself, which was tense, divisive and carefully orchestrated by the proposers and supporters, many wearing differently coloured keffiyeh headdresses. Then having to walk past the proposers of the motion speaking to the media afterwards and hearing them say how everyone in the room was in favour of the motion and wanting to interrupt and say, ‘Er, what about the 813 in there who voted against it?’ But I couldn’t, not after the events of the past ten months. I just felt too defeated, too shut out in that minute.” By the “past ten months”, Frieze means the rearguard action she and others have been fighting to stop the “Zionism is racism” motion being rammed through without going through the normal processes. “The ‘Zionism is racism’ motion was shared at the last minute for consultation with the Jewish Greens, and any requests for amendments were met with blank refusal, to the point that relations broke down between us and the proposers. We requested mediation with them but they responded with a litany of accusations and demands for apologies for actions we had nothing to do with, like reporting them to the counter-terrorism police.” Frieze and her fellow Jewish Greens ’ arguments did see the motion get bogged down at the spring conference, to be carried over into the autumn one. Over the summer Frieze saw the Greens for Palestine group decide on a railroading approach. “It was all over their Instagram, X and Bluesky, their rallying cries, to join the Green Party and vote to turn us into the only specifically ‘non-Zionist’ party,” she says. Thirty council candidates at the May local elections are now being investigated for antisemitism in their social media posts, but Frieze says that by this time many of the party’s governing structures had already been infiltrated by Greens for Palestine, making opposition at any level increasingly difficult. Advertisement “I’ve become used to being attacked in the left-wing press and online,” Frieze says. She adds that one article in an online radical left publication “defamed me as the wife of ‘a former member of the Zionist occupation forces’. I showed this to my husband, Shimon, to show him how his mandatory conscription into Israeli national service when he was 21 was now being spun. “The thing is, I want peace in the Middle East as much as anyone because my husband’s family are embroiled in it every day: missiles fly overhead, children shiver and shake at the constant sirens. We just came back from a trip to Israel to honour Rosh Hashanah, Jewish new year — 40 of us on a kibbutz for the celebration itself — and all around us, within us, I could see the wounds and trauma of the last three years since October 7. “My brother-in-law, who lived in Sderot, is still haunted by that day when, just because he was babysitting his grandchildren, he didn’t go for his usual Sabbath morning walk. He survived in their safe room: his neighbours were slaughtered. No family, Palestinian, Israeli, Ukrainian, Sudanese, anyone, should suffer like this, yet there is no consensus about what to do next. That day was filled as much with debate and anger about Bibi, about the settlers going wild in the West Bank, about the horrors of Gaza, as it was about marking the Jewish new year, celebrating love, questing for peace. “We didn’t even bother trying to table our peace motion at this most recent conference,” she adds. She looks and sounds defeated, exhausted. “I actually stepped down from being a Green councillor in Richmond