Green Party investigates member who proposed Zionism motion

The Green Party has opened an investigation into Lubna Speitan, the member who proposed the conference motion describing Zionism as a form of racism, a party spokesperson said on 7 October.

“Where members have expressed views that do not fit in with the party’s values, we have internal processes to investigate and an investigation is underway,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson added: “Lubna Speitan holds no party positions other than being a member.”

The investigation came after it emerged that US court documents from 2015 listed Speitan, a British-Palestinian artist, as a “close friend” of Minh Quang Pham, the BBC reported. Pham was jailed in the US after pleading guilty to supporting al-Qaeda. He denied planning a suicide attack.

The documents said Speitan could provide “critical testimony regarding Pham’s mental state”. US prosecutors said Pham had been directed by the al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki to detonate explosives in Heathrow’s arrivals area. In a later letter to the US District Judge, Speitan wrote that Pham was one of the “few people I regard with such high respect and esteem”.

There is no suggestion in the documents, the report said, that Speitan knew of Pham’s criminal activities at the time they knew each other.

In an Instagram post, made before the party confirmed the investigation, Speitan said: “I reject all defamatory and nonsense claims made about me.” The post went on: “This is a classic distraction. I am not the conversation.”

The leader of Brighton & Hove City Council, Labour’s Bella Sankey, said refusing to let the Greens hire the Brighton Centre for future events was under consideration. The council owns and operates the venue, where the party’s conference took place.

Sankey described being “deeply concerned at the prospect of the Green Party returning to Brighton for future conferences” and called the motion “divisive, discriminatory and wrong”. Green Party sources rejected that characterisation of the motion.

What happened before

Party members approved the motion by 1,022 votes to 813 on 4 October. The motion defines Zionism as an ideology supporting “an ethnonationalist Jewish state” and calls for a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”. Under party rules, motions backed by members become official policy but will not necessarily be in the next manifesto.

Israel banned the party leader, Zack Polanski, from entering the country in response, and some Labour and Lib Dem MPs reported the party to Great Britain’s equality watchdog. Four of the party’s five MPs opposed the motion.

Polanski, who is Jewish, said in a statement released on 5 October that the Green leader would “not accept any exclusion, or refusal to engage with anyone, because of the religious or communal body they are part of”.