PUBLIC STATEMENT BY BRIGHTON & HOVE PALESTINE SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN
“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” – Omar El Akkad, 2025.
Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign (BHPSC) and the grassroots anti-racist groups listed below applaud Green Party members – and especially Greens4Palestine – for having the wisdom and courage to state the truth: that Zionism is Racism.
From the 1948 Nakba onwards, Israel’s apartheid, ethno-supremacist Zionist state has been founded and maintained through land grabs, ethnic cleansing, and murder. Zionism has now reached its inevitable culmination, with Israel committing ongoing genocide in Gaza for 3+ years. Bodies including the UN, human rights organisations including Amnesty International, and even Raphael Lemkin: the lawyer who coined the term ‘genocide’, have all charged Israel with perpetrating the ‘crime of crimes’.
In contrast, lacking any wisdom, Labour Leader of Brighton & Hove City Council, Bella Sankey, made a statement excoriating the Greens4Palestine motion and explicitly linking Zionism with the Jewish residents of our city.
By asserting that Israel represents all the world’s Jews, Sankey has, by definition, held all Jewish people responsible for the crimes of “their state”: settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. This is clear antisemitism. Anti-Zionist Jews across Brighton & Hove are appalled, though not surprised, at Sankey’s ignorance.
BHPSC notes that, while promoting herself as guardian of our ‘City of Sanctuary,’ Sankey has never reached out to residents of Palestinian heritage; stateless people living in Brighton & Hove because the Zionist project forcibly displaced them from their homeland.
These Palestinians have seen their relatives slaughtered by Israeli Occupation Forces in the Gaza genocide since 2023. They have friends and loved ones in the West Bank and East Jerusalem living under a brutal military occupation and apartheid for almost 80 years. Even now, they are suffering an escalation in Israel’s terror and displacement, via state-sanctioned settler pogroms. No response from Sankey.
Once again, congratulations to the Green Party on this bold, principled move. To the Labour Party, one day you will pretend you were always against racist Zionism. We’ve kept the receipts.
Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 15.10.26.
Statement supported by:
Brighton & Hove Apartheid-Free Zone
Brighton & Hove Christians Against Genocide
Brighton & Hove District Trades Council
Brighton & Hove Jews Against the Occupation
Collective Action Brighton & Hove
Make Music Matter
Seagulls Against Apartheid
Stop L3Harris
Sussex Jews Against Zionism
Unite the Union, Brighton and Surrounds SE/6246