The British Labour Party, supposedly reinvigorated by the ascendancy of a new leader – Andy Burnham – who has promised to end 40 years of neoliberalism, is rapidly coming unstuck. Its National Executive Committee is set to decide whether to cease power-sharing arrangements with Green Party councillors over the latter formation’s recent ‘Zionism is Racism’ conference motion.

The point of this motion is clearly that ethno-nationalism is inherently racism. Which it is. Seeking to found a state on grounds of ethnic supremacy or exclusivity constitutes discrimination along racial lines.

The impulse to protect Jewish people from horrific and genocidal exploitation by creating a new form of state in which they are welcome is good and just. The impulse to do this by creating a form of state that colonises another’s land and objectively commits genocide against erstwhile occupants of that land in order to revamp its demographics is bad and unjust, and replicates the very racist logic that Zionism professes to be an escape from.

I do not imagine that many readers of this blog need convincing of the moral bankruptcy of the Labour Party given its rightward shift in recent years. However, the obstinacy of its position on Israel lays this bankruptcy even barer than before. Labour must believe that Zionism is unequivocally not racism – but simply a benign movement for a Jewish homeland – to react so stridently to this specific motion.

There can be but two explanations for this: one, senior party members and executives have been operating with their eyes closed for the last three (never mind 80) years, ignoring the campaign of daily slaughter and oppression visited on the Palestinian people by inspired Israeli nationalists; two, they wish simply to toe the line of an insipid and vacuous media ecosystem as blindly as can be, hoping to remain in a position to win the next election if they can dodge as much controversy as possible.

The second option here is surely closer to the truth. Many Labour Party politicians, and indeed activists and advocates, commit a cardinal failing in accepting the validity of the ‘Overton window’ – the range of policies which appear acceptable and feasible to the perceived electorate of the day – as a precondition of their ascent to power and prominence. There is simply a profound paucity of principle or lack of critical thinking – or both.

In fact, the Overton window is strongly shaped by the powers that be – and these powers that be are necessarily right wing in such an unequal society, seeking policies that advance their own interests. There is no sensible middle ground that exists independently of politics and ideology. Green Party members as well as councillors – whatever their flaws and disagreements on the issue itself – have attempted to approach a sensitive issue with principles and values including anti-racism, internationalism, and solidarity. Establishment Labour figures meanwhile prioritise not upsetting opinion-shapers who whitewash or openly promote actually-existing genocides, seeking to slot themselves into a prevailing institutional framework in the vain hope that they (re)gain power and eviscerate any effective Left opposition in the process.

There would be an easy rebuke to the above argument: address the logic. Explain why Zionism is not racism or produce evidence that Green Party members who systematically oppose and march against genocide are somehow secretly racists themselves – which is the implication of delinking from them over this specific motion.

Why does neither Andy Burnham nor any other Labour figure actually address the argument? Because they are not interested – the Labour Party is a centrist liberal formation with hints of progressivism on vanishingly few topics, and it is easier to govern from within dominant institutional frameworks and discourses than to foreground principles and a critical analysis of contemporary society.

Green Party councillors and members who support the Zionism is Racism motion for principled, internationalist and anti-racist reasons can take solace in a few facts. The anti-slavery movement was once an outsiders’ campaigning movement furiously opposed by supposed spokespersons for the majority. The anti-imperialist movements of the twentieth century were similarly once minority movements clamped down on with bitterness, bile, and blood by dominant global powers.

Opposing racism – in this case, a settler colonialism that grows more aggressive and fascistic by the day, under conditions of support and endorsement from Western political leaders – is right, just, and principled, period. So-called progressives who wish to shut down critical discussions of the hierarchical ordering of modern societies should, if they are really progressive, explain why this manifestation of colonialism is uniquely not racist. They will not, and can not, so a Labour Party under any centrist leadership will continue to prioritise pallid posturing and sloganeering over a genuine exploration and exposition of socialist principle.