Why progressive Jews like me can no longer support the Greens

Until the party moves past binary thinking and acknowledges the complexity of the Middle-East, the Greens will continue to lose the Jews who believed in it.

Sometimes we all need to apologise for mistakes, because ultimately to be human is to err. In the past week, Newtown Greens MP Jenny Leong insisted she was not intending to reference a historical antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews as an octopus when she used the term “tentacles” to criticise Jewish groups’ attempts to “influence power”.

While it’s nice that she apologised for “causing offence”, I sometimes wonder how she came to make the comment in the first place.

My relationship with the Greens began in August 2001 after seeing the cruelty shown by the Australian Government to the 438 men lying on the open deck of the MV Tampa containership.

I was so angry at the Howard government and then even more shocked when a few days later, opposition leader Kim Beazley and the ALP gave their full support to what later became known as “the Pacific Solution”. It was at that moment that I knew there was no way I could vote for anyone other than the Greens at the next election three months later, as they were the only ones resolutely against the cruelty of offshore detention.

Yet, as a Jew, I knew the Greens have long had a complicated relationship with Israel, the country where I was born and now live. To help make the Greens more of an option for myself and my Jewish friends who cared about climate change, refugee lives, and a fairer economy, I joined the party and eventually became one of the founding members of the J-Greens.