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BDS is obviously popular with rank-and-file Greens, but so is May

It is not for me to say whether Green-ness logically implies hostility to Israel. But if it does, it is mighty late for the party to be deciding that. May believes, naturally enough for the leader of a political movement, that it should not break in half over Israel’s right to exist, which she supports. She is now threatening to resign as leader unless the judgment of the convention can somehow be revised. But it is not clear either how this would happen, or why it would. She is suggesting that a leadership convention induced by her resignation could be the means of reconsidering, but if she were to quit, why would the winning side accept a do-over?

BDS is obviously popular with rank-and-file Greens, but so is May, who was endorsed by 94 per cent of the members in a spring leadership review despite her continuing failure to conjure much Green electoral progress. The BDS supporters seem to have felt they could have both their saintly, affable leader and their anti-Israel crusade. It is almost as if they had concluded she would go along.

Perhaps there was good reason to think so. May says she does not want to lead a party that is formally anti-Israel. But she also reiterates that she will run as a Green in the next election no matter what — which seems to suggest she is comfortable representing an anti-Israel party as a mere MP. Has she thought this through all the way?