Zack Polanski has said he will not overturn a motion passed by Green Party members that declared Zionism to be racist.
The party leader told the Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday programme that, while he would like to amend it, the motion would be party policy until 2028 and denied it was controversial.
The motion, passed at the party’s conference earlier this month, described Zionism as an ideology supporting “an ethnonationalist Jewish state in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population”.
It divided the party and sparked a major backlash from MPs, Jewish campaigners, the government and the European Green movement.
The fallout from the motion overshadowed the final days of Polanski’s campaign in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, in which he came second to Labour, and threatened his leadership.
He came under criticism for not voting on the motion which was passed by 1,022 votes to 813, a small fraction of the party’s 230,000 members.
Asked if he would now step in as leader to overturn it, Polanski said: “I’m not going to try to overturn it.
“At the first available opportunity, I do want to amend it – I want to move away from one state, towards saying that Israelis and Palestinians should decide that future for themselves.”
He said this would not be until 2028 as “you can’t [amend it] within the rules, so when you vote on something in our party conference that’s then policy for two years”.
Kuenssberg asked if he would therefore change the rules as leader, but Polanski said: “I think if members have made a decision, then I respect the democratic will of our members.”
Polanski had previously said he would not have voted for the motion without amendments.
Green MPs, including Ellie Chowns, have called for the party’s member-led decision-making procedures to be reviewed given how few people took part in the vote.