Green shoots of a crisis: is party’s antisemitism problem worse than feared?
Jewish News investigation finds shocking new evidence of anti-Jewish hate among local election candidates
There are growing fears that evidence of open Jew-hatred amongst Green Party candidates has been seriously underestimated, amid a failure to conduct proper due diligence ahead of next month’s local elections.
A Jewish News investigation has discovered multiple examples of Green candidates sharing conspiracy theories about Jews, including some originating on far-right neo-Nazi websites, along with clear evidence of Holocaust distortion.
Some observers now even fear that the antisemitism crisis with Zack Polanski’s party, which is fielding thousands of candidates at the May 7 elections, is comparable to, or even worse than, the similar problem that caused havoc to Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
Challenged at the launch of the Greens’ election campaign over fears of an inadequate vetting process by party chiefs ahead of next month’s poll, Polanski himself admitted: “I recognise we’re dealing with an immense amount of people very quickly, and so I won’t be surprised if we have the odd candidate where we have to distance from them.”
He claimed: “We’re doing everything we can to make sure we’re doing due diligence … We’re not being complacent about it for a second and recognise the scale of the task that’s in front of us.”
The widely predicted Green success in the local elections could impact significantly on Jewish voters, especially within areas of London.
While Polanski’s party is unlikely to make dramatic inroads in Barnet, home to the largest Jewish electorate, the predicted Green surge in boroughs like Camden, Brent, Hackney, Haringey, Lewisham and Islington is now a major concern for communal leaders in the run-up to the local elections.
New evidence unearthed by Jewish News includes a Green Party candidate standing for election in Camden, north London, who shared antisemitic claims that the Old Testament commands Jews to kill children, that Zionists carried out the 9/11 terror attacks, and “false flag” lies about the Golders Green Hatzola arson attack.
Jewish News has approached the Green Party for comment after being shown a series of deeply troubling social media posts shared or written by Aziz Hakimi, who is standing in Camden’s Haverstock ward.
One post shared by Hakimi in August 2025 shows him sharing a graphic of the flaming twin towers after the 9/11 terror attack and openly blaming it on “Zionists.”
Hakimi also shared an article widely circulated after last month’s Golders Green arson attack that stated: “The London Ambulance Attack — Of Course It Was A False Flag.”
Another post shared by Hakimi originally appeared on the Islamist 5 Pillars website and shows footage of Charedi Jews being abused and told to “go back home” after arriving at Krakow airport in Poland on a flight from Israel.
Jewish News has also been sent evidence showing how the Green Party has willingly accepted candidates who faced antisemitism allegations in the Labour Party. Karen Sudan, now standing for the Greens in West Sussex, resigned from Labour amid such claims.
In August 2018, she accused the media of being “too busy making up and/or exaggerating stories about antisemitism in the Labour Party to raise an outcry over other forms of racism.”
Support for, or justification of, the October 7 Hamas attacks amongst Green candidates is also not hard to find.
Another Green candidate, Mark Adderley, standing for Croydon Council, has been found to have shared conspiratorial claims that “Benjamin Netanyahu is doing Jeffrey Epstein’s work as we speak”, adding that the dead paedophile’s “blackmail, honey trap operation is being run right now” by the Israeli prime minister.
Adderley, husband of TV presenter Nadia Sawalha, was also videoed discussing the Golders Green arson attack, saying: “Benjamin Netanyahu is single-handedly responsible for endangering the lives of Jewish people throughout the world … and just for the record … if a Muslim community had their own ambulance service we would have never heard the end of it.”
Jewish News has also been shown posts made by sitting Green councillor Alex Dimond on Sheffield City Council, who openly compared Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust in a social media post and claimed: “Genocide has long been the colonialist policy of the West’s political and economic elites.”
Councillor Dimond’s “Nazis were never the exception” post also received the approval of Green deputy leader Mothin Ali, who is shown to have “liked” it on social media.
Only last week, the Greens announced they had dropped Bernard Mani, their initial choice as a candidate in Forest Hill, Lewisham, after it emerged he had pulled down hostage balloons at a November 2023 show of solidarity by the Jewish community in Hove, Sussex. Mani also backed lies that Israel was actually responsible for the October 7 Hamas atrocity.
This came only days after another Green candidate was forced to step down after sharing a conspiracy theory about the Golders Green ambulance attack. Tope Olawoyin, who had previously been photographed alongside Polanski at a party event, wrote: “I can say with almost absolute certainty that the men arrested are white, probably even Jewish, because we all know for a fact that if they weren’t their names and pictures would be everywhere.”
A Green candidate standing in Thurrock, Alfie Jay Rees, who is standing in Tilbury St Chad’s ward, was shown to have posted a message in an online chat calling for “Death to Israel”, “Death to America”, and “Death to England.”
It is understood party chiefs decided not to take action, deeming the post to have been of a satirical nature and taken out of context by those who called for him to be dropped as a candidate.
Another concerning case emerged after The Spectator revealed posts by the Green candidate for the Hackney, Stoke Newington ward.
Ifhat Shaheen is revealed to have reposted a message on social media after last month’s arson attack on Jewish ambulances saying that “since Golders Green is now in the news, I want to take the opportunity to make people aware that the Jewish community in North London host IDF soldiers in their synagogues and raise funds for the IDF during a ‘family fun day’.”
She also asked whether “Zionist funding” was behind the racist Tommy Robinson marches, and said that “Corbyn would have been a great PM, the Zionist lobby worked hard to keep him out”.
Meanwhile The Times reported on past messages from Hau-Yu Tam, a Green councillor in Lewisham, southeast London.
Tam was elected as a Labour councillor but left to join the Greens in March last year.
That month she said pro-Palestinian students “were correct to defend the Hamas book” after protestors picketed the launch of the book Understanding Hamas: And Why That Matters at the London School of Economics.
Tam has also re-shared a post calling Zionism “the Nazism of our time” and in April last year expressed support for a barrister representing Hamas in a legal effort to overturn its proscription as a terrorist organisation.
A report published by The Independent last week noted how Chandni Chopra, who is standing for the Greens on Newcastle City Council, had argued that the Hamas massacre — which saw at least 828 civilians, including 36 children, murdered — was justified.
Chopra posted on Instagram shortly after the 2023 attacks: “In the face of the biased mainstream media, it is apparent that the Palestinians’ legal right to resist is being portrayed as barbarism and unwarranted.”
Asked about allegations around candidate antisemitism a Greens spokesperson said: “The deadline for candidate nominations has just closed and we will be investigating anything brought to our attention that doesn’t fit with Green Party values and views.”
The Green Party’s antisemitism problem has been building for years, but has intensified sharply as the party has grown in electoral significance under Polanski’s leadership.
Another explosive recent episode involved leaked WhatsApp messages from Greens for Palestine, a grassroots faction within the party. The messages, first reported by The Telegraph, showed activists describing Jewish people as “an abomination to this planet” and claiming Jews “murder, bomb and starve” children.
At the party’s 2026 spring conference, Motion A105 aimed to formally define Zionism as racism, position the Green Party as explicitly anti-Zionist, and call for a single Palestinian state replacing Israel.
In the end, efforts by hardline pro-Palestine activists in the party to force a vote on the motion were halted, mainly due to technical issues with the online voting system — though the motion may yet return at a future conference.
The Jewish Greens group had warned the motion would make Jewish members “uniquely exposed” to accusations and would “send a message to Jewish members that they need to choose between their party membership and being a member of their Jewish community.”
The Jewish Labour Movement, which fought antisemitism under Corbyn, wrote to Polanski warning the motion would leave the party as “a potential space for antisemitism to go unchecked.”
And it recently emerged that Tony Greenstein, long associated with claims around antisemitism before he left the Labour Party, had been allowed to join the Greens.
To understand why the antisemitism problem has been allowed to fester, it is necessary to understand the Green Party’s remarkable electoral rise — and the role the war in Gaza has played in it.
Having won four seats at the 2024 general election — its best ever result — the party has surged further in the polls since Polanski took over as leader last September. Under his “eco-populist” leadership, the Greens have expanded beyond environmental concerns to make opposition to Israel a defining issue, and the strategy has paid dramatic electoral dividends.
At last week’s campaign launch, Polanski began his speech not by focusing on local issues, but with further condemnation of Israel over attacks in Lebanon and the now familiar claim that the government is “complicit in genocide” in Gaza.
The Gaza war has placed Keir Starmer’s government in an often impossible position, bleeding votes from both directions. Many in the British Jewish community feel let down by the prime minister, particularly after his government backed recognition of a Palestinian state.
For Jewish voters who had returned to Labour after the Corbyn years, the move felt like a betrayal. The political consequences are likely to be felt in May’s local elections in areas with large Jewish populations, including Barnet, Camden, Brent, Hackney and Haringey.
One video currently circulating online, shot in the Brondesbury ward of Brent, shows Green Party activists facing a hostile response from a man identifying himself as Jewish and Zionist, who asks the three party campaigners: “Is your party not trying to make Zionism racism?” The man then adds: “Don’t ever knock on my door again. We don’t want you here. “Don’t come here with your Jew hate.”
Barnet, however, could buck the wider London trend.
The borough looks far less fertile territory for the Greens than inner London, with both the Conservatives and an increasingly resurgent Reform UK seeking to gain control of a council that only turned Labour last time around. Unlike the rest of the capital, the battle appears to be a three-way fight in which the Greens are unlikely to be among the main beneficiaries.
But Starmer has lost far more votes to those who regard him as too soft on Israel. Polanski has gone as far as to accuse him of being “complicit in genocide” in Gaza — a charge that has resonated with many on the left.
Meanwhile, a more troubling narrative has taken hold among a section of voters: the conspiracy theory that Starmer and other Labour MPs have been “bought” by Labour Friends of Israel, a mainstream cross-party lobbying group.
The claim has gained a worryingly high level of credibility over the past two years despite being rooted in classic antisemitic tropes — the idea that Jews use money to purchase political influence and that Zionist interests secretly control the levers of power.
That such rhetoric has moved from the fringes into mainstream political discourse is itself a measure of how far the conversation around Israel has shifted since October 7.
The biggest prize came in February 2026, when the Greens won the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester — the party’s first ever Westminster by-election victory. Green candidate Hannah Spencer won with 14,980 votes, pushing Labour into a humiliating third place behind Reform UK.
The Greens’ campaign in Gorton was explicitly targeted at voters angered by Labour’s stance on Gaza, both in the Muslim and wider community. The party distributed leaflets in Urdu in which Spencer wore a keffiyeh, urging voters to “give the faltering walls a push — Labour must be punished for Gaza.”
Labour accused the Greens of “whipping up hatred” among Muslim voters. Polanski himself has regularly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, called for the arrest of Netanyahu, and condemned Israel’s airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites during the June 2025 war.
It would, however, be reductive to put the Green surge down to sectarianism alone.
The party has built substantial support among white, middle-class liberal voters — the kind who might once have backed the Liberal Democrats or a centrist Labour — for whom Gaza is one concern among many, alongside climate change, housing and public services.
Polanski’s “eco-populist” pitch, delivered with considerable skill on social media, has tapped into a broad sense of disillusionment with mainstream politics that extends well beyond the question of Israel.
To a lesser extent, there are also signs of Green support growing among working-class voters who are fed up with both major parties but unwilling to follow others in blaming the country’s problems on immigration.
For this group, the Greens offer an outlet for anti-establishment anger that doesn’t come with the nativist baggage of Reform UK.
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