Zack Polanski and the politics of moral evasion

There is something uniquely painful about watching a Jewish politician become the most prominent enabler of antisemitism in British public life. And yet that is exactly what is happening.

Last week, Zack Polanski told ITV’s Robert Peston that he does not believe any country has the right to exist, including Israel. He called it “semantics.” He suggested the whole idea of Israel’s legitimacy is just gatekeeping, a word game that (according to Zack) is the root cause of the current conflict. This is not political philosophy. It is political pandering dressed up as principle.

When a politician is asked point-blank whether the world’s only Jewish state has a right to exist, and he cannot bring himself to say yes, the intellectual framing does not matter. The effect is the same. He has given a green light to every person who wants to see Israel wiped off the map, wrapped neatly in the “semantics” of universalism.

The timing matters. Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green. Synagogues torched. Hatzola ambulances set on fire. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner warned Polanski that his rush to criticise officers who arrested a terror suspect would have a chilling effect on a community already scared. Polanski had previously speculated as to whether the fear was even real. He is Jewish, we are told. Repeatedly, by him and his sycophants, as though his heritage is a permission slip. It is not. And using one’s Jewish identity as a shield while running a party with candidates arrested for stirring up racial hatred, one of whom shared a social media post describing ramming a synagogue not as antisemitism, but as revenge, is not hypocritical. It is reprehensible.

There is also another startling problem. Polanski says no country has the right to exist, and in the same breath campaigns for a Palestinian state. His position is not principled. It is selective. And selectivity of this kind, applied only to the Jewish state, has a name. Peston asked him directly: your logic means Britain has no right to exist either. Polanski did not deny it. He reached for more “semantics”.

This week the results came in. Reform UK took 1,453 council seats, gaining 14 councils outright and 27% of the national vote, the most dramatic local election result in a generation. Labour collapsed, losing 1,496 seats and control of 38 councils. The Greens gained 411 seats. Both parties celebrated. But consider what British voters were endorsing in the same week their Green leader told a national television audience that no country, including Britain, has the right to exist.

People respond to politicians who take a stand. Last week Kemi Badenoch went viral for confronting a heckler who tried to change the subject while she was speaking about antisemitism. She told him plainly: the people who have been killed were Jewish people in a synagogue. In 2026, that is apparently a controversial thing to say. Meanwhile Farage established the Reform Jewish Alliance and Reform Friends of Israel, called for the IRGC to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation, something both Labour and the Conservatives have refused to do despite repeated promises, while Iran plots assassinations on British streets and funds the groups that murdered Jews on 7 October. He said without hesitation that Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself. He was even invited to speak at Sunday’s Standing Strong rally against antisemitism outside Downing Street. Over 2,200 Jews signed a petition to have that invitation withdrawn. Farage is complicated, for sure. But when the community is under attack, we do not have the luxury of turning away those who stand with us. We Jews must stand in the present. We cannot afford to reject those who stand with us while embracing those who will not even say we have the right to exist.

I have friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, who supported the Greens last week. I respect that. But I would ask them sincerely: how do you justify a leader who could not take a stand for his own people or for his fellow Britons? At some point the rhetoric of the leader rises above whatever the party stands for. The leader is the party. And when asked to stand tall on the right of a Jewish state or his own country, he reaches for justifications and “semantics”.

Polanski wants to be a Jewish Prime Minister of Great Britain. A country he has told the nation has no right to exist. He was given the chance to correct himself. He chose silence. We deserve a leader who stands up for the people he wishes to lead. At least Badenoch, Farage, and even Starmer, whatever their faults, know which side they are on. Polanski reaches for “semantics.” Zack, if you want to lead our country, we deserve a resounding yes on Israel, on Palestine and a yes, on the country you wish to lead, Great Britain. Instead you deliver “semantics”.