Why Zack Polanski would make a terrible MP

This Thursday, Holborn and St Pancras elects a new MP. The seat has been Labour’s since its creation in 1983 and was last held by Keir Starmer. Labour is the favourite, but Zack Polanski is the one challenger with a real chance of taking it.

I’m going to be blunt. Under Zack Polanski, the Green Party has become one of the most troubling sources of anti-Jewish sentiment in British politics. The politics this party now espouses poses a threat to our community, and by extension to our country. As the party’s leader, he should not be taking a seat in Parliament.

Look at Brighton. The party Polanski leads voted, by 1,022 to 813, to call itself anti-Zionist and to treat Zionism as a form of racism. Members then voted down an amendment protecting Jewish members of synagogues that call themselves Zionist, synagogues like South Hampstead, in the very area he wants to represent. The party needed a safe space for Jewish members at its own conference. A member of 38 years wore a yellow star in the hall. Activists chanted that Zionists weren’t welcome. The Movement for Progressive Judaism said the party had made antisemitism its official policy.

And the leader was nowhere to be found. He was campaigning in Camden – a convenient excuse, but not a particularly convincing one, given Brighton is less than 90 minutes from London, via train. A leader who can’t stop his own members targeting Jews isn’t leading. He is a “useful idiot”, a “political tool” just along for the ride. Days earlier, at a local hustings, he had declared himself an anti-Zionist anyway.

Then read the motion. It rewrites the party’s policy on the conflict, backing a single democratic Palestinian state in “all of historic Palestine”, with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for everyone and a right of return for Palestinians and their descendants. Until Sunday, the party said peace was for Israelis and Palestinians to agree. That is gone. The Green Party no longer believes Israel should exist as a Jewish state. To every Israeli, and every British Jew who feels a bond with Israel, the message is clear: the Greens don’t recognise that homeland, whether you see it as a birthright or a promise. None of this should surprise us. In May, Polanski told Robert Peston that no country, including Israel, has a right to exist, referring to notion as semantics.

The timing could not be worse. Two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green. Two men have been charged over an alleged bomb plot against a Manchester synagogue. Police want Wednesday’s 7 October march, which will go through the constituency he hopes to represent, called off. Will Zack show up to support it? His being Jewish changes none of this. A Jewish leader doesn’t make the message more acceptable. He makes it more palatable, which is just as bad.

Over 10,000 Camden residents identified as Jewish in the 2021 census, roughly one in twenty. Holborn and St Pancras is a melting pot of Jewish families, other cultures and minorities, students, hospitals and the stations that connect London to the country. How can someone from a party that treats a fundamental part of many constituents’ identity as racism represent them? And the Greens have never won a parliamentary seat in London. A win here, days after Brighton, would tell every party these views are no barrier, and tell Jewish families something about whether this city is still home.

I know people who back the Greens for good reasons: housing, the cost of living, the climate. I get why. But Thursday’s vote is about the person you elect and what their win will symbolise. Every vote Zack gets on Thursday tells the country that this sort of pandering at the expense of the wider Jewish community is OK. The people I sit with at my synagogue, in the very area he hopes to represent, just feel threatened. They feel let down by a party that just labelled them racists, and by a leader who wasn’t there.

The truth is, he probably won’t win, and I hope Camden proves the bookmakers right. But the damage is already done. Whatever happens on Thursday, Britain now has a national party, with MPs in Parliament, that is publicly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel. The sad part is that Labour, a party I believe is anti-Israel in its own right, will come out of this looking like the good guys. Camden cannot undo what happened in Brighton. It can refuse to reward it.