In the May elections, the Green Party won outright control of local councils in Hackney, Hastings, Lewisham, Norwich, and Waltham Forest, with a net gain of 441 councillors across England. Party leader Zack Polanski courted pro-Palestine voters, for example on 9 April by calling for ‘robust sanctions’ on Israel – and yet in the following weeks his party suspended around a dozen candidates for alleged offences relating to ‘anti-Semitism’. This and other capitulations show the Greens will not be a vehicle to fight British support for Zionism. MATT GLASS reports.
Conference fiasco
The Green Party of England and Wales tripled its membership to 200,000 in six months to March 2026 – tens of thousands of these people have been active opponents of the Gaza genocide. This has created contradictions in what is essentially a liberal capitalist party.
On 28 March the Greens held their online Spring conference. Despite all 200,000 members being eligible to join, only 900 attended. All eyes were on motion A105 ‘Zionism Is Racism’, which would declare the Green Party anti-Zionist and which ‘affirms the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination, including the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and liberation… by all available means’.
This basic position of support for Palestinian self-determination was unacceptable to the Jewish Greens group, which claimed ‘regardless of how Zionism has played out in the real world [!], an unbridled attack on Zionism would – for many Jews (regardless of their own relationship with Zionism) – come across as an attack at that very basic right of aspiring to lead a safe and secure life’ – insinuating that Palestinian self-determination is incompatible with Jewish safety, precisely a Zionist perspective. After hours of filibustering and a suspected cyber-attack, the conference ended before the motion was voted on.
The motion not only offended the Jewish Greens group but directly contradicts the stated positions of Polanski and the Greens’ 2024 manifesto, both of which have rejected the Palestinian right to resist occupation. Deputy leader Mothin Ali apologised in May 2024 for having defended this right, saying ‘I do not support violence on either side: violence leads to more violence’.
In February Polanski admitted to ‘openly equivocating’ on the question of whether Zionism is racism. On 28 March, he ducked the issue by avoiding his own party’s conference – instead he was dancing on a Westminster stage with the Together Alliance, a love-in with the genocidal Labour Party (see FRFI 311, ‘No alliance with the racist Labour Party’). This gives the lie to those who insist a Polanski-led government would be a friend of Palestine.
Police and Green bureaucracy clamp down
Polanski’s equivocations over Zionism and the isolation of pro-Palestine voices in the party are not nearly enough to satisfy ruling class opinion. In the week of the local elections, the Labour Party issued a dossier calling on the Greens to expel members who had posted what it called ‘anti-Semitic hatred’ on social media. Following knife attacks on three men on 29 April, including two Jewish men in Golders Green, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley wrote a public letter accusing Polanski of ‘amplifying “us and them” rhetoric’ by sharing the mildest criticism of a police assault during the arrest of the alleged attacker. Polanski made a grovelling apology to Rowley within hours.
In the runup to the elections two Lambeth Green Party candidates were arrested for alleged offences relating to anti-Semitism by the Met Police. The same force announced in April that its War Crimes Unit would not investigate alleged war crimes of Britons who fought for the IDF, despite the Public Interest Law Centre and Palestinian Centre for Human Rights presenting a dossier including 240 pages of evidence.
This is the same criminal ‘justice’ system that the Green Party has sided with against the anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein, who was suspended from the Greens in April without warning. The Green Party told him the basis of this decision was his alleged ‘Documented history of antisemitism, including court decisions and recent terrorism charges’ – charges, not convictions, are enough to get suspended from the Greens.
The electoral trap
Many young people are enthused by the Green Party, especially in the context of the failure of Your Party, believing it to present a socialist option on the ballot. Its record in local government shows otherwise: the Green minority administration in Brighton and Hove from 2020-23 presided over more than £200m of cuts to services. The council socially cleansed rough sleepers from the city into nearby deprived towns.
The Greens’ electoral strategy depends on being acceptable to the ruling class, and the Green leadership has already proved itself willing to toe the line. We must build an unapologetically anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movement, that will demand full sanctions on the state of Israel.
