The anti-Semitism smear that devastated Corbyn's Labor is now targeting the Greens

The Green Party was until recently on the fringes of British politics. Between 2010 and 2024, he had only one member of parliament. In the July 2024 election, which saw the collapse of the Conservatives and Labor government under Keir Starmer, he managed to secure just four seats in parliament.

But the party’s fortunes began to change rapidly in the Starmer era. With the Conservatives and the Labor government now reduced to the mid-to-high-teens in the polls, the economy on its knees, and anti-establishment sentiment growing across the political spectrum, the Greens have begun to emerge as a political force capable of challenging Nigel Farage’s Reform at the next general election. They are now polling at around 17 per cent, level with the Conservatives and one point ahead of the ruling Labor Party. They also won their first parliamentary by-election at Gorton and Denton, with 40.6 per cent of the vote. Membership has risen from 65,000 in July 2025 to around 220,000 today.

This shift is due in no small part to the party’s unapologetic support for Palestinians. Indeed, many leftists and progressives frustrated with the Labor Party’s support for and whitewashing of Israeli crimes in Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine expressed their support for the Green Party after Zack Polanski, a non-Zionist Jew who has unequivocally described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide”, was elected leader in October 2025.

Polanski’s vocal support for Palestine and his consistent condemnation of Israeli crimes and excesses undoubtedly contributed to the party’s surge in support. But it also unleashed an anti-Semitism smear campaign almost identical to the one that eventually saw Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing, pro-Palestine supporters, including you from the Labor Party. How the Green leader responds will not only determine the future of his party, but possibly the direction of British politics.

The anti-Semitism smear campaign against the Greens began in earnest after the party’s by-election victory in Gorton and Denton, where 30 percent of the population is Muslim, and the Greens put Gaza at the forefront of their campaign. The victory shocked the British establishment and forced many to accept that the Greens had become a real contender for power.

As a result, just as was the case with Corbyn’s Labour, Polanski’s Greens were immediately accused of “sectarianism” and promoting anti-Semitism for votes.

Accusations of perceived anti-Semitism peaked after an attempt at the party’s spring conference to pass a motion declaring that “Zionism is racism,” failed only due to filibusting by Jewish Greens.

Around this time the media started pushing the line that those kicked out of Labor over perceived “anti-Semitism” during the Corbyn years had joined the Greens and transferred their “hateful” politics there.

As the first Jewish person to be branded an “anti-Semite” and kicked out of the Labor Party in 2018, and as a new member of the Green Party since 1 March, I have been personally targeted for promoting this argument.

On March 28, the Jewish Chronicle published an article about me in the Green Party, suggesting that my involvement with the Greens “fueled fears that the party was becoming a magnet for those expelled from Labor at the height of its anti-Semitism crisis.” A similar article appeared in The Telegraph two weeks later. Since then, the so-called “crisis of anti-Semitism” in the Green Party has become a narrative widely accepted as fact in the British media, and Zack Polanski found himself where Corbyn once stood in 2018.

Polanski still has a great chance of carrying his party into power, but he could lose it all if he repeats Corbyn’s mistakes and tries to appease his worst critics.

Indeed, during the so-called “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” Corbyn never once questioned the good faith of his Zionist accusers. Instead, he acted as their messenger, repeatedly apologizing, promising to do better and throwing friends under the bus, ultimately echoing his detractors’ narrative. In August 2018, he even said that anyone who denies the anti-Semitism “problem” in Labor is “adding to the problem.”

Corbyn’s strategy of appeasement, as we all know, has been a disaster. His opponents simply demanded more and more concessions. Eventually, Corbyn became a victim of the witch-hunt he had agreed to take part in, and he too was expelled from the party.

Tragically, it appears that the Green Party leadership has decided to implement Corbyn’s failed strategy of appeasement in its efforts to survive its own “anti-Semitism crisis”.

On April 16, my membership in the Green Party was suspended without any explanation beyond 11 words: “Documented history of anti-Semitism, including court decisions and recent terrorism charges.” Since then, at least 22 council candidates have been suspended over similar issues.

On April 29, two Jewish people were stabbed in Golders Green, North London, by a man with a long history of mental health problems. He had earlier stabbed a fellow Muslim, although this was largely ignored by the press. Police declared the incident an act of terrorism, and Starmer quickly linked the attack, without evidence, to Palestinian solidarity protests against Israel’s genocide that have been taking place across the city for more than two years.

Then Polanski retweeted

After the Metropolitan Police Commissioner wrote an open letter to Polanski criticizing him for the retweet, a “senior Green Party source” told ITV News that “the test now is what action the leadership takes around candidates who have made anti-Semitic comments.”

The conservative press then stepped up its smear campaign against Polanski, with The Telegraph publishing the front page headline “Polanski is an extremist, says Israel” on 1 May. Meanwhile, The Times ran a caricature depicting the Green leader with an exaggerated hood kicking a police officer at the scene of the Golders Green stabbing. On May 2, the Daily Mail ran the headline “Polanski’s Greens Are a Party of Poison,” suggesting that the Green leader was “under intense pressure to ‘get a grip’ on the anti-Semitic ‘poison’ infecting the Green Party.”

Since then, social media posts by a handful of Green Party candidates about Israel, viewed by the establishment as anti-Semitic, have taken center stage in the new “Green Party Anti-Semitism Crisis.” Despite immediately condemning the offending posts, Polanski was accused, mainly by Starmer’s Labour, of being too slow to suspend or remove the offending candidates.

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Polanski condemned any anti-Semitic comments, saying they were “not an abstract idea” for him. “As a Jewish person, those comments disgust me. It’s important that we let the disciplinary process take its place, and that’s exactly what we have,” he said. He rejected the idea that anti-Semitism was something particularly common in the Green Party: “I don’t believe we have a particular problem compared to wider society and other political parties.”

Polanski seems to be following Corbyn’s failed playbook in dealing with this manufactured crisis. If he doesn’t change course, the smear campaign will consume him, just as it consumed Corbyn. What Polanski should make clear is that the overwhelming majority of these accusations are not cases of people hating Jews because they are Jews, which is what anti-Semitism actually is. Rather, these are cases of people, often clumsily, expanding criticism of Israel into anti-Semitic tropes after decades of Zionist insistence on confusing the Israeli state with the Jewish people as a whole.

Indeed, his reassurances seemed to have little effect, as the so-called anti-Semitism of the Green Party remained a major talking point in the run-up to the May 7 local elections.

In tomorrow’s polls, the Greens are expected to gain more than 500 seats, quadrupling the number they have today, while Labor is expected to lose up to 75 percent of its 2,557 seats.

The Greens are campaigning on a radical platform of taxing the wealthy, bringing utilities back into public ownership, ending new oil drilling and supporting the Palestinians. The party, and its progressive platform, has never been so close to significant political power in Britain. It maintains that momentum may depend on whether Polanski continues down the appeals path, or instead chooses to directly challenge what he and his supporters see as politically motivated accusations designed to neutralize pro-Palestinian politics.

Polanski should know better than to appeal to his accusers. In the not-so-distant past, he admitted to getting “lost” in the “propaganda” surrounding Corbyn and the handling of alleged anti-Semitism in the Labor Party, and later apologized.

If the Green Party continues to purge anti-Zionist voices in an attempt to appease its critics, it risks hollowing out the very movement that spurred its rise and transforming itself into just another establishment party, albeit one with a green tinge.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial position.