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British Greens battle antisemitism scandal as Jewish leader Zack Polanski targets historic gains in local elections
(JTA) — Britons heading to polls in local elections on Thursday will deliver an answer to the question of whether their country’s legacy parties still hold wide appeal.
They will also illuminate just how willing British voters are to overlook antisemitism accusations around a rising left-wing party party — and potentially propel its leader, a 43-year-old Jewish activist who describes himself as “certainly not a Zionist,” into the upper echelon of British politics.
If Zack Polanski delivers the gains to the Green Party’s local leadership that polls have indicated are possible, he will instantly become one of the most high-profile Jewish progressives in the world. But unlike Bernie Sanders, the Jewish U.S. senator who is a doyen of the global progressive movement, Polanski has from the start made pro-Palestinian politics a centerpiece of his party’s platform — a reflection of how the war in Gaza has reshaped politics, and a gateway for antisemitism allegations that have dogged the Greens ahead of the election.
Polanski has said that antisemitism is “completely unwelcome” in the party as accusations thronged dozens of candidates heading into elections. More than 30 candidates are being investigated in an internal party probe.
But Jewish leaders and politicians, as well as London’s top police officer and members of other parties, say Polanski has failed to act strongly enough and runs the risk of inflaming antisemitic sentiment as violence against British Jews surges. And even Jewish members of the Green Party — who are increasing in number — have objected to some of the party’s moves against Israel.
Two Greens candidates in London were arrested last week on suspicion of “stirring up racial hatred online,” according to Metropolitan Police. One of them, Sabine Mairey, said in a post, “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism, it’s revenge.” The other, Saiqa Ali, shared an image of an armed man wearing a Hamas headband with the slogan, “Resistance is freedom.”
The party also recently dropped support from Tina Ion, a candidate in Newcastle who said that “every single Zionist” should be killed on an account called “thereal.anne.frank.” Two other Newcastle candidates lost their endorsements just days before the elections. Philip Brookes posted that it “takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit antisemitic,” and Mohammed Suleman reposted a video claiming that Jews were willing to bury Soviet prisoners alive under Nazi instruction during World War II.
Polanski told the BBC on Wednesday that these messages were “unacceptable.” He said the party was ensuring a “standardized vetting process” and “compulsory training” for all candidates to “make it clear that antisemitism is completely unwelcome in the Green Party, as it is in society.”
He added, “It is also important to say one case of antisemitism is one too many. This is a handful of cases and actually we have over 4,500 candidates, the vast, vast majority of which are doing amazing work in their communities.”
The scandal comes as Labour is predicted to lose well over half of its 2,500 seats on English local councils, especially to the Greens in London and the right-wing Reform UK in northern England. The two formerly fringe parties have framed the local elections, which select officials who manage municipal services and affairs, as a referendum on legacy politics, a weak economy, poor public services and an unpopular leader in Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
While polls suggest that multiple parties will benefit from the losses by Labour, Starmer’s party, the Greens are being watched especially closely because of what their momentum could signal for the future of the British left.
Polanski is the most prominent Jewish critic of Israel in mainstream U.K. politics. He has called to end all arms sales, trade and diplomatic ties with Israel, and decried Starmer for complicity in what he says is “the very obvious genocide in Gaza.” His pro-Palestinian stance has taken center-stage in the Green Party’s platform, alongside the environment and affordability.
Polanski did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency made over several months.
Polanski frequently speaks about his pride in being Jewish, which he says led to his support for Palestinians. He said in a TikTok video last year, “When I speak out for Palestinians, I don’t do it in spite of my Judaism. I do it because of it. Because ‘never again’ for one group of people must actually mean ‘never again’ for anyone.”
Polanski is also a member of Na’amod, an organization of British Jews who say they seek “to end our community’s support for Israel’s occupation and apartheid.” He told The Guardian last year that “the most vicious” criticism in his political career came from “so-called mainstream Jewish communities,” which felt betrayed because he was “certainly not a Zionist.” (Polanski was blasted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the country’s largest group representing Jews, after he said that British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis did not represent most British Jews and instead spoke “in the interests of defending the Israeli government.”)
These views diverge sharply from his upbringing. Polanski has described his childhood in a “Zionist household” in Manchester, where he attended the Jewish school King David. He grew up as David Paulden with a mother who reportedly continues to identify as a Zionist.
At 18, he changed the anglicized name to the original name of his Jewish ancestors, who immigrated from Ukraine and dropped their name upon confronting antisemitism in the United Kingdom, he told the BBC in March. (Polanski said he changed his first name because of a negative experience with his stepfather, who was also named David.)
While promising to root out antisemitism from the Green Party, Polanski has said that some allegations “conflate genuine antisemitism with legitimate criticism of an Israeli government which is committing war crimes.”
The Greens face mounting scrutiny amid a wave of antisemitic attacks nationally, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in the London neighborhood of Golders Green last week and a string of arson attacks on synagogues and other Jewish sites. In October, an attacker drove his car into people gathered outside a Manchester synagogue and fatally stabbed one man.
Polanski criticized the police for their use of force in detaining Essa Suleiman, the suspect charged with the Golders Green stabbings. His comments sank his approval ratings in recent days and prompted a swift rebuke from police chief Mark Rowley.
“London’s Jewish communities are scared. They have experienced a series of targeted attacks on the community, and they expect our officers to act, protect them. That is exactly what our officers did yesterday. Your decision to criticise these officers, using your public profile and reach will have a chilling effect,” Rowley wrote in an open letter to Polanski.
“Officers need to know that when they act to protect Londoners decisively, they will be supported. Officers know they must be accountable for their use of force and there are processes for this to happen,” he added. “Your use of your public profile to call their actions into question, hours after a terrorist incident is not the appropriate route.”
The episode sparked a fresh set of antisemitism allegations, this time targeting media treatment of Polanski. Times of London published a cartoon on Saturday that depicted a hooked-nose Polanski kicking one of the police officers, which Polanski called a “vile antisemitic caricature.” Other newspapers similarly published cartoons that elicited accusations of antisemitism.
Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party .
Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun. pic.twitter.com/F4J1kPaivQ
— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) May 6, 2026
British Jews, who number close to 300,000, are a politically diverse group that has historically voted mainly for the center-right Conservatives and the center-left Labour. But their support for the two dominant parties fell sharply in recent years to less than 60% combined, according to a report from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, reflecting both a broad shift in public opinion in Britain and particular concerns for Jewish voters during the war in Gaza.
Some British Jews turned to the pro-Israel Reform, with their support for the party rising from 3% in 2024 to 11% in 2025. But a stronger contingent of disaffected Jewish voters turned to the Green Party. By June 2025, nearly one in five British Jews said they backed the Greens, nine times the rate of the population as a whole, according to JPR. (This data, the latest on British Jewish voters, was compiled before Polanski became the party’s leader in September.)
At the same time, the way British Jews see Israel has fractured. A majority identify as Zionists, but that proportion fell from 72% in 2013 to 65% in 2024, according to Brendan McGeever, a sociologist and co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London, who analyzed JPR data. Meanwhile, the proportion who identified as anti-Zionists and non-Zionists reached 28% in 2024.
McGeever said this polarization reflected the Green Party’s surge with younger Jews, while many other Jews have taken deep offense at his statements about Israel and antisemitism.
“The communal ‘we’ that Jewish communal organizations have spoken about for the last several decades, that communal ‘we’ is now breaking down before our very eyes,” McGeever told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Jews are increasingly divided politically, especially over core issues such as Zionism and Israel.”
Polanski has fierce critics in the British Jewish establishment, such as Daniel Sugarman, deputy editor of the U.K.’s Jewish News and former public affairs director for the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Sugarman has said the “mainstream Jewish community is absolutely furious” with Polanski, whom he accused of “playing politics with the hatred that the Jewish community is regularly experiencing” and “gaslighting those who call it out.”
Zac Goldsmith, a Jewish member of the House of Lords in the Conservative Party, said last week that the Green Party was “one of the greatest threats to Jewish people in the UK.”
Polanski “offered up his Jewishness as a tool for mass laundering of antisemitism,” Goldsmith said on X. “He’s done so not because he is antisemitic, but because he is an opportunist and is tapping into a large and growing market.”
Even within the Greens, some Jews have balked at the strength of the party’s anti-Zionist sentiment. Polanski gave qualified support earlier this year to a party motion called “Zionism is racism,” saying he would back the resolution if its definition of “Zionism” was linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its actions in Gaza.
The Jewish Greens group urged their colleagues to vote against the motion. “This is not your run-of-the-mill motion opposing Israel’s actions (something that Jewish Greens would have no problem with), but something much more problematic that is likely to make Jews feel unwelcome in the Green Party,” they said in a statement.
Questions about defining antisemitism and opposition to Israel have plagued politicians across the spectrum, not least in the Labour government, which fought an antisemitism scandal of its own under former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer has said there are “instances” when pro-Palestinian demonstrations could be banned, suggesting that protests and pro-Palestinian chants had a “cumulative effect” on British Jews.
The Greens have split from mainstream U.K. parties by adopting multiple definitions of antisemitism, including both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. The former, which most parties use exclusively, has received backlash from the left for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic.
Reactions to antisemitism allegations within the Green Party are mixed. Deputy leader Mothin Ali privately told the Greens for Palestine group that candidates who were accused of antisemitism should seek “serious legal advice” against their own party, The Times of London reported.
Other members have loudly condemned the incidents. Former party leader Caroline Lucas, the first elected Green MP, said on X that the recently resurfaced statements from Green candidates were “totally unacceptable & require immediate action.”
“There’s no place for antisemitism or any hate speech in the party. This is a society-wide problem & needs to be rooted out wherever it’s found,” said Lucas.
Meanwhile, as the election neared and online discourse about it escalated, new concerns continued to rear their heads. After the academic Harriet Bradley shared one of Polanski’s videos urging Brits to the polls this week, a Jewish member of the Labour Party tweeted that he recognized her.
Bradley was suspended from a Labour Party local seat in 2019 following antisemitism allegations over her social media posts and subsequently left the party. She was investigated by police over another post two years ago.
“When I organised @JewishLabour’s conference in 2024, we had to report this woman to the Police for threatening to bomb the venue,” wrote Jack Lubner, referring to an incident that was widely reported at the time. He added, “Why are these people attracted to the Green Party? Why does Polanski welcome their support?”
The post British Greens battle antisemitism scandal as Jewish leader Zack Polanski targets historic gains in local elections appeared first on The Forward.
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Antisemitism Exploding on the Far-Right: The Conspiracy Doesn’t Need an Event Anymore
Dan Bilzerian arrives at the Fashion Nova x Cardi B Collection Launch Party held at the Hollywood Palladium on May 8, 2019, in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States. Photo: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
In April 2026, Dan Bilzerian — a social media personality with 29.6 million Instagram followers — filed to run for the US Congress against incumbent Randy Fine (R-FL). Within 10 days, he had been interviewed across right-wing, left anti-imperialist, manosphere, and tabloid outlets, calling his Jewish opponent a “fat Jew” and naming “Jewish supremacy” as the greatest threat to America.
My team at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism collected and coded 3,000 YouTube comments under six of these video appearances. Across the six videos, 41 percent of comments were antisemitic. The lowest single video came in at 23.6 percent. Under TMZ, where the hosts pushed back on Bilzerian on camera, the figure reached 52 percent — the highest of the six.
These are not numbers consistent with the way online antisemitism has usually been studied — including in my own previous work.
Most digital antisemitism research, including the studies my team has run after the Capital Jewish Museum shooting, the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Bondi Beach attack, the Temple Israel Synagogue attack, and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, treats the discourse as event-driven. Something happens; comment sections respond. The highest antisemitism rate I have ever documented in those event studies sits in the 12 to 20 percent range.
Sadly, even Bilzerian’s quietest video outran the worst spike I have ever seen after a major attack. There is no event driving these numbers. There is just a candidate.
Online antisemitism is still being produced on the left, by Islamist actors, and by foreign malign-influence operations. None of that has gone away — and on the left in particular, the post-October-7 surge has not receded.
What has changed is that a second front has opened among right-wing influencers with mass audiences, and it is moving fast. Bilzerian comes from there. So did Candace Owens before him. So did Tucker Carlson.
Antisemitism and adjacent conspiracy narratives are now being normalized by these figures at an unprecedented pace, inside the broader Republican coalition, using platform infrastructures and institutional vehicles existing monitoring rarely even looks at.
Jewish institutions calibrated mainly to track the left or external state actors are now watching one front while a second one widens.
The pattern holds across audiences that have nothing else in common. Owen Shroyer is a former Infowars right-populist. George Galloway is a heterodox left anti-imperialist who was expelled from Labour in 2003 over his Iraq War statements. Sneako is a manosphere influencer and Muslim convert. Jimmy Dore is a left-populist commentator.
The antisemitism saturation is steady under all of them, because what is producing it is not the host or the audience but the speaker each is platforming. Under Galloway, a typical comment ran: “It is the Zionists in control of all our western governments that have promoted the illegal immigration issues we have all been experiencing for the past decade.” Under Sneako, where the title named “Jewish supremacy” directly, the wordplay register surfaced — “very Cohencidental,” “Cohencidence” — alongside lines like “anyone who shits on Jews is a legend.”
Under Jimmy Dore, where antisemitism reached 42 percent, the historical-authority register dominated: a Hitler quotation got 71 likes, with a reply reading, “Yes we owe that man AH a big apology.”
Bilzerian’s candidacy is more than a single bad actor. It is a convergence: manosphere reach built up over a decade — poker, weapons, wealth display — converted into a pre-loaded political audience; anti-establishment positioning that reads as left or right depending on the listener but is coherent only as anti-Jewish-power (anti-Trump, anti-AIPAC, anti-Iraq War, pro-Palestinian); eliminationist content visible across the comment sections, including Hadrian endorsements, death wishes referencing the Nova massacre directed at named Jewish commenters, and the line “FINISH THE JOB THIS TIME”; and a Republican primary as the institutional vehicle that cleared the FEC filing process without friction.
The TMZ result shows what happens when this baseline meets resistance. Hosts Harvey Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere did exactly what mainstream-media accountability journalism is supposed to do. They named “fat Jew” as antisemitic on camera. They challenged Bilzerian’s redirection toward Palestinians as the “real Semites.” They refused his pivot from his own rhetoric to attacks on Fine’s record. By the standards of on-camera adversarial framing, this was a textbook intervention. The replies came in at 52 percent antisemitic.
The mechanism is the finding. The audience did not register the host pushback as journalistic accountability. It registered the pushback as further evidence of the conspiracy Bilzerian was naming. TMZ co-founder Harvey Levin’s documented appearance in the Epstein files — a real fact in the public record — became the activation trigger. One commenter, with 30 likes: “the owner of TMZ is in the Epstein files and plays the victim. These people support actual genocide. They are using words as a shield.” Another, with 73 likes: “He would win with ease but I don’t think the tiny hats would ever allow him to run.” A Goebbels quotation circulated through six different stations of one mega-thread, accumulating endorsements at each stop — “based,” “my daddy.” Latibeaudiere, the Black co-host, was recoded as a racial subordinate to a Jewish boss: “his boss and co-partner is a Jue,” “he figures it’s better to be in the house than in the fields.” A single counter-comment in the entire 500-comment sample, detailed and factually correct, arrived sixteen days late and received zero likes.
The dominant strategy that Jewish institutions, journalists, and platforms have for handling antisemitic public figures is on-camera adversarial framing: bring them on, push back, make them defend the indefensible. The assumption is that the audience will absorb the pushback as suppression. The TMZ case shows this assumption breaking. When the audience has already been primed — by years of speaker supply on other platforms — to read the host as part of the system being challenged, adversarial framing does not suppress the saturation. It feeds it.
Antisemitism in this material is not one hate register among several. It is the organizing logic for the others. Anti-Black framings, misogyny, anti-Muslim and anti-trans rhetoric all appear under the videos — but not as parallel categories. They appear under the conspiracy frame, organized by formulations like “the media is run by Jews and pushes X.” Monitoring systems that track hate categories separately measure each layer in isolation and miss the architecture connecting them.
Two things follow.
For Jewish institutions: a Congressional candidate with 29.6 million followers and a steady four-in-10 antisemitism saturation in his comment sections is not a fringe figure. The fact that he can be interviewed on TMZ and the replies come out at 52 percent is not a journalism problem. It is a structural condition. Strategies that depend on the host’s standing to push back will fail when the audience has already coded the host as compromised. And the threat is now coming from a direction the field has been slow to map: the Republican coalition, mass-audience right-wing creators, and the convergence of manosphere reach with anti-establishment populism.
For those tracking online antisemitism: the methodology to see this exists. The bottleneck is not detection. It is the analytical assumption that antisemitism is something that happens around events. When the speaker is the event, the existing framework cannot register what is in front of it.
The FEC filing was processed without friction. The primary ballot will list a candidate calling a sitting Jewish Congressman a “fat Jew” on national television. Both of those institutional doors opened on schedule. The architecture passing through them did not announce itself as extremism, because by the time it arrived it was wearing the credential of a federal Congressional campaign.
Matthias J. Becker, PhD, is AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism — now its successor project, Decoding Hate — Research Advisor to AddressHate, and Editor-in-Chief of Digital Hate Review.
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Iranian Rapper Releases Persian Remix of Israeli Song, Calls for Revenge Against Regime
British-Iranian rapper 021Kid in the music video for his Persian remix of the song “Harbu Darbu” (feat. Stilla & Ness). Photo: Screenshot
British-Iranian rapper 021Kid has released a Persian remix of the song “Harbu Darbu” by Israeli rap duo Ness & Stilla, and in the lyrics, he calls for the death of the Iranian regime forces responsible for the killing and oppression of their own people.
The rapper, whose real name is Tony Mohraz, sings in both Farsi and English in “Harbu Darbu,” which was originally released by Ness and Stilla in 2023 in response to the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
In the Persian remix, 021Kid calls for the destruction of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an Iranian military force and internationally designated terrorist group, as well as the Basij parliamentary force that operates underneath it. The regime uses the Basij to violently suppress protests and crush political opposition across the country.
The rapper, who was born in Tehran but now lives in the United Kingdom, also sings about Iranian leaders and senior military figures who have been killed in US and Israel strikes. He mentions by name Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force Commander Qasem Soleimani, former Iranian Air Force Commander Aziz Nasirzadeh, and Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force.
021Ki further targets the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that has been persecuted by the regime and seeks its overthrow but was a US-designated terrorist group from 1997 to 2012.
“We don’t want mullah, neither MEK. Smoke ’em on site, show no mercy,” 021Kid raps in English. He then sings in Farsi, “I’m standing with Iran till the end … We get our country back, just watch.”
The song includes some Hebrew phrases as well. “My Persian Jews, Irani Chai and that’s why Am Israeli Chai,” 021Kid raps in the song. “I pull up Tel Aviv, Ma Nishma? [How are you?].”
The music video also features clips from Ness and Stilla’s music video for the Hebrew version of “Harbu Darbu.”
021Kid explained the intention behind his new song in an Instagram post.
“After what happened in Golders Green, London a few days ago where a Jewish man was stabbed — it’s a reminder that hate doesn’t just live online, it shows up in real life,” he wrote, referring to the antisemitic stabbing attack in which two Jewish men were injured in late April.
“Since January, the people of Israel & the jewish [sic] community have shown strength, resilience, and unity and solidarity standing next to us Iranians. As Persians and sons of Cyrus the Great we see it we respect it,” 021Kid further wrote on social media. “In times like this, real allies don’t stay silent. We stand together against hate, against violence, and for something bigger than politics — humanity, strength, and loyalty … From Persians to Israelis — we stand with you, to the very end AM IRANI CHAI & AM ISRAEL CHAI.”
In the original “Harbu Darbu,” released after the Oct. 7 attack in 2023, Ness & Stilla call for revenge against Hamas and Hezbollah, and threaten celebrities who voiced support for the terrorist groups or condemned Israel. The rappers name Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and top Hamas officials Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, saying “every dog’s day will come.” All three have since been killed by Israel.
In 2024, Ness & Stilla claimed that were denied visas to enter the United States because of the song. The track also received backlash from pro-Palestinian activists who called for it to be removed from YouTube, claiming that it violated the platform’s harassment policies, but YouTube ultimately decided to let the song remain on its website.
Watch the music video for 021Kid’s “Harbu Darbu [Persian Remix]” featuring Ness & Stilla below.
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California man pleads guilty in 2023 death of pro-Israel protester
The man accused in the 2023 death of a pro-Israel protester will avoid a prison sentence after pleading guilty this week to all charges against him.
Loay Alnaji, 53, was at a pro-Palestinian protest in Ventura, California, in November 2023 when he allegedly struck a pro-Israel counterprotester named Paul Kessler with a megaphone. Kessler, who was 69, then fell, hitting his head on the pavement. He died several hours later, with the death ruled a homicide by blunt-force trauma.
Trial proceedings had been set to begin next week, with Alnaji facing up to four years in prison. But Ventura County Superior Court judge Derek Malan offered Loay Alnaji, 53, a deal on Tuesday that allowed Alnaji up to one year in jail followed by three years on probation.
Alnaji accepted the offer. His attorney, Ron Bamieh, told the Ventura County Star that Malan had determined “two old guys had a dispute and an accident happened.”
Alnaji pleaded guilty to the two counts against him — felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury — and admitted aggravating factors, namely that he used a weapon and that the victim was particularly vulnerable.
He will be sentenced June 25.
The plea deal was too lenient in the eyes of Kessler’s family — which wanted the maximum sentence, according to the Star — as well as Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko.
“Alnaji should be sentenced to prison for his violent behavior, and our office strongly objects to any lesser sentence,” Nasarenko said in a statement. “While no amount of punishment will ever fully account for the Kessler family loss, a prison commitment underscores the severity of this crime and will deter others from committing similar acts of violence.”
The Kessler family could not be reached for comment.
The guilty plea brings a tragic saga that began in the early days of the Israel-Hamas war closer to an end. Kessler and Alnaji were among 75 to 100 people who descended upon a busy intersection in Thousand Oaks — about 25 miles north of Los Angeles — for dueling protests related to the Israel-Hamas war.
What happened during the altercation remains unclear. Bamieh said Kessler put his phone in Alnaji’s face; when Alnaji swatted the phone away, the megaphone inadvertently hit Kessler’s face. (He also said Kessler had previously been diagnosed with a brain tumor, though the coroner has stated the tumor was not a factor in his death.) After Kessler’s fall, he was bleeding from the head and mouth, but was responsive at the scene and evacuated to a hospital. His condition worsened overnight and he died there early the next day.
Alnaji, who at the time was a computer science professor at Moorpark College, was placed on administrative leave by the school after his arrest and subsequent release on $50,000 bail.
Rabbi Noah Farkas, chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, welcomed the guilty plea for what he called a “heinous crime.”
“While we would have liked a harsher sentence that better reflects the pain of the Kessler family, we respect the legal process,” Farkas said in a statement. “Our hope is that today’s news helps bring closure to his family and gives our community the ability to demonstrate safely.”
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