Uncategorized
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.
Uncategorized
After Beirut Strike, Netanyahu Says ‘No Immunity’ for Terrorists
Rescuers work at the site of an Israeli strike that took place yesterday, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, May 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Azakir
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday there was no “immunity” for Israel’s enemies, a day after the Israeli military targeted a Hezbollah commander in its first strike on Beirut‘s southern suburbs since a ceasefire declared last month.
Israel said the attack killed the commander of the Iran-backed terrorist group’s elite Radwan force.
Hezbollah, which controls Beirut‘s southern suburbs, has yet to issue any statement on the strike or the commander’s status.
“He likely read in the press that he had immunity in Beirut. Well, he read it and it is no longer the case,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
Hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah reignited on March 2 when the Islamist group opened fire at Israel after Tehran came under US-Israeli attack.
Wednesday’s strike raises pressure on the Lebanon ceasefire that emerged in parallel to a truce in the wider Middle East war, with a halt to Israeli strikes in Lebanon being a key Iranian demand in Tehran’s negotiations with Washington.
Announced on April 16 by US President Donald Trump, the Lebanon ceasefire has led to a reduction in hostilities: the Beirut area was not struck by Israel for weeks before Wednesday’s attack.
But the sides have continued to trade blows in the south, where Israel has carved out a self-declared security zone.
Netanyahu said the Hezbollah commander, identified as Ahmed Ali Balout by the Israeli military, “thought he could continue to direct attacks against our forces and our communities from his secret terrorist headquarters in Beirut.”
“I say to our enemies in the clearest possible way: No terrorist has immunity,” he said.
LEBANESE PM: TOO EARLY FOR ‘HIGH-LEVEL’ MEETING
More than 2,700 people have been killed in the war in Lebanon since March 2, Lebanon’s Health Ministry says. Some 1.2 million people have been driven from their homes in Lebanon, many of them fleeing from southern Lebanon. According to Israeli officials, the majority of those killed have been Hezbollah terrorists.
Israel has announced 17 soldiers have been killed in southern Lebanon, along with two civilians in northern Israel.
At least 11 people were killed in Israeli strikes in three different areas of south Lebanon on Wednesday, according to a tally of Lebanese health ministry announcements.
Hezbollah said it carried out 17 operations against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, while the Israeli military said it had struck more than 15 militant infrastructure sites in the south the same day.
The Israeli military says Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel since March 2.
Hezbollah says it has the right to resist Israeli forces occupying the south.
Israel’s control zone extends as deep as 10 km (6 miles) into southern Lebanon. Israel says it aims to protect northern Israel from Hezbollah terrorists embedded in civilian areas.
The Lebanon ceasefire was announced for an initial 10 days and then extended for an additional three weeks during a meeting between the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to Washington, hosted by Trump at the Oval Office.
Hezbollah strongly objects to the Lebanese government’s contacts with Israel, which reflect deep differences between the group and its critics in Lebanon.
Trump said last month he looked forward to hosting Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun in the near future, and that he saw “a great chance” the countries would reach a peace deal this year.
But on Wednesday, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said that it was premature to talk of any high-level meeting between Lebanon and Israel, and said that shoring up a ceasefire would be the basis for any new negotiations between Lebanese and Israeli government envoys in Washington.
Uncategorized
A View From My Campus: Sacrificing Science and Innovation for Political Symbolism
Illustrative: A BDS demonstration outside the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
In 2021, then-president of Rutgers, Jonathan Holloway, traveled to Tel Aviv to sign a partnership with Tel Aviv University (TAU) for future research at a cutting-edge facility being constructed in New Brunswick, The HELIX, which stands for The Health and Life Science Exchange.
This project includes collaborations with Robert Wood Johnson Hospital, Nokia Bell Labs, the NJ Economic Development Authority (NJEDA), Devco, and the American Technological University, all aimed at advancing innovation across industries.
The $665 million project offers “premier workspaces & laboratories for both startups and established companies operating across the gamut of healthcare, biotech, pharma, and, most broadly, the life sciences.” According to the NJEDA’s calculations, the cross-cultural development will bring an economic benefit of $340.4 million to the state.
But amongst Rutgers’ anti-Israel student groups, and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activists, there have been calls to terminate the partnership between Rutgers and Tel Aviv University, one of the leading research universities in the Middle East. This opposition came long before Oct. 7, 2023, and the war that followed.
According to these groups at Rutgers, the partnership with “Israeli universities play[s] a key role in supporting Israel’s system of apartheid rule,” and they call for “nothing less than complete divestment from these egregious investments, which drown our endowment fund and university facilities in blood.”
Note that they don’t actually care if this program or TAU connects in any way to the Israeli military or government; treating any Israeli, regardless of affiliation, like a human is apparently beyond the pale.
Notably, TAU was the first university in Israel to establish a Commission for Equity, Diversity, and Community, and has increased the representation of Arab students on campus to close to their proportion in the general population, a feat that is only possible in a place like Israel. It’s also important to note that, like many other universities in Israel, TAU leadership has gone out of its way to advocate for Palestinians.
Yet, somehow in the distorted truth of the BDS movement, TAU is complicit in “genocide.” Morally focused political movements on campus have historically claimed to fight for justice and against discrimination, exemplifying the higher education ideals of open-mindedness and critical thinking. And yet, these groups want to terminate partnerships for research, for innovation, for healthcare-based initiatives, for job and economic growth, and for expanding the academic frontier.
The Endowment Justice Collective, a Rutgers anti-Israel group, sent a letter to the administration claiming, “[a]ny collaboration which serves to bolster TAU’s reputation, provide it with a public platform, or materially support its operations shores up the legitimacy of an institution which aids and abets Israel’s oppression and genocide of Palestinians.”
But what will ending this huge project achieve, apart from a symbolic show of solidarity to a global movement whose priorities seem to obsessively focus on attacking Jews at Palestinians’ expense?
By taking intellectual pursuits such as the HELIX and dismissing them as politically motivated human endeavors, they become the very thing they seek to speak out against. TAU has the Neubauer Fellowship, an initiative specifically for Palestinian PhD students and faculty in STEM fields to provide high-level lab access and funding to elevate Palestinian representation in advanced research. When calls to cut ties like these set a precedent, they put such fellowships at risk as well. Rather than advancing equity, these efforts can ultimately backfire, restricting opportunities for Palestinian researchers and weakening the academic partnerships that make such programs possible.
Academic research and partnerships remain among higher education’s greatest strengths. They drive medical breakthroughs, technological innovation, and cross-cultural understanding. When groups like SJP demand the severance of ties with institutions like Tel Aviv University, they don’t just protest a government, but wall off the very pathways of discovery that benefit all of humanity. On our part, we must reject the close-mindedness of movements that prioritize ideological purity over global progress.
The author is a CAMERA Fellow at Rutgers University. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.
Uncategorized
Unreported: Palestinian Youth Leadership Center Named After Munich Olympics Massacre Planner
An image of one of the Palestinian terrorists who took part in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
A Palestinian center for “training and nurturing young leaders, children, and trainees” sounds amazing, right?
It’s an initiative that Western donors would undoubtedly love to support, and something everyone would consider a step in the right direction to Palestinian Authority (PA) reform.
But what is the name of the center?
“The Martyr Salah Khalaf Center for Training Young Leaders”
Who was Salah Khalaf, you ask?
Maybe he was a famous Palestinian leader who could inspire the youth arriving at the center to participate in “programs and activities,” which are held “in accordance with the vision and goals of the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports”?
In fact, Salah Khalaf headed the terror organization Black September, a secret branch of Fatah. Attacks he planned include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics (Sept. 5, 1972) and the murder of two American diplomats in Sudan (March 1, 1973).
A PA role model par excellence!
Furthermore, the center is not only named after terrorist Salah Khalaf — but is hosting children specifically on Prisoner’s Day to indoctrinate them to honor terrorist prisoners. The pictures below show young children visiting the center:
This is a classic example of how the PA subtly transmits its ideologies and values to young Palestinians. Naming education centers, streets, and schools after terrorist murderers ensures that everyone is reminded of the name and the “role model” daily. This cements the terrorist’s status as a PA “celebrity.”
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has reported on the center in the past, documenting that its walls are adorned with images of terrorist Salah Khalat, former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and current Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
Supervising the Salah Khalaf center is the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports, which is headed by none other than top PA official Jibril Rajoub, who is also Fatah’s Central Committee Secretary.
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that Rajoub is an avid terror supporter. He recently praised a murderer of 12 people as “the most sacred thing”:
Official PA TV reporter: “The Fatah Movement, the Ramallah and El-Bireh District, the [PA-funded] Prisoners’ Club, the [PLO] Commission of Prisoners’ [Affairs]… set up a mourning tent for Martyr and released prisoner deported to Egypt Riyad Al-Amour [i.e., terrorist, responsible for murder of 12], who died as a Martyr…”
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “The most sacred thing in the eyes of the Palestinians is those who sacrificed their lives and their freedom – our Martyrs.”
[Official PA TV News, April 9, 2026]
In keeping with this view, Rajoub has announced that terror against Israel — which he and other PA leaders refer to as “resistance in all its forms” — is “still on the agenda” for Fatah:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “National unity must be based on the adoption of UN resolutions by all of us, which grant us a state and also resistance in all its forms [i.e., including terror].
I tell you as a Fatah member, resistance in all its forms is still on the agenda of this [Fatah] Movement … Let no one think that we are surrendering. I tell you that the first among us who believes this is [PA President] Mahmoud Abbas … We all know the nature and essence of Fatah … Either popular resistance without blood if there will be a state, or else resistance in all its forms.”
Posted text: “During the opening of the first national youth conference.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page,
Jan. 19, 2026]
Rajoub has also announced his support for terrorists and the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” program that rewards them financially, vowing the PA “won’t give up on” them “or their rights or their status”:
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “I want to see hundreds of young people holding processions to end the [Hamas-Fatah] rift and holding processions for reforms that stem from our reality and our will and align with our aspirations and interests. Not what [US President] Trump wants or John Doe or whoever, I don’t know what their problem is with the prisoners.
This is not a reform, this is a burial, elimination, and denial of our history and heritage. We won’t give up on the Martyrs or the prisoners or their rights or their status, not in our awareness nor in our project, whether the political, militant, or organizational.”
[Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub, Facebook page, Jan. 19, 2026]
Western donors who are supporting the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports would do well to examine the kind of activities the Council is involved in. Presumably they would hardly appreciate the glorification of one of the planners of the Munich Olympics massacre.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.