By Haim Bresheeth-Žabner

It seems the Green activists are more in tune with the direction of travel than is the leadership of the Party.

On October 4, 2026, the Green Party of England and Wales discussed, for the second time, a motion on Zionism is Racism, and voted to pass the motion with 1022 (55.69%) against 813 (44.31%).

The motion became GPEW policy on that date. This was a political first, anywhere in the West – a mainstream party announcing that its measured reaction to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a recognition of Zionism’s extreme nature and objectives. This received support of the members at the conference despite, or because of a long and troubling campaign against the motion by certain MPs and leaders in the party, some who have been supported financially by rich donors who donate to UK MPs who seem committed to supporting Israel, from whatever party.

This dramatic change, coming such a short time after the change in the Labour government policy towards the Palestine situation through announcing a range of limited sanctions, is clearly a sign of a step change in the UK; this is especially true as the change in Labour’s position was itself at least partially forced by changes in the Green Party, with its new leader, Zack Polansky, placing the party in opposition to the policies and priorities of the former PM, Keir Starmer.

The incoming PM, Andy Burnham, knew he had to indicate a change from his predecessor, and the most obvious departure had to be from the toxic positions of Keir Starmer on Gaza, pointed out by the Green Party. The sanctions announced by the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, himself Jewish, were welcomed warmly and enthusiastically at the Labor conference in September, despite their symbolic and cosmetic nature. Britain was only one of 12 countries announcing sanctions!

The British mainstream media has been at the Green Party’s throat even before this crucial vote, ever since it became known, in early 2026, that a motion on this topic would be presented at the GPEW Spring Conference in March. The motion was put forward by a group calling themselves Greens for Palestine and led by the UK popular and courageous Palestinian activist, Lubna Speitan. At the Spring Conference, held online, the motion became the target of a group of Zionist supporters of Israel, some of them leading the Jewish Greens member group.

An unknown member of this group has reported the Zionism is Racism motion to the London Metropolitan Police Terror Squad even before the conference, describing it as an illegal/suspect activity, as well as to the mainstream media, especially those media organs which support Israel as their default. Such support continued and even intensified throughout the genocide.

The campaign against the GPEW took off even before the conference, and culminated in a series of coordinated articles claiming the party had antisemitic policy, and using antisemitic caricatures in the various press organs, all seemingly drawn by the same hand, presenting the Jewish leader of the party in the well-known style of Nazi antisemitic cartoons of the 1930s in Nazi Germany, especially in Der Stürmer during the 1930s All the articles appeared together on May 5, synchronised with a local elections in the UK, for achieving the most damage to the Green Party.

For comparison, I include some of this British ‘artwork’, side by side with the original inspiration for these vile creations. The Times has led with a classic antisemitic image, and other papers followed, all MSM right-wing publications that used antisemitic visual memes to defend Zionist arguments against Zack Polansky. Most political parties also accused Polansky after his comments on a Golders Green knife attack by a freed mental patient, who was obviously not a political terrorist and actually attacked his Muslim friend on the same day.

The times have gone quite far with its visuals – describing Polansky not just as a ghetto Jew as seen by Nazi propaganda, but also as a violent hoodlum attacking the police:

The Stürmer has used the same facial features in its myriad antisemitic images during the Nazi period. Purely for comparison, I attach her one of such depiction of ‘typically Jewish’ faces in the racist imagination of the period:

I would include here just another image, though there were four used by the four newspapers of the Tory right. This is an image from the Daily Telegraph, closely matching that in the Times, as both were fashioned on the historical model of Der Stürmer. The images in the Sun, for example, were lurid beyond belief, but I feel the point was made by the images included here, and there is no need to include all the deprecating and scandalous fascist creativity of the British press at its lowest ebb. The image in the Telegraph was:

Simply stated, the British press, some of which was presenting antisemitic arguments even in real time during the 1930s, has found it acceptable to attack a Jewish party leader, born and bred in the UK, by using antisemitic visual memes developed by Nazi publications which have been aiding and abetting the genocide of six million Jews by the Nazis, all in the service of a Zionist ideology which they share, of a genocidal polity calling itself a “Jewish state”!

You could not make this up.

If this were an isolated case, it would still be beyond the pale, but it is the typical reaction of right-wing media which supports Israel and Zionism. These are all birds of a feather, in Pavlovian backing of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. How is this justified in a society which prides itself of being the mother of democracy? It seems that such media organs are also giving vent to an incipient current of racism lying dormant and invisible in the elites which are nominally anti-fascist. It seems that in the defense of Israel, normative criteria can be abandoned, replaced by Nazi symbolism.

Interestingly, the election of Zack Polansky to the post of GPEW leader, announced in early September 2025, has proven incredibly popular in the British political circles on the left; almost immediately it led to practically quadrupling membership of the Green Party of England and Wales, from just over 60,000 members to almost 240,000. This was the case for two main reasons.

The first one was to do with the left-wing Your Party, nominally led by Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the Labour Party who was hounded by the Israel Lobby in the UK and its allied media organs, to the point he lost the 2019 election to Boris Johnson and resigned as party leader.

Corbyn, a staunch left-winger, anti-racist and anti-war MP, has been besmirched as an antisemite by a series of political media attacks and by political allies of Zionism in the UK, making his leadership untenable.

Almost immediately, such tactics of harassing any political figure in Britain who had the Chutzpah to criticize Israel were proven to have been organized by the Israel Lobby and directed by Israeli operatives. Al Jazeera English produced a four-part documentary series, The Lobby, using undercover journalism, proving the linkages.

The documentary also recorded the planned removal of a British politician, Alan Duncan, which indeed was successful, after he deigned to criticize Israel. This was after Corbyn greatly increased membership of the Labour Party to around 600,000 – the largest membership of any party in Britain, and indeed, in Europe. His popularity, together with his avowed support of Palestine, made the Labour Party a serious contender to the ruling Conservative Party, as they dealt with Brexit and tried to implement the EU referendum results after 2016.

Getting rid of Corbyn as Labour Leader became the main priority of the Israel Lobby and the conservative allies of Israel. The Conservative Party had clear interest in this process: “in the May 2015 UK general election, 64% of Jews voted for the Conservatives, compared with just 15% for the Labour Party, led at the time by Ed Miliband, a Jew and the son of a Marxist academic.” So this was not just an Israeli interest but very crucial to the Tory Party, which benefitted historically from this phenomenon, giving it all the motive it needed to collaborate with such moves.

By 2024, the picture has drastically changed, after 14 years of ramshackle Conservative rule of Britain, and the low points represented by Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, to name only the main candidates for the ‘worst in British history’ crown.

“Support for Labour and the Conservatives among British Jews had fallen to 58% by July 2025 from nearly 84% in 2020, according to a report from the Institute of Jewish Policy Research (JPR), which said it was “the lowest level we’ve ever recorded by some distance”.

In the same election, 18% of British Jews supported the Green Party by June 2025, for the first time. It is a safe bet that those were mainly anti-Zionist Jews, as by then both the party and its soon-to-be elected leader were vocally critical of Israel, with its genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid policies and practices. By that time, most of the 800,000 supporters of Your Party were moving in the same direction, due to the many rifts which emerged in the party due to open disagreement on policies towards

Palestine between Zarah Sultana, who declared herself anti-Zionist, and Jeremy Corbyn, who declined to do so. The resulting exodus was clearly heading towards the Green Party and is responsible for the quadrupling of its size. So there are good reasons for Zack Polansky to listen carefully to the majority of his party membership, beyond the staple party democracy lip-service.

Polansky missed the 4^th October party session on which the motion Zionism is racism was debated and voted upon. His explanation was simple – he was the party’s candidate in a by-election later that week, and door-knocking was crucial for winning the seat, which in the event, he did not gain, having lost to Labour.

The mainstream media blamed his stance as ‘cowardice ’ and ‘lack of leadership’, a charge also made by former Green MP and party leader Caroline Lucas, who served as the only Green MP  for over a decade. Coming from Lucas, this is rather rich – her years of party leadership were typified by static membership, no new ideas, and the party being mainly limited to the South Downs around Brighton and Hove, with little impact elsewhere. On the question of Israeli oppression in Palestine, she has proved a typical ‘moderate’, not to mention towing the elite line to a worrying degree. Much of her donor income as an MP of £234,454.50 came from large donors supporting Israel – Lisbet and Sigrid Rausing (Sigrid is the Chair of the New Israel Fund).

Both sisters have made large donations in support of Israel to Labor Party MPs as well. Another donor to Lucas was Lord Oakshott, who also funds Labour MPs who are members of Labour Friends of Israel. This may be the reason, or one of the reasons, why Lucas supported cases such as that of Bristol University v. Prof. David Miller for claimed antisemitism, a case lost three times by the University, ending up making legal history. Green grandees like Lucas did their best to oppose the Zionism is Racism motion at both conferences, claiming that passing the motion at the October conference signals that “Jews aren’t welcome in the Green Party” – something certainly NOT signaled by the motion in any way.

So, while the supporters of the motion are definitely right in considering its passage as a crucial act towards isolation and sanctioning of Israel in the European and global arena, by the same logic, the supporters of Israel consider this a bridge worth defending. History shows that when the Lobby concentrates its forces, nothing could stand in their way, as the deep state and the media, political and academic elites are all under tight control and supportive of Israel, whatever the public itself might prefer.

But there is always the first time; in an internal poll, the GPEW members, and especially the Jewish Greens members, supported the Zionism is Racism motion by a much higher percentage than in the conference hall itself, by 81%.

In that sense, the fact that the GPEW MPs were and remain against the motion is immaterial to an extent, as the party itself, despite some evidence to the contrary, is the most democratic political grouping in the UK  – otherwise, the passage of the motion would be an impossibility with the high-end opposition in the upper echelons of the party. It seems that most of the five MPs are against this motion, as is at least one of the Deputy leaders and some others, such as the party CEO.

So, what is the way forward for the Green Party, now that the Motion has become policy?

Zack Polansky opposed part of the motion – the support of a single democratic state in the whole of Palestine – as he is a supporter of the Two-State solution, or more accurately, delusion. Israel is totally against this across the (narrow) political spectrum and has made such an option totally impossible by building more than 600 settlements and “outposts” in the West Bank, for the purpose of making a Palestinian state impractical. Polansky and his five MP plan to reverse the Motion in 2028 – the constitution of the GPEW makes this the earliest point when this motion may be challenged.

The Greens across the EU, led by the German and Austrian parties, have censured the Motion severely as most of them are part of the Israel lobby in their countries.

Lubna Speitan and her colleagues in the large group which has supported the motion, co-proposed by over 750 members, when normally motions are proposed by less than ten members, are not scared of the plans to annul the policy against Zionism: “We know, from a number of internal surveys, that amongst the members at large, the backing for the motion is even stronger than in the conference hall,” says Speitan.

“We plan to run a series of meetings, webinars and educational publications, as well as develop the policy further, towards the necessary steps – political and professional sanctions against Israel, leading to its removal from the UN, as was the case with South Africa in the 20^th century. We will produce a model for every democratic state in Europe and elsewhere – we need them all to vote for Israel’s expulsion and an end to Zionism.”

Will this stark development lead to a policy change across Europe? Some evidence points that way – the European Commission has suggested suspending Israel’s membership of the Horizon Research program, for example, a move which will cost Israel billions as well as the loss of research collaboration, crucial for its universities. And this is only one of the planned moves, with many others to follow across the EU. It seems the Green activists are more in tune with the direction of travel than is the leadership of the Party.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.