There is little doubting the impact Zack Polanski has had on the Green Party of England and Wales. The Greens were already picking up electoral support before he became leader last autumn, gaining four seats on nearly seven per cent of the vote at the 2024 General Election. But since Polanski took the helm, the Greens’ support has rocketed. They now regularly poll in the high teens, with some polls even putting them second, ahead of Labour and the Tories, but behind Reform UK, on around 20 per cent. This is a huge uptick for a party that has long commanded little real support.

The polling numbers are already translating into tangible electoral gains. In February this year, the Greens won the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton from Labour, wiping out its 13,000-strong majority in one fell swoop. In next week’s council elections, the Greens are predicted to win most boroughs in London.

Polanski has overseen a prodigious growth in Green Party membership, too – it now stands at over 200,000, nearly triple what it was when he became leader in September.

Polanski and his supporters provide a simple reason for the Green surge. It is because the Greens represent ‘hope’, as opposed to the ‘fear’ supposedly peddled by Reform, or the ‘austerity’ of Labour and the Conservatives. They claim to be ‘eco-populist’, that is, on the side of the majority against the avaricious ‘one per cent’. They pledge to tackle the cost-of-living crisis through wealth taxes. They promise war on fossil-fuel companies and warn of catastrophic climate change. And they talk of addressing the extortionate cost of housing through rent controls.

No doubt some of this quasi-socialist posturing does appeal to the bourgeois leftists who once flocked to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, but now lean Green. Indeed, there are quite a few young-ish veterans of that achingly middle-class movement now within the Green Party’s membership ranks – from John McDonnell’s former economic adviser, James Meadway to self-identifying ‘Marxist’ Grace Blakeley and Corbyn-era Labour staffer Matt Zarb-Cousin.

But there is another far darker reason for the Green surge. It’s that under Polanski the Greens have become a party united not in the fight against global warming, but by an obsessive hatred of the state of Israel. It is this demented focus on Israel, on its supposed ‘genocide’ in Gaza, its supposed ‘fascism’ and ‘apartheid’, that has fuelled the Greens’ rise in the polls. And it has led to one of the most striking metamorphoses in British party-political history – a party once favoured by bucolic conservatives and de-population misanthropes has been turned into a vehicle for virulent hatred of the world’s only Jewish nation.

The results of this metamorphosis are now becoming all too apparent. In this regard, a series of articles this month by journalist Andrew Gilligan in the Spectator have made for extraordinary reading. They reveal a party now awash with anti-Semitism.

There’s Feda Shahin, a Green candidate for Bournemouth council. She posted online that ‘Zionists, during the Bolshevik [period], killed 20million Christians’. ‘The committee that decided to kill these 20million Christians had 500 people, 480 of these people were Zionists.’ Shahin also said that the island owned by Jeffrey Epstein was a ‘symbol of the headquarters of the Zionists who are trying to control the world’.

To most of us, these views will seem extreme – even insane. But not in the Greens. ‘It takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit anti-Semitic’, said Philip Brooks, one of the party’s candidates in Newcastle. Saiqa Ali, a candidate for Lambeth, posted an AI-generated image online of a blue and white serpent – the colours of Israel – coiled around the Earth. She also claimed that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center were an Israeli ‘false flag’ operation, criticised the British government as being ‘overrepresented with Zionists Jews’, and posted a picture of a Hamas militant under the slogan ‘resistance is freedom’

Sabine Mairey, also a Lambeth Council candidate, described the recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks in the UK as ‘revenge’ for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. She also suggested Israel was far worse than Nazi Germany, claiming that at least the Nazis ‘had to hide what they were doing’.

Both Ali and Mairey were arrested by the police this week on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.

It seems there are many more in the Green Party, standing for election, who harbour similar sentiments. ‘Israel has given us the biggest paedophile sex ring with Epstein’, claimed Mark Adderley, a candidate in Croydon. Ifhat Shaheen, a candidate for Hackney, accused Israel of ‘harvesting organs’ of Palestinians, in order to ‘alter [the] DNA of Zionists to claim land’. She described Hamas’s mass murder of civilians on 7 October 2023 as Palestinians ‘inevitably try[ing] to defend themselves’. She lambasted Keir Starmer for condemning ‘the Palestinians’ fightback against their Zionist oppressors’, while not also condemning Israel.

While the Green Party has suspended some candidates after their comments were publicised, it has continued to endorse others. Polanski campaigned alongside Saiqa Ali in Lambeth, well after her comments had come to light.

The Greens have been zeroing in on Israel and Gaza as the political issue of our time for a little while now, especially since 7 October. And in doing so, they have appealed to Islamic sectarians, driven by a loathing of Israel and Jews. Polanski’s principal achievement has been to accelerate the growth of the Greens as an Islamo-leftist alliance. But it is now becoming clear that the tens of thousands of new passengers he and others have welcomed aboard are increasingly determining the direction of the Green Party ship.

Arguably, the most significant of these passengers has been the Greens’ deputy leader, Mothin Ali, a one-time Labour Party member who joined the Greens in 2020 – that is, after the then new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, replaced the very anti-Israel Jeremy Corbyn. At first glance, Ali seems harmless – a small, cheerful man who speaks in a broad Yorkshire accent and posts pictures of his garden on Instagram. But there is more to Ali than meets the eye.

He provided a glimpse of this on the night of his election to the Leeds City Council in 2024. His first words weren’t the usual platitudes one would expect from a newly elected councillor – a nod to the party for its support, gratitude to the people who elected him. Instead he shouted, ‘We will raise the voice of Gaza! We will raise the voice of Palestine!’ A group of Muslim men, dressed in traditional Islamic garb, unfurled the Palestinian flag behind him. ‘Allahu Akbar’, he bellowed, punching the air with his clenched fist.

Ali can be a vicious individual. He praised Hamas’s 7 October attack, describing the murder, kidnapping and torture of hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish people as an overdue ‘fight back’. He even referred to it as the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, Hamas’s codename for the pogrom, which resulted in the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. In 2024, he led a terrifying campaign of abuse and intimidation against Leeds University’s Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, because he was a reservist in the Israel Defence Forces (a legal requirement for any Israeli citizen). Ali issued a vituperative call to arms on social media, referring to Deutsch as an ‘animal’ who students needed to be ‘protected’ from. Deutsch eventually fled Leeds, along with his family, on the advice of police.

Ali also seems to have little problem with the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of the most brutal, anti-Semitic regimes on Earth. This became clear in March, after US-Israeli airstrikes took out the Iranian tyrant Ayatollah Khamenei. While most people were understandably wary of another US-led Middle Eastern intervention, few would mourn the death of Khamenei – a depraved and sadistic theocrat responsible for the violent repression of Iranians and instability throughout the Middle East.

Yet Ali took a different view. On the first weekend after Khamenei’s death, the Greens’ deputy leader sallied to London to participate in a public display of mourning for the assassinated Islamist. There, a crowd repeated the favourite battle cry of the Islamic regime, ‘Death to America’, held up placards of the slain ayatollah, and desecrated the lion and Sun banner, the traditional flag of Iran and a symbol of the Iranian resistance to the mullahs.

Ali came under heavy public criticism for his attendance at what was, effectively, a rally to celebrate the life of the world’s foremost Islamist – the principal supporter of a global terror network that includes Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Under Khamenei’s reign, Iran has also orchestrated numerous anti-Semitic attacks in the West – most recently, the synagogue burnings in Australia. It is also suspected of being behind the arson of four Jewish ambulances in north London in March. Yet rather than try to explain his stance, Ali smeared the critics. He said it was ‘racist’ to draw attention to his presence at the rally – a position supported by Polanski, who described critics of his deputy as ‘Islamophobic’.

Ali is just as unrepentant when it comes to the anti-Semitism now coursing through his party’s veins. As The Times reported this week, the deputy leader told attendees at a private meeting of Green members that they needed to take legal action against their own party over the dismissal of local-election candidates accused of anti-Semitism. ‘What we need to do is we need to get some serious legal advice’, he said. ‘We need to make sure that we are putting the party on notice straight away.’ This is not the approach of someone wanting to root out the anti-Semitism in his party.

Indeed, the Greens seem to have travelled so far down the road of Islamo-leftism, cultivating support among bourgeois leftists and hardline Muslims alike, that it is difficult to see how they could correct their course. At the Gorton and Denton by-election, in February, the party showed its unashamed willingness to play to the Islamic-sectarian crowd. Hannah Spencer, the successful Green candidate, relied heavily on a campaign that appeared to focus almost exclusively on the concerns of the Manchester constituency’s large Muslim voting bloc. A Green propaganda video claimed that Reform ‘fuels Islamophobia’, and is seeking to ‘deport families’ and ‘tax people born abroad even more’. The video showed Muslim members of the community going about their daily tasks, interspersed with footage of a flattened Gaza Strip. It also showed pictures of UK prime minister Keir Starmer and former foreign secretary David Lammy with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi – the leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and a figure accused of discriminating against India’s Muslim minority. Furthermore, the entire video was in Urdu – the native language of Pakistan. A leaflet distributed by the Greens – also in Urdu – told voters that ‘Labour must be punished for Gaza’, alongside a picture of Spencer standing outside a local mosque in a keffiyeh.

Spencer’s openly sectarian campaign was aided by a truly bizarre intervention. Writing for the Muslim website, Islam21c, days before the election, Islamic cleric Haitham al-Haddad urged Manchester’s Muslims to support the Greens, and to do so in spite of the party’s ‘progressive’ policies on gay rights and transgenderism. ‘These issues can be overlooked in pursuit of more urgent matters, for instance, protecting our brothers and sisters facing genocide in Gaza’, Haddad wrote. He beseeched Muslim voters to make a ‘powerful impact’, writing that a victory for the Greens ‘could force Labour to take more positive steps that match with the interests and values of people of conscience nationwide, including British Muslims’.

An indication of Haddad’s views can be gleaned from his position as chair of the ‘Fatwa Committee’ at the Islamic Council of Europe, a position he holds alongside his day job as a ‘jurist’ at the Islamic Sharia Council. An investigation by The Times in 2018 revealed that he had provided advice on how to perform female genital mutilation and had advocated the death penalty for apostasty. He has claimed that Western women who had committed adultery had ‘begged’ him to be sent to an Islamic country, in order that they could be stoned to death for their crime. His views on gay people (‘God hates them’) and teenage brides (the ‘younger the better’), leave little room for nuance or interpretation.

Naturally, the Greens were thrilled to have Haddad on board. According to Guido Fawkes, local party officials enthusiastically shared his article among Gorton and Denton’s Muslim faithful. It was further proof of how intimate the Greens had become with some of the most hardline sections of British Islam. And it demonstrated that a mutual hatred of Israel can overcome all manner of very real disagreements.

Spencer won the by-election at a canter, proving that, whatever its contradictions, the alliance between ‘progressives’ and Islamists can be a formidable one. Unsurprisingly, the Greens have made Gaza one of their principal concerns in next week’s council elections – particularly in London boroughs with a significant Muslim population. The Hackney Greens, for example, have promised to ‘cut ties’ with the northern Israeli city of Haifa, where they falsely claim that ‘Palestinian people live under occupation and apartheid’. If recent polls are anything to go by, the demonisation of Israel looks like being a successful election strategy. The Greens are expecting an array of victories across the capital as emphatic as their triumph in Gorton and Denton a few months ago.

The rapid sectarian shift of the Greens has not gone unnoticed by some of its traditional members. Prime among these is Shahrar Ali, a deputy leader of the party from 2014 to 2016. This week, Ali wrote on spiked that the Green Party had become a ‘monster’ under Polanski, who had ‘facilitated hardline Islamic entryism’ and welcomed anti-Semitic candidates.

These warnings have so far fallen on deaf ears. And none in the Greens, it seems, is as unhearing as Polanski himself. A man of Jewish heritage, Polanski is no frothing anti-Semite. But he is also seemingly incapable or unwilling to address the Islamic sectarianism and anti-Semitic poison within his own party.

On the contrary, he has seemed intent on downplaying the problem, even as increasingly violent anti-Semitism has surged since 7 October. Just last week, Polanski was asked about the spate of arson attacks on synagogues and the torching of the four Hatzola ambulances. He responded by saying ‘there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety, but neither are acceptable’.

This comment was deeply insulting to increasingly besieged British Jews when it was made a week ago. After this Wednesday’s horrendous anti-Semitic knife attack in Golders Green, it sounds malevolent.

Polanski just doesn’t seem to be willing to face up to the hate festering within his party, let alone confront the role the Green Islamo-lefitist alliance has played in making Britain an unsafe place for Jews. Like Ali, Polanski has claimed accusations of anti-Semitism are being ‘weaponised’ against his party. And his cheerleaders dismiss it all as an attempt at demonising the Greens’ ‘criticism of Israel’.

As well they might. The truth is, the Greens have been only too happy to ride this wave of Jew hate, masquerading as ‘criticism of Israel’. It has enabled them to draw support from both the decadent middle-class left and Islamic sectarians, powering their electoral charge. To start calling out the hateful forces now tearing at the social fabric, and making Jews’ lives a living hell, would likely cost the Greens’ their ‘anti-Zionist’ support.

Polanski’s Green Party tries to present itself as virtuous. As the party of hope. But beneath the eco-populist branding, it’s clear there now lurks a party of hate and reaction. A party that has done so much since 7 October 2023 to build a political movement based on a loathing of the world’s only Jewish nation.

If this is ‘eco-populism’, then it is the populism of fools.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.