An event hosted by the Jewish community in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency last night was not your usual by-election hustings. There might have been five candidates present at the north London synagogue, but the audience was only there to hear one of them: Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, who is standing for the seat at the 8 October by-election.

The evening started orderly and polite, though the tension was immediately palpable. Opening remarks by the candidates present from Labour, Conservative, Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens focussed on local issues. But the conversation quickly turned to the inevitable: questions on the safety of Jews amid a breakdown in community cohesion, rising anti-Semitism and the threat of terrorism, as well as on Zionism, the two-state solution and Israel’s right to exist.

It didn’t take long for Polanski to invoke his Jewish heritage, perhaps on the mistaken belief that dropping the J-word might have given him a get-out-of-jail-free card. Instead, each time it triggered bursts of mockery and laughter from an audience who – aside from a handful of Green Party supporters – viewed him in contempt. He was repeatedly condemned for describing himself as an ‘anti-Zionist’ and labelling the war in Gaza as a ‘genocide’.

But Polanski stuck to his guns. He said that ‘calling it [a genocide] is not anti-Semitic’. He said the Jewish community needs to ‘recognise that when we call that anti-Semitic, we are making ourselves, as Jewish people, less safe’. For Polanski, it seems that the problem isn’t the car-ramming, knife-wielding terrorists, the racists, the extremists who burn ambulances, vandalise synagogues and intimidate Jews. No, the real risk comes from Jews themselves, apparently, and their objection to the anti-Semitic blood libels being told about the Jewish state.

When all other candidates were clear about their support for a two-state solution, Polanski repeatedly refused to express his view. When all others confirmed that they were Zionists, Polanski reiterated his anti-Zionism. He justified this by giving his own made-up, convoluted definition of Zionism that most would consider a complete distortion of the term. This once again sent the audience into uproar.

Polanski seemed most at ease in the brief time he talked about gas and oil, or nationalising Thames Water, and most agitated when asked by a constituent whether he would promise to enlarge her breasts if she voted for him – a reference to a Sun article in which he hypnotised a journalist to help her breasts grow. His claim of being a ‘mensch’ – a Jewish term for a person of integrity and kindness – was received with loud mockery. A woman behind me muttered ‘let the Kapo speak’ – Kapo being an historical slur used to describe collaborators and traitors in Nazi concentration camps. It was hardly surprising when Polanski made a dash for the exit and into a side room the second the evening was over, escaping a hostile, furious audience and the media.

The event laid bare how Polanski is caught between a rock and a hard place. He is facing hostility from the vast majority of British Jews for rejecting the Jewish right to self-determination and advancing hardline Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions policies against Israel. He has repeated the ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ smears that have fuelled left-wing anti-Semitism and motivated violence and terrorism against Jews. He leads a political party whose members and candidates want to de-proscribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation, who are opposed to banning Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and who have notoriously discussed ‘killing Zionists’.

On the other hand, Polanski is under fire from within his own party for being insufficiently anti-Zionist. Green members have accused him of ‘struggling’ to overcome his ‘Zionist indoctrination’. His hesitancy to support the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion at the party’s upcoming conference – a motion that demands the elimination of the Jewish State – has disgruntled many in his party.

He has even been branded a ‘genocide denier’ by elements within the Greens. This explains why, despite the furious backlash every time he dropped the phrase ‘anti-Zionist’ at the hustings, he kept doing it anyway. He knew he could safely provoke the audience because he was in a room governed by democratic decency, where people use their voice rather than their fists – a stark contrast to the climate of real, physical intimidation faced by Jews in spaces occupied by the kinds of activists Polanski wants to curry favour with. He wasn’t trying to win over the Jewish community in the room in front of him – he was signalling to the hardliners in his own party.

Clearly, Zack Polanski’s career as a hypnotist is behind him. Certainly no one at the hustings was buying into his illusions.

Limor Simhony Philpott is a writer, policy adviser and researcher.