Never feed the crocodile. This is a lesson Zack Polanski is learning the hard way as the Islamists, Jew haters and deranged ‘anti-imperialists’ he has spent much of his leadership appeasing could be about to swallow him.

The Green Party leader’s humiliating defeat in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, coming after a Green conference in which a hardcore of activists managed to pass a flagrantly anti-Semitic motion, reveals a party that is captured by its most sinister elements and thus toxic in much of the country.

Taking Keir Starmer’s old seat was never going to be easy. Holborn and St Pancras has been Labour ever since the constituency was created. But a slashed majority at the General Election, and a Green wave in London at the local elections, put it firmly in play.

Polanski has blamed Andy Burnham’s ‘honeymoon’ for his defeat, but the Greens might as well have paid for his hotel suite. Burnham’s efforts to win back young, progressive voters has been aided no end by the squall of disarray and the stench of extremism that now emanates from Polanski’s Island of Misfit Toys.

Polanski’s personal approval ratings began to plunge in May, after he responded to that stabbing spree in Golders Green by chiding the police for roughing up the suspect. Meanwhile, the days when the Greens were polling at 20 per cent look like a mercifully brief fever dream, with the party’s support now slashed in half.

Depressingly, credible accusations of anti-Semitism are no longer a barrier to electoral success in many of England’s ‘diverse’ cities. Even so, the Greens have tested this to its absolute limit. Stories of Green Party candidates and activists calling Jews ‘cockroaches’ and ‘abominations’ have clearly, mercifully, cut through.

As has the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, which sailed on to the Green policy books at the party’s Brighton conference. You didn’t need a degree in Middle Eastern history to realise that this motion, casting Jews as the only people on Earth undeserving of national self-determination, was, at the very least, sus.

The delegates then left us in no doubt when they rejected an amendment that would have protected Jewish members from ostracism if they attended a ‘Zionist’ synagogue. We’ve since learned the woman behind the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion was once a ‘close friend’ of an al-Qaeda terrorist, who she vouched for in US court documents.

It all makes Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party look like a masterclass in vetting by comparison. The Greens’ explosion in membership under Polanski has clearly been fuelled by an influx of Israelophobic leftists too mental for Labour and Islamist entryists who know a useful, basket-weaving idiot when they see one.

Even beyond its own membership, the Greens exist within a post-October 7 ecosystem in which Islamic sectarians are key players. An organisation called The Muslim Vote (TMV) has endorsed Green candidates up and down the country – and TMV is a far more dubious group than its lamely identitarian name would suggest.

Muhammad Jalal – a podcaster and ‘political scientist’ – is reportedly one of the brains behind TMV. He’s called for the Greens, Your Party and Muslim independents to strike up electoral pacts and ‘divide up the country’. He claims to have put this idea to Polanski personally. During the early 2000s, Jalal was the UK leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist party that was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK in 2024, shortly after it called for ‘Muslim armies’ to wage ‘jihad’ against Israel.

Muhammad Jalal has also sung the praises of Mothin Ali, the Greens’ pint-sized deputy leader, best known for chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ immediately after he was elected as a councillor in Leeds. What is less known about Ali is that he put out a video on 8 October 2023, while Hamas’s pogrom was still underway, insisting ‘Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’.

It gets worse. Ali also led a hate campaign against Leeds-based rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, who was called up to serve in the IDF after October 7. Ali called Deutsch an ‘animal’ and suggested he had returned to Israel so as to ‘kill women and children’ in Gaza. Deutsch and his family were bombarded with death threats and at one point were advised by the police to flee their home.

Ali issued a non-apology apology, before going on to be elected co-deputy. After a slew of Green Party activists were suspended over accusations of anti-Semitism, Ali told a private meeting of Greens for Palestine that the group should seek ‘serious legal advice’ so as to put the ‘party on notice’ over its handling of the dismissals.

The Greens for Palestine faction has been souring on Polanski for some time. In the run-up to the ‘Zionism is racism’ vote, group chats buzzed with claims that he was a ‘genocide denier’ who had failed to overcome his ‘Zionist indoctrination’, a reference to his Jewish upbringing. Even though Polanski backed the motion in principle, and smears Israel’s war against Hamas as a ‘genocide’ at every opportunity, his support for the amendment to protect Jewish Greens apparently marked him out as some kind of crypto-Zio.

In the end, Polanski didn’t even vote on the motion. He scuttled off to campaign in Holborn and St Pancras, following the defeat of the doomed amendment. It was a neat demonstration of his craven leadership, built on currying favour with an extremist fringe whose supposed ‘anti-Zionism’ is just Jew hatred draped in a keffiyeh.

Can Zack Polanski survive this? Time will tell. Mothin Ali is standing by him, batting away claims he was being lined up to mount a leadership challenge. For the moment, the faction most incandescent with Polanski is the old-guard Greens, with former leader Caroline Lucas breaking cover to tell him to clean up his act. (For her trouble, some Green members are now agitating to have Lucas expelled from the party.)

But it surely won’t be long until the crocodiles begin to circle again. The Islamo-left alliance is nothing new – Jeremy Corbyn was calling Hamas and Hezbollah his ‘friends’ before it was cool. Sadly, this unholy alliance may hold for some time yet. Anti-Israel bigotry, it turns out, can paper over a lot of cracks. But the sight of a gay, Jewish politician running scared of members with rather different ‘social values’, exposes what a morally bankrupt endeavour this Green Party has become.