March of the Greenshirts: Polanski’s party are the real racists

‘Back us to stop the far right,’ say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many ‘Zionists Jews’, and that Donald Trump is ‘owned by Jews’. Not even the Z-word, that last one.

Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: ‘Long live the Resistance.’ If it is a Hamas headband, this may actually be a criminal offence. Ali has since apologised ‘for any offence or distress caused’ and said she rejects ‘anti-Semitism in all its forms’. Some ‘legacy Greens’ are appalled but others are drinking the drug of relative success from a very low base Other Green candidates give new meaning to the term ‘eco-warrior’.

Rebecca Jones, standing for the party in Blackheath, Lewisham, says we must ‘burn Zionism to the ground’. Jones is a practising NHS GP. Sabine Mairey, another Lambeth Green candidate, posts a video saying a terror attack on a synagogue ‘was not anti-Semitism’ but ‘revenge’ against Israel. Ifhat Shaheen, a Green candidate in Hackney, says that the mass murder, rape and abduction of civilians on 7 October was just Palestinians ‘inevitably try[ing] to defend themselves’.

Feda Shahin, a candidate in Bournemouth, claims ‘the Zionists killed 20 million Christians’. Over the past few weeks, at least 17 Green candidates have been exposed by The Spectator and others for holding or sharing hideous views. Many of them will soon also be holding public office, with significant power over their communities, including Jews. That is one difference with Jeremy Corbyn–era Labour, when most of the haters were mere activists.

Most popular The even more critical difference is the central Green party’s continued embrace of these people. At the time of writing, 15 of the 17, including all those named above, remain fully endorsed Green candidates. Many of these stories about them were in the public domain even before nominations closed. The party did nothing, apart from telling them to make their social media accounts private. Actually, that’s not true. They did do something.

Responding to many of the stories, the Green party’s deputy leader Mothin Ali said: ‘Anyone currently being attacked in the media should know that the only reason for the smears are [sic] that you are making the right type of noise… Know that you are not alone.’ So this isn’t just progressive soft–headedness about wrongdoing by minorities or lack of vetting in a small party hitting the big time. It’s not just ignoring bad stories which might not, as the party’s slogan goes, ‘Make Hope Normal Again’.

It’s an explicit statement by the Greens’ no. 2 which appears to suggest that candidates who have made racist and extremist remarks are ‘making the right type of noise’. A Green party spokesman told the Telegraph : ‘Clearly, this does not mean that he [Ali] – or the Green Party – supports everything they have said in the past.’ Could it be, therefore, that the Green party under Mothin Ali and Zack Polanski has adopted a deliberate strategy of appealing to racists and extremists?

Some of them, anyway. If so, that’s literally unprecedented outside the far right: hence my question at the start of this piece. Polanski sometimes seems almost to go out of his way to alarm Jews. After the candidate controversies and the recent attacks on Jewish targets, he asked rhetorically whether British Jews suffer from a ‘perception of unsafety’, rather than ‘actual unsafety’. He called the candidate stories a ‘weaponisation of a political attack’.

But actual weapons, used in actual attacks against synagogues, and future Green councillors who think the Jews own Donald Trump sound quite ‘unsafe’ to many outside the Green party. ‘Is this a proper attack or anti-Semitism?’ Polanski calculates, perhaps, that life has changed since Corbyn was felled by this sort of thing. There’s the Gaza war, the waning of traditional media, the shrinkage of the political centre. Maybe he thinks his own Jewishness is a shield.

And for sure, not all the Corbyn-era parallels apply. There is much less internal opposition. Some ‘legacy Greens’, those in the party before Polanski, Ali and the Corbynistas got there, are certainly appalled. But others are drinking the drug of relative success from a very low base. And Green moderates, unlike Labour’s, have no taste for faction-fighting. Why are the Greens so fixated with Gaza; lots of them, not just the racist ones?

Why are Green candidates – lots of them, not just the racist ones – making campaign videos about Palestine in elections about potholes? Why is Gaza the Greens’ answer to so many questions? When Polanski was told that his plans to confiscate Trump’s golf courses could be legally problematic, he replied: ‘I think more problematic is a genocide in Gaza.’ Israel and Gaza increasingly fulfil the same function for left-populists as the EU did for right-populists Some will say it’s simply pandering to the Muslim vote.

But even for British Muslims, Gaza is not a priority. In a poll during the general election, while the slaughter was still under way, only 21 per cent of them named it as their top issue. Only 44 per cent of British Muslims even put it in their top five. The figures for non-Muslims were much lower. That’s not because people don’t care about the horror. It’s because they think, surely correctly, that there is little that any British government, let alone any local council, can do about it.

I think the core reason for the Greens’ obsession is this: Israel and Gaza increasingly fulfil the same function for left-populists as the EU did for right-populists. That is, not as an accurate reflection of voters’ priorities but as an ‘organising idea’ to galvanise activists and make a wider argument of how Britain and the world have gone wrong. Gaza is used to argue against the moral bankruptcy of the West, its colonisation of subject peoples, the hypocrisy of the western liberal order and the rapacity of capitalism, all of which must be overthrown.

Israel and/or Zionism and/or the Jews are attacked as the supreme embodiments of these dark forces, as the Jews have been for centuries. These goals are, of course, much more radical than the goals of Eurosceptics, and the people promoting them are more extreme. Psephologically, too, it is much harder to build a winning electoral coalition around anti-westernism than around leaving the EU. But that’s what this is, whether all the keffiyeh-wearers quite realise it or not.

That’s another part of the reason why the Greens probably won’t sack Saiqa Ali, Sabine Mairey or Rebecca Jones. But most voters, outside the hard left, know you can support Palestinian rights without descending into conspiracism, violence, racism or fanaticism. You can support Palestinian rights while recognising that Jews – even Israelis – also have rights. Until he disowns the Greenshirt wing of his party, Polanski is the wrong side of this line.

It will limit his support and it will eventually bring him down.