Leaked Whatsapp chats, political infighting, institutional antisemitism. No, you haven’t been hit on the head and woken up in 2019. Media outlets are once again pumping out headlines attempting to “Corbynise” Zack Polanski and the Green party with the same allegations of antisemitism that brought down the Labour party in 2019. 

The Greens have been ascendant since Polanski became leader in September. Having more than tripled their membership, they are now the most popular party among working-age voters (under 65s), even narrowly overtaking Reform in national polling among all ages for the first time a couple of weeks ago. 

Polanski’s plans to tax the richest in society and redistribute wealth to tackle growing inequality sit alongside his open criticism of Israel, recently calling for the British government to withdraw its trade agreement with the apartheid state. 

Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media have gone into full meltdown mode. To halt the Greens’ momentum, they’ve used the party’s pro-Palestine consensus and Polanski’s own anti-Zionist views to slander the Greens, and their Jewish leader, as toxic antisemites.

You would be forgiven for expecting the media to be discouraged from weaponising antisemitism against Polanski, given he is Jewish. Yet the Telegraph has published on average two articles a week since February just on attacking Polanski for his views on Israel and accusing the party of antisemitism, ramping up to an average of one a day in the last week.

His Jewishness, in fact, has given right-wing journalists an opportunity to think outside the box. Now, the private tensions of his Jewish family are ripe for exploitation: here, any internal conflict is broadcast not only as evidence of personal failing and untrustworthiness, but as a betrayal of Western civilisation.   

In March, the Daily Mail published a hit piece with the headline: “Zack Polanski is facing rebellion from his OWN family as they fear being forced to leave UK if Green party leader becomes Prime Minister”. One of the article’s co-writers, Nicole Lampert, claimed she spoke to three members of Polanski’s “extended family” who are concerned about the direction of the Green party, including one relative who claimed that the Greens are becoming “the future Islamic party of Britain” where there would be “no place for Jews”.

Polanski hit back on social media, claiming his immediate family all “refused to talk” to the outlet, and that Lampert had “started hunting down random ‘anon’ relatives” for her story. He called Lampert’s behaviour “parasitic” and linked to an article on the court case against Lampert for unscrupulous journalistic practices. Lampert, who is Jewish, responded by arguing that Polanski had invoked antisemitic tropes of Jewish people as “parasites” against her. The hypocrisy is striking: hounding a Jewish politician’s family for a scoop is all well and good, but when faced with scrutiny, Lampert used her own Jewish identity to present herself as the victim. Polanski’s family have subsequently issued a formal complaint to IPSO, the media regulation body, to stop journalists approaching them at their homes. 

It’s not just the media instrumentalising antisemitism against the Greens. Cabinet minister Steve Reed came out against Zack Polanski in an interview with the Huffington Post, a statement to the Guardian, and in various attack ads on X, accusing the party of having an antisemitism problem (his seat, incidentally, is projected to go Green). He called on Polanski to sack “racist” Green candidates standing in the upcoming local elections and show that they are not “a safe haven for antisemites”. 

This is not particularly creative from Reed. In fact, he has used these exact same tricks before. In May 2020, Reed submitted dossiers on ten left-wing individuals in the Labour party, demanding they face suspension and investigation for antisemitic conduct. Four of those named were Jewish. 

It has now emerged from the extensive research laid out in investigative journalist Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, that the murky thinktank Labour Together and its then-head Morgan McSweeny, funded by undeclared donations, were anonymously planting stories in the media about institutional antisemitism within the party: a cloak-and-dagger way to undermine Corbyn from within. 

Holden writes that Reed was “one of the more chilling figures encountered in researching this book” and was at the core of this movement to take on Corbyn.

If you cast your mind all the way back to 2019, you might recall the slogan “for the many, not the Jew”: a catchy play on Corbyn's Labour party motto “for the many, not the few”. Despite winning a substantial proportion of the vote in 2017, Corbyn faced escalating attacks, largely on the basis of an “antisemitism crisis” – which ended in huge electoral defeat (at least by first past the post standards; he still got 3 million more votes than Keir Starmer in 2024).

As Holden explains: “By about late 2018, and certainly from mid-2019, the primary alleged sin of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ was one of ‘denialism’, which could, at times, give the whole controversy a Kafkaesque air.” 

Trawling the archives, it was painful watching Corbyn trying to deal with these “gotcha” questions. In an interview with Andrew Neil for example, Corbyn evaded the question “can you apologise to the Jewish community over allegations of antisemitism?”, answering that his party stands against all forms of racism in society – falling straight into the “Jeremy Corbyn refuses to apologise over anti-Semitism allegations” headline Neil was after. In another, Corbyn was berated by the now-disgraced Good Morning host Philip Schofield into a forced apology, both lending credibility to the allegations and appearing insincere in his obvious exasperation with this line of questioning. 

Labour Together’s mission relied on complete secrecy: hence the undeclared donations that led to them being fined over £14,000 by the Electoral Commission. Corbyn had no idea where the coordinated campaign against him came from, and therefore no idea how to deal with it.

But the fraud is exposed now: Polanski, and the rest of the public, have the benefit of knowing exactly where these tired attacks originate and can see them coming from a mile off. Instead of getting caught in the traps the mainstream media sets for him, Polanski pushes back so that every media attack fuels the Greens’ growth, by exposing the press’s right-wing bias and demonstrating how anti-establishment the party is.

Responding to Reed’s accusations, he simply posted an article where Reed was forced to apologise for a tweet calling a Jewish Tory party donor a “puppet master”, with the caption “chutzpah” – Yiddish for “audacity”.

The Prime Minister recently criticised Polanki’s “disgraceful” comments after the Greens’ leader distinguished between “perceived” and “actual” Jewish unsafety, calling both “unacceptable,” and arguing that Labour uses claims of antisemitism as a “cynical political attack”. Following the stabbings of two Jewish men in Golders Green on Wednesday, MPs including Robert Jenrick and Chris Philip, and journalists – who are not themselves Jewish – have used the attack as an opportunity to blame the only Jewish leader of a political party, citing Polanski’s comments from the previous week.

Responding to Starmer’s criticism on X, Polanski said: “I’m Jewish. I condemn genocide. I condemn the Labour Government’s role in the Genocide” and called Starmer’s conflation of “the Israeli government’s genocide and actual antisemitism… disgusting”. He added that “many Jewish people don't want non Jewish people telling us what to believe & say,” and, in a statement addressing the stabbings on Thursday, condemned politicians who weaponise very real antisemitism to play “political football” against other parties and use attacks as an excuse to clamp down on our right to protest. 

Polanski also didn’t hold back from labelling the Daily Mail “a shit rag” and calling it his “enemy” for having “historically supported fascists & continu[ing] to do so”. “I’ll take no lectures from them on Antisemitism”, Polanski added, posting the statement to social media alongside a photo of Lord Rothermore, the founder and original owner of the Daily Mail, meeting Adolf Hitler in 1937. The Daily Mail remains owned by the Rothermore family and the current Lord Rothermore holds non-dom status to evade tax because he “identifies” as French. 

The paper and its billionaire backers have become obsessed with smearing the Greens, running a series of articles warning the public to “Beware the Green Menace”. Rather than shying away, Polanski reposted the article with the caption, “Didn’t expect the Daily Mail to be doing free branding”. He listed Green party policies to “lower bills, protect the NHS and fund public services,” positing, “Can imagine why Lord Rothermore isn’t so keen….”. He has now taken to referring to party campaigners as “Green Menaces” and, in a recent Green party event in Leeds, Polanski wore a t-shirt with a Telegraph headline warning his “Glastonbury-style dancing is no joke”.

But it’s not just down to Polanski’s social media expertise; the public’s perception of Israel and Palestine has changed profoundly since Corbyn’s heyday. 

We have watched the genocide in Gaza unfold from our screens for two and a half years now. While the mainstream media and the Labour party repeatedly sanitise Israel’s image, public sympathy nevertheless lies with Palestinians rather than with Israel. This trend holds true across divides of age, gender, region, employment sector, and even party preference. The only exceptions where support for Palestinians falls under 50% are Conservative, Reform and Leave voters, who marginally sympathise more with the Israeli side. It is probably safe to say that this comes more from a hatred for Muslims than a love for Jews: a YouGov poll found that Reform voters are more likely than any other party to believe racist stereotypes that Jewish people are greedy (almost a quarter) and less open to having Jewish friends, while the reverse is true of the Greens.

While in 2019, polling showed that only 14% of Britons backed calls to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, as of 2025, a majority of Brits would support suspending the UK’s trade deal with Israel. The fact is that people can see with their own eyes the horror perpetrated against Palestinians, and watching the mainstream media and political classes trip over themselves trying to justify it only exposes their own complicity and corruption. 

The irony is that insisting on the total continuity of the British Jewish community with Israel as a way to brand pro-Palestinian opinions as antisemitic and silence debate not only trivialises real antisemitism, but also makes its emergence more likely. Polanski knows this, and has himself stated that the constant conflation of Jewish identity with a colonial, genocidal state ultimately makes Jews “less safe”.

“It is deeply cynical, it’s been done with a very strong political purpose, and… the most hopeful thing is it’s not working,” Polanski added.

Indeed, if forecasts are to be believed, despite their attacks, Labour is facing annihilation by the Greens in the local elections next week. But the more successful the Greens become, the more hysterical the attacks from the political and media class will be. After winning their first Northern MP in the recent by-election in Manchester, the Greens were accused of “sectarian” campaigning and “family voting” (now disproven by the Manchester police), alongside conspiracies that the Greens are a Trojan horse for radical Islamists – despite being run by a gay, vegan Jewish man. 

After years of complicity with Israel’s war crimes, of weaponising Jewishness and using antisemitism to silence dissent in a way that actually harms Jewish communities, there is finally a voice fighting back. Now, with the Greens shooting up in the polls every day, Palestine, and an anti-Zionist Jewish politics, is on the ballot for the first time.

The question becomes: how low will the press and the Greens’ political opponents sink during and after these local elections to keep a left-wing populist party out of power? And can Polanski actually overcome the establishment’s divide and rule tactics with a unifying message of hope over the months and years to come?▼