This Jewish non-Zionist wants to be the UK Green party’s answer to far-right populism

LONDON — Since it won last July’s general election, Britain’s Labour government has often had to compete for headlines — and votes — with the right-wing populist party, upstart Reform UK.

Led by Nigel Farage — a supporter of US President Donald Trump, who admiringly dubbed him, “Mr. Brexit” — Reform has edged into the lead in the opinion polls, captured a formerly safe Labour seat in a special election, and won control of a slew of local authorities.

But while Labour and the Conservative opposition struggle to adjust to the challenge posed by Reform, it is inspiring one of the country’s leading Jewish politicians in his bid to capture the leadership of the left-wing Green party.

Zack Polanski, currently the Greens’ deputy leader and a member of the Greater London Authority (GLA), is standing on a platform of “eco-populism,” pledging a “much bigger, much louder, much more effective” party, and saying it needs to learn from Farage’s success.

“Is this the left-wing Farage?” wondered ITV News, when it interviewed 42-year-old Polanski in June.

Polanski’s supporters have another role model in mind: Zohran Mamdani, the far-left Democrat who last month won the party’s nomination for the New York mayoralty. Both men, they claim, “show that you don’t have to follow the agenda of the right, but can shape the agenda yourself,” and that “radical politics” can be “fun, personal, and recognizable.”

Polanski’s supporters have another role model in mind: Zohran Mamdani, the far-left Democrat who last month won the party’s nomination for the New York mayoralty

The Green party — which takes a tough anti-Israel line and supports the BDS movement — faces a choice in the leadership contest between the conventional environmentalism offered by two of its four MPs, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, and Polanski’s more populist approach.

For years on the fringes of British politics, the Greens have made steady progress in recent years. Disillusionment with Labour — which has seen its support slump from 34% to 22% — could help the party grow further, and complicate Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s path to re-election in four years.

Last year’s general election saw the Greens win an additional three seats in the House of Commons — their highest-ever representation — while the party now has 800 council members in over 170 local authorities.

Unlike Ramsay and Chowns, who are running on a joint ticket to become co-leaders of the party, Polanski has opted not to have a running mate, declaring that the party needs “someone at the top… that’s a recognizable face.”

A gay vegan, Polanski — who declined to be interviewed for this piece — has a colorful biography. Born David Paulden in Salford in northwest England, Polanski changed his name at 18.

“Growing up, my stepdad was called David, and I didn’t like being a little version of my stepdad,” he recently told Big Issue magazine. He opted instead for Zack in tribute to the Jewish refugee Zach in Michelle Magorian’s wartime evacuation novel, “Goodnight Mister Tom.” Paulden was dropped in favor of Polanski — his grandfather’s surname before the family decided to anglicize its name to avoid antisemitism in Britain after its arrival from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century.

Growing up gay and Jewish led Polanski to understand what it feels like to be marginalized, he said in a 2022 interview. The name switch was important, he recalled, because he wanted to be proud of his identity.

Before entering politics, Polanksi, who went to drama school in Atlanta, Georgia, worked as an actor, taking part in immersive theater productions, and as a hypnotherapist. In 2013, Polanski attracted minor tabloid fame when he featured in an article in The Sun newspaper claiming hypnotism could enlarge its female reporter’s breasts. (Embarrassed by the incident, he has since apologized.)

Although Polanski’s first political moves were as a member of the centrist Liberal Democrats — he represented the party in the 2016 elections to the GLA — he has since emerged as a leading light on the left of the Greens, whom he joined in 2017. In 2021, he was elected to the GLA and became the party’s deputy leader a year later. At the time, he called for the party to broaden its agenda beyond the environmental issues that have allowed it to pick up support among both urban disenchanted former Labour supporters and disgruntled Tories in rural areas.

“There is no environmental justice without racial, social, and economic justice, too,” he argued during his successful deputy leadership bid.

Polanski’s radical credentials — he was arrested as part of an Extinction Rebellion climate change protest in 2019 — are unlikely to be a turn-off for the Greens’ 60,000 members, who will begin voting in the leadership election in August, with the result due on September 2.

However, his pitch to position the Greens as a left-wing version of Reform is likely to be more contentious. The leadership fight has been described by political commentators as pitting “more sober, election-focused professionals” — epitomized by Ramsay, who has served as the party’s co-leader since 2021 — against “insurgent activists.”

Polanski is clear he wants to shake things up. “We need to be so much bolder about what we are offering,” he said after launching his bid for the top job.

That includes taking a page out of Farage’s book.

“People are done with the two old parties and we’re in this dangerous moment where Nigel Farage is absolutely ready to fill that vacuum,” Polanski said in an interview with The Guardian in May. “We should never turn into Nigel Farage. But there are things we can learn in terms of being really clear in speaking to people. Being sensible and professional are good qualities. But I don’t think they should be the central qualities.”

People are done with the two old parties and we’re in this dangerous moment where Nigel Farage is absolutely ready to fill that vacuum

In other interviews, Polanski has said that Farage tells “a really powerful story,” albeit one “based on disinformation and lies.” The Greens, he says, need to learn from that. “Not with the same politics, I despise his politics, but with the storytelling.” This lies at the heart of Polanski’s push for “ecopopulism” — “still being absolutely based in evidence, science and data — and never losing that — but telling a really powerful story.”

Polanski accuses Labour of effectively aiding and abetting Farage by “protecting the wealth and power of the super-rich.” His desire to park the Greens’ tanks on Labours’ lawns is rooted in hard politics: all of the 40 seats in which the Greens came second at the last election are currently held by Starmer’s party, and most are in urban areas, including London, Manchester, Leeds, and Merseyside. Recent polls show that, while one in five Britons say they would consider voting Green at a future election, this pool draws substantially on those who voted Labour in 2024.

“It’s not just about Keir Starmer. I think they’re never going back. They’ve not left the Labour Party, the Labour Party’s left them,” he told the Big Issue.

Polanski is also making no secret of his desire to play footsie with the left of the Labour Party. He has spoken openly of “rolling out the red carpet” for left-wing Labour MPs who want to defect to the Greens. More controversially, Polanski has also said he would welcome Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left former Labour leader who was elected as an independent MP last July. “Absolutely,” he responded to one interviewer when asked about Corbyn joining the Greens. “Every time we’re on the same platform we’re talking about the same issues.” (Currently, rumors swirl that Corbyn is joining up with controversial former Labour MP Zarah Sultana.)

While there has been speculation about potential Labour defectors, Polanski has already won the backing of some prominent former Corbynites. Owen Jones, the hard-left commentator and activist who endorsed the Greens last July, has trumpeted him as a potential left alternative to Farage-style populism. “There’s an ever-growing constituency of disillusionment to Labour’s left, but right now, it is fragmented and demoralized,” Jones said recently. “Polanski is the Greens’ best bet to turn that around.”

Polanski’s apparent effort to woo Corbyn and his former supporters may seem odd coming from a leading Jewish politician. Indeed, Polanski had previously criticized the rise in antisemitism in the Labour Party on Corbyn’s watch, saying in 2018 that he was “a pro-European Jew,” calling that “two reasons I couldn’t vote for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.”

But the Green leadership hopeful has now recanted his former position, telling the far-left Novara Media last month that “it was not helpful for me to assume that the Labour Party was rife with antisemitism when we now know that blatantly was not true.” He added that Corbyn did not deal with the issue “perfectly.” Corbyn was suspended from Labour in 2020 after responding to a damning report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission by arguing that the problem of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons.”

Polanski also staunchly defended the Green party during last year’s general election following revelations concerning antisemitism within its ranks. “Antisemitism must be treated with intention and care,” Polanski said in response to an investigation by The Times newspaper. “We must be clear about the conflation between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and antisemitism.” Polanski also said that while antisemitism would “never be tolerated in the Green party,” other parties were “weaponizing” the issue.

Polanski says he is not a Zionist and has moved towards a more hardline position on Israel. He told an interviewer in May that he had grown up in “a very Zionist household, raised to really believe that Israel was the center of everything and must be defended at all costs. And that’s very different to my politics now.” He added: “I very much identify as Jewish, I’m very proud to be Jewish, I’m very much involved in Jewish cultures, but I’m certainly not a Zionist.” In an interview last year, Polanski said that his position on Israel has changed because “Israel has changed.”

Polanski claims his stance has led to ‘vicious’ attacks from the ‘so-called mainstream Jewish communities’

Polanski claims his stance has led to “vicious” attacks from the “so-called mainstream Jewish communities.” He has, however, hardly pulled his punches in his denunciations of communal bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which he has dubbed “the Board of Deputies for the Israeli Government.”

Polanski’s stance reflects the Green party’s pro-Palestinian line and hostility towards the Jewish state. The party supports unilateral recognition by Britain of a Palestinian state and “an urgent international effort to end the illegal occupation of Palestinian land.” At its annual conference last September, the Greens reaffirmed their support for the BDS movement, passed a motion branding Israel an “apartheid state,” and accused it of perpetrating a “genocide.”

The party has repeatedly called for the UK to cut off all arms sales to Israel and “impose a wide range of sanctions,” and says the UK government must publicly back “the arrest and trial of all those guilty of war crimes — including Prime Minister Netanyahu.” It also accuses Starmer of “lots of bluster,” but failing to take “concrete action.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Greens vigorously opposed Israel’s military action against Iran’s nuclear program. “These actions confirm that Israel is a rogue state operating outside international law,” Chowns, the leadership contender who serves as the party’s foreign affairs spokesperson, said in June. The US and Israel’s actions were also denounced by the party’s leadership as “indefensible aggression.”

Polanski’s language on the conflict is similarly strident. He has accused Israel of “committing war crimes” and “genocide,” and claimed that “tens of thousands of innocent people are being massacred.” Addressing a pro-Palestinian demonstration in London in June, Polanski repeated his accusation that the UK government is “not just complicit but active participants” in “the Genocide in Gaza.” “Stop selling arms that are actively fuelling a genocide. Arrest Netanyahu and all those guilty of war crimes,” Polanski posted on X last month.

Polanski also addressed a rally outside the US embassy in London called to protest against its “horrendous and illegal” bombing of Iran. “Iran were negotiating — when Israel launched a war on them,” Polanski wrote.

The Greens’ attacks on Starmer and the Labour Party for supposedly failing to take a robust enough stance towards Israel have undoubtedly produced political dividends. During last year’s general election, they repeatedly highlighted Labour MPs’ failure to vote for a ceasefire in parliament. In a seat in the city of Bristol, the Greens defeated a member of Starmer’s frontbench, having distributed leaflets bearing a Palestinian flag.

Polanski’s hyperactive, social media-savvy leadership campaign suggests that, if he is elected in September, he will not only take the Green party in a more populist direction, he will also raise its profile.

Experts believe, however, that Britain’s voting system places a potential cap on the party’s growth. “The Greens are benefiting from progressive voters who supported Labour last year, but feel the government is letting them down,” says polling expert Peter Kellner. “If Britain had Israel’s proportional voting system, they would be on course to make significant gains and possibly end up as part of a left-of-center coalition. Instead, under first-past-the-post, the best they can hope for is to double their tally of MPs from four to eight, in the 650-seat House of Commons.”

And, having pledged to take on Farage, could Polanski inadvertently end up assisting him? “If they succeed in taking significant votes from Labour, [the Greens’] main impact is likely to be to damage Labour in seats being targeted by Reform and the Conservatives — and hence reducing the number of progressive MPs at the next election,” warns Kellner.