It’s time for Zack Polanski to make a stand against the antisemitism rippling through his Green Party. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s also now costing him support.

The Greens recently won the Parliamentary seat of Gorton and Denton with a heavy focus on Gaza, a trend that they’ve carried into these local council elections. In doing so they’ve attracted some of the same obsessional anti-Zionists who flourished under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership and who Sir Keir Starmer was forced to expel.

The core tension within the Greens is between robust criticism of Israeli policy, which many activists see as a matter of principle, and content that crosses into antisemitic tropes or conspiracy theories. It’s a line some Green candidates have clearly crossed.

One council candidate claimed the Golders Green ambulance arson attacks were a false flag; another tweeted about “Jewish Nazis” being “money-grubbing thieves” under the alias “the real Anne Frank”; a third shared a post that said “ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge”. All have either been suspended or had party support withdrawn.

Last week, following a rebuke from Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Polanski apologised for criticising officers who apprehended a suspected antisemitic attacker charged with stabbing two Jewish men in Golders Green. On Sunday he then reignited tensions with the police by accusing Rowley of meddling in politics before the local elections.

Polanski would be wise to put a sock in it; his net approval rating has fallen 14 points between this week and last, according to polling released on Tuesday by More in........

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