Shortly after the Greens’ triumph in February’s Gorton and Denton byelection, with the party polling above 20%, Zack Polanski seemed as if he might be taking the party into a new era. Now, some members fear he has led them off an electoral cliff.
It is not Polanski’s direct responsibility that the English and Welsh Greens are saddled with an official policy stating that Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, is a type of racism, and that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state. The party is a direct democracy, and the members decide.
As leader, Polanski’s only direct power is one vote on a two dozen-strong executive committee. But as a figurehead and public face, he holds much informal sway. And it is here, his critics charge, he has repeatedly failed to act.
There have been growing fears among some Greens that with a welcome influx of new activists, more than triplling the size of the party since Polanski took over, came some highly motived and militant campaigners, many of whom focused almost exclusively on Palestine.
Entryism can be a problem for lots of parties, but with its cumbersome internal discipline and member-governed policy platform, the Greens are particularly vulnerable.
For all that direct democracy is a level playing field, in practice Green policy is decided by the small proportion of members motivated and solvent enough to attend a party conference in person, or who bother to register for online or proxy votes.
As such, Sunday’s “Zionism is racism” motion was actively supported by precisely 1,022 members, or about 0.4% of the total.
While some argue that directly member-led policymaking is difficult in such an expanded party, many Greens back the current system, saying it generally makes for more considered ideas.
Similarly, the motion has support among some mainstream Greens, including some Jewish members, who insist it will not target anyone for holding Zionist views.
Either way, Polanski could not have unilaterally changed the way the party is governed. But critics in the party say he could have said something about the way that Greens for Palestine, who tabled the Zionism motion, encouraged non-members to sign up specifically to get the policy adopted.
They are more annoyed still at the fact that Polanski very literally absented himself from the most toxic internal debate the party has faced for years, offering no definitive opinion about the motion and skipping the vote to campaign in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection.
Even with all this, the motion passed by only 209 votes. But it nonetheless did, leading to the adoption of a policy that has prompted condemnation from outside the party, and considerable anguish inside it, with four out of the five Green MPs opposing the idea despite their otherwise strong criticism of Israel.
The vote obliterated coverage of just about every other aspect of what was the party’s biggest and most ambitious conference to date, and seems likely to dog the Greens for years, especially given the apparent likelihood of legal action under equality laws.
Polanski was already seen as an outsider in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, and now appears even less likely to take Keir Starmer’s old seat.
“This act of self-indulgence by a radical fringe of activists will put a lower ceiling on Green support right at a time when a broader breakthrough became plausible,” said Robert Ford, professor of politics at Manchester university. “The sooner it is reversed the better for their electoral prospects.”
If any of the last 24 hours feels familiar, that is because it is. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour struggled with activists whose opposition to the Israeli government became so generalised and trenchant that critics said it spilled over into antisemitism – a view formally endorsed in 2020 by the human rights watchdog.
Some Greens say that a number of those who quit or were forced out of Labour as Starmer sought to address the issue have now come to them, some via Corbyn’s ill-fated subsequent project, Your Party.
Worried Greens are now looking to Polanski to take action of his own. But after missing Sunday’s debate, the usually voluble leader has been unusually silent on social media, posting just a couple of times about the byelection.
This is his biggest test yet. And with a new party leadership election due in less than a year, there is not much time to wait.
