Green leader defends post after Zionism motion and by-election loss

Zack Polanski stood before the cameras in the early hours of Friday morning, having just watched his party finish second in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. He had come to defend his leadership of the Green Party, but the real test was not the election result—it was a motion that had passed at the party's annual conference in Brighton three days earlier, one that declared Zionism a form of racism.

The motion, approved by party members, defined Zionism as an ideology supporting "an ethnonationalist Jewish state" and called for a "single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine," language that encompasses modern-day Israel. Under Green Party rules, member-approved motions automatically become official party policy, though they need not appear in the manifesto for the next general election. The problem was that Polanski, the party leader and himself Jewish, had not participated in the debate or voted on it at all.

Former party leader Caroline Lucas did not wait for the by-election result to speak. She told the BBC that Polanski had failed to show leadership, calling the motion "dangerous" and "divisive." She said she would have hoped he would be "a very strong critic" of it. When asked whether he should step down, Lucas hedged slightly—"let's just see what happens in the coming days and weeks"—but the message was clear: his absence from the vote was a dereliction of duty.

When Polanski finally answered questions about the motion, he refused to take a clear position on its central claim. Asked directly whether he agreed that Zionism is racism, he pivoted to his own evolution. He had grown up in a Zionist household, he said, believing in the idea of "a land without a people and a people without a land." But he had educated himself, and he no longer believed that was true. What he saw now was "an ongoing genocide and the displacement of the Palestinian people," which he called "clearly racist." When pressed again on whether Zionism itself is racism, he repeated that the displacement and genocide were racist—but he would not say the word Zionism is racism.

His strategy was to reassure Jewish members while not explicitly rejecting the motion. "Nobody will be excluded in the Green Party based on faith and religion," he said. He pointed to the party's growth under his leadership, from 55,000 to 60,000 members when he was running for leader to 220,000 now. "Any member is entitled to their opinion," he added. "We're a democratic grassroots party." But this satisfied neither side. Those who supported the motion wanted him to embrace it as policy. Those opposed wanted him to distance himself from it entirely.

The motion had exposed fractures within the party that went deeper than one vote. Four of the five Green MPs had opposed it. The party's co-deputy leaders were split. The deputy leader in Wales resigned over it. The European Green Party condemned it, as did the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, speaking from Berlin, called the motion "completely wrong" and said it showed "terrible judgement." He demanded that Polanski reverse it and ensure it does not become Green Party policy. Burnham argued that the motion effectively ruled out a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine.

The by-election itself had been overshadowed by the controversy. The Greens had hoped to overturn a substantial Labour majority in the seat vacated by former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. They did not succeed. Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali won, though the Green performance was strong enough to reduce Labour's majority from 11,572 to 3,364. Polanski's response, in the early hours after the loss, was to insist he would stay on. "Yes I've taken a loss tonight," he said, "but our movement is so much bigger than one election or one motion." The question now was whether the party could hold together, or whether the divisions exposed by the motion would continue to fracture it.