Green Party leader rebuked for claiming Chief Rabbi doesn’t represent UK Jews on Israel

“I often go to meet with them during festivals. We break bread together. We sing together. I'm not religious, but we pray together in terms of the tradition of praying together. And that's a beautiful community experience”.

The Manchester-born party leader went on to criticise Jewish communal organisations as being unrepresentative of the wider community – a point he made in an interview with the JC last year.

However, on this occasion, Polanski singled out Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis for criticism.

He told Stewart and Campbell: “We have a Chief Rabbi who I think has more than overstepped the mark”, adding that there were “many times where he's not speaking for the British Jewish community. He's certainly not speaking for me, but I don't think he's speaking for the wider community. He is clearly speaking in the interests of defending the Israeli government.”

“Now, as a personal view, he's totally entitled to do that, and I'm totally entitled to disagree with him, but as someone with the role of Chief Rabbi to politicise what's happening in Israel as a defence of the Jewish community in Britain, I think is deeply damaging in the same way as so many things within our politics. Where politics and people's ideas and personalities get mixed, we end up in a dangerous place where institutions crumble.”

Stewart responded by saying that he was “at risk of violently agreeing” with the points Polanski made.

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, however, criticised Polanski’s comments.

“Zack Polanski's attack on the Chief Rabbi is outrageous and completely unjustified. The Chief Rabbi's commitment to Israel and its welfare reflects the feelings of the overwhelming majority of the community he serves,” a Board of Deputies spokesperson said.

The Jewish Leadership Council also condemned the remarks, saying:

“Many within the Jewish community feel deeply uncomfortable and often threatened when they see the world’s only Jewish state singled out or held to different standards. We have seen the real and violent consequences that follow when individuals seek to amp up extreme rhetoric towards Israel. The Chief Rabbi is absolutely right to call out this behaviour in defence of our community’s interests”, a spokesperson for the organisation said.

They added: “In stark contrast, Zack Polanski has gone far beyond criticism of the government of Israel and has actively defended his Deputy Leader, who described Hamas terrorists as ‘indigenous people’ fighting back.” 

Mothin Ali, now the Green Party’s deputy leader, made those comments after October 7, 2023 but later argued that he had not been referencing the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.

He also said in a post on X on October 7, 2023 that “White supremacist European settler colonialism must end” and was criticised for inciting division against a Leeds University rabbi who returned to Israel for reserve duties after the start of the war.

Ali labelled Rabbi Deutsch a “creep” in a now-deleted video.

Ali subsequently apologised for “any upset my comments caused about the Gaza conflict” shortly after his council election victory in May 2024.

Earlier in the interview, Polanski also credited a meeting with Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence with getting him to think more critically about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

He met with the group prior to being elected as a member of the London Assembly.

“I sat down and listened to them, and I felt myself getting defensive over what they were saying in the meeting”, he said, adding that he felt that their voice was “different to the narrative that I've grown up with, and the narrative of ‘Israel needs to be defended. Israel's under attack all the time’”.

“Just listening to their experiences and just knowing… that none of my questions made any sense, none of them were coherent, because actually everything they said I knew was true, and actually what I've been doing was denying it to myself because of the uncomfortability (sic) of sitting in that moment and the uncomfortability (sic) of your worldview or things that you really believe changing.”

The Chief Rabbi has been contacted for comment.