Campaigning in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, Zack Polanski said the contest was between “hate and hope”. The result was a triumph for the Greens. They took the seat from Labour and prevented the election of the sometime academic Matt Goodwin for Reform.
Those words were hollow. It’s the Greens who now promote hate and division. In adopting the position at their autumn conference that Zionism is a form of racism, they’ve inflamed public debate and poisoned community relations.
A party leader with a sense of civic responsibility, let alone a moral core, would have seen the danger, headed it off and expressed uncompromising solidarity with British Jews. But that is not Polanski’s way. The limits of his character, veracity and command of policy detail have been progressively exposed in recent months. This is far more serious.
It’s no hyperbole but a mere truism that the Greens have excoriated and delegitimised British Jews for the content of their convictions. And the party leader chose to be absent, campaigning in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. Like Macavity the cat, he “always has an alibi, and one or two to spare”: yet at the crucial moment, Polanski wasn’t there.
Zionism is no more nor less than the conviction that the Jews should have a homeland in some portion of historic Palestine. It is not a cause specific to supporters of the current Israeli government. It’s perfectly compatible with strong opposition to the policies of the Netanyahu government. There are many who believe, as I do, that the pluralist ethos of Theodor Herzl’s vision of the Jewish state would be exemplified in an eventual negotiated settlement that meets the just demands of Palestinians for statehood and the pressing requirements of Israel for security.
To those who cleave to this ideal of Jewish statehood, which requires no scriptural premise but only recognition of the ties of historic sentiment and communal belonging, the Greens have nothing to say. Their response is instead to defame a community that overwhelmingly feels attachment not to a government but to a nation by telling them they are racist. It should not need to be spelt out, yet was absent from the Greens’ equivocations, that the Jews have powerful pragmatic reasons to be concerned about safety, and that the abolition of Israel would be not merely a calamity but an existential threat.
You can fashion a theoretical anti-Zionism that holds to universalist rather than atavistic premises. Two of Israel’s greatest intellectuals, Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, advocated a binational state. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that vision other than its utter remoteness from geopolitical reality. And the type of anti-Zionism that has spread from the fringes into mainstream parties of the left, and now captured the Greens, is a very different animal: a denigration of Jewish nationhood in principle. That is not a legitimate position. It can properly, and only properly, be described as racist.
Amid this crisis, Polanski, with the party’s deputy leaders and MPs, issued a statement that might have come from Jeremy Corbyn’s playbook of condemning “all forms of racism”. This declared that they would “continue to work to ensure that the Green Party is an anti-racist party in every way”, heedless of the fact that it’s just demonstrated it’s not. The statement upheld “universal human rights”, which takes no courage, and made no reference to the antisemitism that has disfigured public life and debased the Greens’ cause.
When the Greens won Gorton and Denton, I concede that I was pleased that the result showed the potency of tactical voting in thwarting the rise of right-wing populism. The feebleness of Polanski and his colleagues in this affair shows that the Greens cannot be an option for voters who wish to thwart the forces of xenophobia and extremism.
It may be an augury that Dale Vince, the renewable energy tycoon, has made a big donation to the Labour campaign in Holborn and St Pancras. For my part, I believe that decent people, whatever their disagreements on wider issues, cannot temporise on this one. The Greens have absented themselves from responsible debate and targeted British Jews with a fearful calumny. On this fundamental moral issue, Polanski has disgraced himself.
Hence then, the article about the speed of zack polanski s fall is truly spectacular was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The speed of Zack Polanski’s fall is truly spectacular )
Also on site :
- In 1974, three artists buried 10 Cadillacs nose-first in an Amarillo, Texas wheat field; the row was moved 2 miles west in 1997 as the city grew
- In 1987, Jim Reinders built a 96-foot circle of 39 cars in a Nebraska field as a memorial to his father; an estimated 4,000 people later watched an eclipse from it
- Ryde Group Ltd. Sued for Securities Law Violations - Contact the DJS Law Group to Discuss Your Rights - RYDE