Why Jews fear Zack Polanski The Greens present a deceptively benign countenance

Indulge me a fantasy:–

Early morning.  

The battlements.

Deprived of sleep, the once Director of Public Prosecutions, now mere Prime Minister, steps out in dread and smells the air. A cold Elsinore-like wind blows in, ruffling the laundered lace collar of his hero shirt. He speaks, knowing no one is listening. ‘The time is out of joint. O, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.’

He has my sympathies. Compare the calamitous disorder confronting Hamlet and Keir Starmer and we have to say Hamlet had it easy. A dead father, a wanton mother, a wicked uncle, a ghost at large, and Fortinbras mustering his forces on the Norwegian border – pfft! Mere domestic inconveniences compared with the things rank and gross in nature that Starmer faces every day: the carping of courtiers calling for a brave new world but lacking the bravery to bring one about; irresponsible rivals tickling the sore spots of a confused and rumour-ridden populace; a ruthless commentariat no less divided but equally athirst for blood; voices prophesying war. Fie on’t, ah fie!

Of the external factions aligned against Starmer’s Labour Party in the coming local elections, the most dangerous — to Starmer and the country — are the Greens. Ask how the Greens have transformed themselves in so short a time from a smug but innocuous band of self-marginalising activists to a smug but menacing army of agitators bent on power, and the answer explains what there is to fear from them. They are not what they until recently purported to be. In the image of their new about-facing leader Zack Polanski, they present a deceptively benign countenance. A party ostensibly for children, with policies of redistribution and fairness, promising goodies (even the naughtiest ones) for everyone, they are only a little less ostensibly a party for Jew haters. Yes, the Greens were always hyper-Gaza-concerned, today they are Gaza besotted.

Reform has its own obsessions, too, but they are as they describe themselves on the tin. Farage comes over as of-the-turf-turfy and of the saloon-bar-boozy, and makes no attempt to attract voters who don’t like that look. His appeal will fluctuate, as it always has, according to the perceived level of immigrant threat. And yes, that makes the success he might enjoy hard to calculate. But essentially Reformers are old men who stoke one another’s fears. Those fears are by no means all irrational but they are ageing. The Greens however are young, which means that whatever there is to fear from them there is to fear for longer. Against that, of course, is the fickleness of youth. Cheered by tens of thousands at Glastonbury but a blink of time ago, Jeremy Corbyn is now pushing “a new kind of politics” — Your Party, it desperately names itself — in company with Zarah Sultana. How the mighty, etc. But Zack Polanski has an advantage over Corbyn, at least when it comes to baiting Jews — he is a Jew himself. And the appeal to the Jew-uncomfortable of an actual Jew who is no less Jew-uncomfortable than they are, is incalculable. Rarely will a Green party candidate forget to rebut all charges of antisemitism with the reassuring lie, “We cannot be antisemitic. Our leader is a Jewish man” — the phenomenon of a Jew-hating Jew being new to voters who are wet behind the ears.

I don’t mind admitting to my own problem with Zack Polanski, over and above my suspicions about people who change their names and seek to make capital out of doing so. Over the centuries, Jews have changed their names from Mordechai to St John in order to join a golf club. That David Paulden should have changed his name to Zack Polanski is harder to understand, unless there was a Polish golf club in north Manchester that wouldn’t otherwise have considered him for membership. Not that the name Paulden immediately conjures up a Jew. The Pauldens — his paternal grandparents — were good friends of my mother and father. We lived next-door to them in Prestwich. I babysat their children, one of whom would have been the not-yet Zack’s father. My own father briefly drove a van for Benny Paulden who owned a small warehouse. My mother ran a fancy goods shop with Ethel Paulden in a rundown precinct in south Manchester. I had a schoolboy crush on her. The four lie close together for all time in a grim Jewish cemetery in Failsworth. I remember them with immense fondness. Modest, generous business people with a sense of humour, relaxedly Jewish. The Pauldens. A nice name, I think, every time I pause before their graves, on the way to visit my parents’.

So why did David Paulden change it? I am not privy to the particular psychology so must accept his explanation that it was a gesture of solidarity with the Jews of the old country. He seems to have taken a while working out who he was. Hence his years as a hypnotist offering to increase the size of a woman’s breasts. Wanting to be loved is as good an explanation as any. And maybe wanting to be taken for a person of high principle. Zack! Well, why not? Z for Zionist, perhaps? Doubt it. Let’s guess it was something more swashbuckling and piratical than that. “A proud Jew”, he has called himself. I wince at the description. What’s wrong with just “Jew”? It’s my experience that people who announce their “proud” adherence to a principle or a faith are usually defectors in waiting. And so it has turned out with this “proud Jew” who shuffles off any residual or complex Zionist or Israel loyalties, any sorrow, any sadness, any hesitancy when it comes to the genocide libel, and only the other day mused aloud that Jews were a little too quick to call out antisemitism while the danger they claim to be facing might be no more than “the perception of unsafety” — this while calling out Islamophobia.

His callous “perception of unsafety” argument returned to bite him after the stabbings in Golders Green earlier this week. There is no room for antisemitism he remembered to say in the heat of the horror, careful not to lose a vote, but must have worried how those who rejoice in the killing of Jews would respond to such a remark, hence, as I understand it, another volte face, this time attacking the police for their brutal handling of the suspect. Whoever would face in two directions at once, might learn from Polanski né Paulden — how to be a Jew and not a Jew, how to express sympathy and deny it, how to say what you think, unsay it and then say it again, and how to keep everyone naïve enough to believe a single spurious word you say, on side for long enough to vote for you.

It is this transparent falsity cynically manipulating fears and libels and trading shamelessly on the ethnic hostilities of numbers of his supporters, that should concern everyone old enough to cast an intelligent vote. Even those whose identity is flattered by Polanski’s schmoozing should think twice before putting a cross beside his party’s name. Another day, another party, and you will be on the receiving end of equivalent defamations. We don’t need one group of citizens to feel good for a passing minute at the discomfiture of another. 

The time is out of joint. Yes, it’s hard to know how to put it right. But there is one way not to make things worse. We should not throw in our lot with false promisers and flatterers. We worry about the algorithms that enable social media to sell us the lies we already believe. Extreme political parties are learning to do the same. Whoever promises to give you what research tells them you want is not your friend.

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