Here's my
@Telegraph column, 'Zack Polanski wants a Jew register. What could be more sinister than that?'
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06โฆ
Iโll say one thing for Zack Polanski: he knows a winning strategy when he sees one. When he became leader of the Greens last September, he spotted straight away that the secret to boosting the partyโs poll ratings โ and thus electoral success โ was straightforward. Dump the green stuff and focus on Gaza.
There was a ready-made group of voters for whom Gaza is the only issue that really matters, waiting to be courted by any party which turned itself into the anti-Israel train. That group fell into the Greensโ arms when Polanski arrived on the scene.
He has been masterly in his care of them, not least in his skilful elision of being anti-Israel with being Jewish himself. It provides a much-used โget out of jail free cardโ when the Greensโ professed anti-Zionism slips into accusations of barely disguised anti-Semitism.
But even by Polanskiโs standards, his demand that any dual British-Israeli citizen who has fought for Israel against Hamas in Gaza has their name listed on a database โ a list, in other words, of bad Jews โ is breathtakingly blatant.
The Green leader has signed an open letter sent to Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, which calls on the Government to act in the name of โpublic safety and justiceโ to โtrack the movements of Brits who have served in the IDFโ and โsubject them to secondary screening where necessary at ports of entryโ. Britons, that is, who just happen to be Jews.
Israel has national service, and all Israeli citizens (with the exception โ which is deeply controversial in Israel โ of some religious groups) are conscripted to the IDF at 18. Many have been called up as reservists when they are older.
Polanski is thus calling for a large proportion of British-Israeli dual citizens to be listed on a database. โNobody wants to live next to a potential war criminal,โ the letter organised by campaign group Declassified UK states. Presumably then, Polanski wishes to refuse entry to or deport any British-Israeli who has served in the IDF.
You will notice one obvious element to this demand. There are wars on every continent. There are accusations of war crimes in all those conflicts. But Polanski has said not a word about British dual citizens โ or even those of sole UK nationality โ who have fought in any of those wars, either ongoing or historic.
I wait, for example, for Polanski to demand a list of dual-nationality Britons who fought in one of the most brutal post-1945 conflicts, the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence. The nine-month conflict led to the death of up to three million Bengalis and the displacement of 10 million refugees into India.
This is not merely historic. War crime investigations are still going on. But no Israelis were involved (letโs be honest: no Jews). So Polanski is silent โ not least because many new Green voters are drawn from those communities.
By signing the letter, Polanski doesnโt only demand that Britons who have fought in Gaza be put on a database. He goes far beyond that. The letter calls says โtravellers with Israeli travel documents or arriving from an origin of Tel Aviv airportโ should be subject to โpotential secondary screenings at ports of entryโ. For Polanski then, any Israeli should be marked out for special screening.
As for the allegation of genocide against Israel, it is, at the very least, hotly contested. But there is a well-founded allegation of genocide against the Chinese in its treatment of the Uyghurs. Does Polanski demand that any Chinese national arriving in the UK is deemed a suspected war criminal? Of course he doesnโt.
If Jews arenโt involved, neither Polanski nor any of his fellow Greens could give a damn. Polanski may be Jewish, but his partyโs strategy could hardly be clearer.