Zack Polanski has claimed that neither Israel nor any other country has a right to exist.
The Green Party leader appeared to dismiss the belief that the Jewish state had a right to exist as “semantics”.
He also suggested that Britain did not have any inherent claim to exist, saying: “I don’t believe any country has a right to exist. People have a right to exist, the Israelis have a right to exist, the Palestinians have a right to exist.”
Mr Polanski is facing growing scrutiny over the handling of anti-Semitism in his party after local election candidates were arrested last week on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.
Some activists also used the Greens’ spring conference to claim that Zionism, the belief in the right of Jews to self-determination, should be classified as a “racist ideology”.
Last week, Mr Polanski was condemned across the political spectrum for sharing a social media post criticising the police after officers kicked the Golders Green suspect in the head during his arrest. Two Jewish men were stabbed during last Wednesday’s attack in north London.
On Wednesday night, Mr Polanski was asked during an interview with ITV’s Robert Peston whether he believed Israel had a right to exist.
Told by Peston that the question had “enormous importance in the Jewish community”, Mr Polanski responded: “I don’t believe any country has a right to exist.
“People have a right to exist, the Israelis have a right to exist, the Palestinians have a right to exist. And I think it’s our role as a third country to make sure that there’s fairness and transparency and accountability about a peace process.
“I always think these semantics about whether a country has a right to exist actually just ends up in gatekeeping, which is partly how we ended up in this mess in the first place with the Balfour Declaration.”
The Balfour Declaration was signed in 1917 and led to British rule of Palestine, laying the foundations for the modern state of Israel. The Israeli state was officially established in 1948 in the wake of the Second World War under a partition plan drawn up by the UN.
Mr Polanski did not challenge Peston when he replied that the “implication” of his argument was that Britain had no right to exist either.
The Green leader also repeated his claim that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, despite the host questioning whether it was responsible for him to pre-judge a legal issue.
The Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism in the UK, recorded its second-highest annual total of incidents ever reported to the charity in 2025.
However, Mr Polanski has refused to apologise for his suggestion in recent weeks that there was only a “perception of unsafety” among the Jewish community.
On Wednesday, he went further by claiming that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was making Jewish people feel less safe.
Mr Polanski said: “Now, we know you can perfectly well speak up for Palestinian people as I have and not be anti-Semitic. I also accept that often those lines can get blurred.
“But I think people like Benjamin Netanyahu, who have made a point of conflating anti-Semitism and criticism of the Israeli government, have actually made many of us, I feel this, less safe in this country.
“Because we’ve lost that demarcation of, it’s different being a British Jew and someone who doesn’t support the Israeli government.”
Polls conducted before Thursday’s local elections suggested that the Greens were on track to win hundreds of council seats across England.
The party has surged in both membership numbers and Westminster voting intention polls since Mr Polanski became party leader last September.
However, more recent surveys indicated that his reaction to the Golders Green attacks had made him more unpopular than ever.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, took the rare step of writing to Mr Polanski, accusing him of sharing an “inaccurate and misinformed” social media post about the treatment of the suspect.
Mr Polanski shared a post on X that attacked officers for kicking Essa Suleiman, who has since been charged with the attempted murder of Moshi Shine, Shloime Rand and Ishmail Hussein, a long-term friend, who he allegedly attacked in Southwark earlier that day.
The Green leader later apologised, but as recently as Wednesday he suggested he had been “traumatised” by the video of Mr Suleiman being kicked.
He also wrongly claimed that Mr Suleiman had been “handcuffed”. When challenged on that remark by Peston, Mr Polanski said he had used the wrong word but insisted nobody was “perfect” and that party leaders were “fallible”.
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This week, Mr Polanski also admitted he was wrong to claim that he was a spokesman for the British Red Cross.
He conceded he had “used the wrong word” during his campaign to become deputy leader of the party in 2022 after the Red Cross contacted the Greens’ leadership team over the claim.
