Greens under scrutiny as leaked messages expose internal row over antisemitism claims

Leaked WhatsApp messages from a self-described Zionist grouping inside the Green Party of England and Wales, published by The Canary on 16 July 2026, accuse the party's co-leader Zack Polanski of antisemitism and detail an internal effort to constrain pro-Palestinian voices inside the organisation.

The screenshots, drawn from a chat calling itself the "Zionist Greens," are the second tranche of leaks reported by The Canary and arrive at a delicate moment for the party: still digesting its best general election result in decades, still negotiating how it relates to a Labour government under Keir Starmer, and still managing a membership that has moved decisively leftward on foreign policy since 7 October 2023. The leaks re-open a question the Greens have spent eighteen months trying to close.

What the messages actually say

According to The Canary's read of the chat logs, members of the Zionist Greens grouping described Polanski, who is Jewish, in language that questioned his standing to speak on antisemitism. The grouping appears to have operated as a parallel channel within the party's broader structures, coordinating responses to motions and to social media posts critical of Israel. The Canary's analysis frames the exchanges as evidence of a faction organising around shared political identity on foreign-policy terrain that the party has formally treated as a matter of conscience.

The publication's account is partisan. The Canary is a left-leaning outlet with a documented editorial line sympathetic to Palestinian solidarity movements and to internal party critics of the party's leadership. Its framing of the Zionist Greens as secretive is therefore the framing of an adversary, not a neutral observer. The chat logs themselves have not been independently authenticated by a second outlet at the time of writing.

A party stretched across two axes

The Greens' post-election position is unusual. After July 2024 the party held four parliamentary seats, including Polanski's, and a council base that had grown faster than its Westminster presence. Its membership skews younger, more urban and more internationalist than Labour's, and polls taken since October 2023 have consistently shown a clear majority of members supporting a ceasefire and opposing arms sales to Israel. That sentiment put the Greens ahead of Labour's official line for most of that parliament.

Inside that membership, the question of how to define antisemitism, who adjudicates it and whether solidarity with Palestinians can coexist with the party machinery's equality and diversity safeguards has been live since at least 2021. The leaked messages slot into that older argument: a faction identifying openly as Zionist, alleging antisemitism against a co-leader who is himself Jewish, on a platform the wider party did not know existed.

Why the leaks landed now

Timing matters. Labour's landslide ended any near-term prospect of a progressive challenger party hoovering up disaffected Lib Dem and soft-Tory voters; the Greens' growth path now runs through municipal elections in May 2027 and a fight over the boundary changes already signalled by the boundary commissions. Polanski's profile, raised by a high-profile by-election and by repeated clashes with broadcasters over Gaza coverage, has made him the party's most visible electoral asset and its most exposed target.

The leaks also reach beyond the Greens. They surface, however obliquely, a question the wider British left has not settled: whether organising around a Zionist identity inside a social-democratic or green party is a defensive posture against a real rise in antisemitic incidents, a vehicle for embedding particular foreign-policy positions inside domestic parties, or both. The Canary's framing favours the third reading. The grouping's own self-description, captured in the chat name, favours the first. Neither has the evidence base to close the argument yet.

What the row is really about

Strip the rhetoric away and the dispute is over standing. Who has the authority, inside a party with a defined complaints procedure and an outside complaints procedure operated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to label a co-leader antisemitic in a chat room? Who gets to be the aggrieved party when the conversation is about a war 3,500 kilometres away, fought over by two national movements with active diaspora constituencies in Britain? The leaked messages show a faction that concluded the formal party process would not deliver the answer it wanted, and acted accordingly inside a private channel.

That is a story about party management, not theology. It is also a story about the limits of coalition politics under conditions where foreign policy has become a first-order loyalty test for the left. Until the Greens publish their own account of the leaks, or until a second outlet verifies the chat logs independently, the dominant read of what the Zionist Greens did and said will remain the read produced by an outlet that was already opposed to what they were doing.

What to watch next

The next scheduled pressure points are the party's autumn conference, where motions on Israel-Palestine are likely to test the leadership's tolerance for dissent, and any response from Polanski himself to the specific allegations in the leaked chat. The EHRC's wider work on party responses to antisemitism, including the ongoing process that began with the Labour cases in 2020, sits in the background. Until then, the conversation inside the Greens is being held, more loudly than the party would like, in public.

Desk note: Monexus has reported the leaks as a factional dispute within the Greens and has not adopted The Canary's framing of the Zionist Greens as a clandestine operation. The publication's account remains the sole source for the chat contents at the time of writing; the article above is built to be rewritten if a second outlet authenticates or contradicts the logs.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/TheCanaryUK