For those still paying attention to the evil mischief indulged in and spread by the anti-Zionism-obsessed Green party, a sizeable 30 of whose local election candidates were investigated over anti-Semitic comments on social media in the run-up to the election, there are a panoply of moments to choose from. Zack Polanski reposting an image of a beardy Green party man last week wearing a t-shirt suggesting that Nigel Farage should perhaps be guillotined is one.
Another, arguably veering closer towards farce – albeit morally demented, troubling farce – was the announcement by the Green party’s pink-fringed mayor of Hackney Zoe Garbett, that the deadline for a longed-for discussion on ending the borough’s twinning with Haifa, a relationship that dates back to 1968, would be … October 7. This, of course, is the anniversary of Hamas’s nearly successful attempted second Holocaust, when 1,200 people in Israel were murdered and 250 taken hostage in 2023. It is thought that Garbett has made this de-twinning a priority after meetings with the activist group Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who are closely aligned with the Greens.
The grotesque offensiveness of the dim but ruthless Garbett and her party is almost drowned out by their absurdity. First, for a party that lives in the trenches on behalf of victims and the dispossessed, whose sensitivity to those who have been done wrong (in their eyes) is so extreme it blots out any talk of the actual environment, it is really something to see how precisely the exact opposite rules apply to the Jews.
We have suffered a great deal from the space and time we have to indulge in luxury beliefs
Then again, the Greens have spent so much time organising and evangelising about the baby-slaughtering, famine-mongering genocidal nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza and beyond since 7 October that to them it must now be either a non-date, or only a key date in a calendar exclusively concerned with measuring Israeli brutality. The massacre of Jews, including babies, on that day by an increasingly global, expansionist army of terminator terrorists is at any rate so unimportant, or unreal, to Polanksi’s Greens that they lack the reflex that would have caused them to blink twice at choosing 7 October for a deadline such as this. Garbett has now apologised for her ‘deeply regretful oversight’ and changed the deadline to October 14.
The target of all this plotting to de-twin is also amusing, since, as has been widely pointed out, Haifia is Israel’s most harmoniously religiously diverse city. Its population boasts a level of integration between Muslims and Jews that Hackney, or any city in the UK or Europe really, could only dream of (the wider Haifa region is 21.4 per cent Muslim), especially given the post-7 October social and political strain in Israel. It is Hackney, not Haifa, which stands to lose by severance of its twin, for I highly doubt Haifa cares much in any case: with a multifront war ongoing, one rather assumes its politicians have other fish to fry.
We have suffered a great deal from the space and time we have to indulge in luxury beliefs. Devoting resources to debating twin cities is about as luxury as it gets. There is no material change afoot; it is entirely symbolic. The twinning had meant some exchange between medical staff at Homerton and Rambam hospitals, but this lapsed during Covid. I can’t find any reports of the Haifa mayor, Yona Yahav, having any response to Garbett’s weird attempted snub, because it won’t be noticed. By anyone.
Yet the pressing urge to de-twin from Haifa dominated the first full Hackney Council meeting. Councillor Sam Mathys insisted that the International Court of Justice said it was ‘plausible’ Israel had committed genocide in Gaza (as if real genocide is the kind of thing you might mistake for non-genocide) and that:
It is is our responsibility as a Green-led council to ensure that our institutional relationships are consistent with our values and commitment to human rights, international law, justice and international solidarity.
Hackney has the highest density of diaspora Haredi Jewish residents outside New York (6.5 per cent of the population of Hackney is Jewish), with six Jewish councillors, all for the Conservatives, and nine Labour councillors. Simche Steinberger, a Conservative councillor, made the obvious point that the council is not elected to play national or international politics. ‘It’s being very naive using the council’s money for such a thing,’ he said.
I find it very upsetting that this has been brought here to the council, because it’s actually depriving our residents. There are so many issues to be dealt with. There’s the issue with housing, with planning, with road closures. Is this why we got elected? To de-twin? Since they say they’ve got a mandate, I think they should go back to all these residents and ask them, is this their priority? Or is the priority mending their flats?
Even Ben Lucas, a Labour councillor, questioned whether de-twinning from Haifa was really where the mayor’s top priorities ought to lie. But Garbett, typical of her clan, is not to be deterred. Not one bit. The symbolism of ‘global justice’ is everything.
‘We need to deliver improvements to people’s everyday lives,’ she said before inserting a ‘but’ that speaks volumes. ‘But I’m also here to use my voice to call on what I think needs to change nationally and globally. And I’m not going to shy away from doing that.’ One wonders what the next treat is in store for the Jews of Hackney under such leadership.
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