Why are the Greens using the local elections to attack Israel?

In putting an attack on Israel front and centre of his party’s local election launch, you would think Zack Polanski was campaigning abroad. Traditionally, English town hall elections were about nothing more exotic than bin collection schedules, the scourge of dog muck and the height of your neighbours’ leylandii. All of a sudden, international trade is on the agenda. Well, trade with one country specifically. Quite why Polanski’s call to tear up the UK-Israel trade agreement would appeal to an electorate that has never shown any municipal interest in the matter before now is a mystery. Truly, the English are a fickle lot.

Of course, everyone knows what Polanski is up to. Wrecking Britain’s trade with Jerusalem will appeal to young progressives who know Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza because a Qatari-funded influencer on TikTok told them so, but these people can be relied upon to turn out for the Greens anyway. No, Polanski’s message is to a new section of his party’s coalition, a faction which proved most helpful in Gorton and Denton and which the Greens are now explicitly pitching themselves to. If demagoguing about Israel worked in the by-election, it’s worth trying it again for the locals.

The ballot might be secret in this country but it does not follow that the vote is a strictly private transaction between elector and elected. Playing the Zionism card in the hopes that it will secure the support of Muslim voters is a sectarian strategy with societal consequences. It escalates the growth of communalism and weakens what remains of national cohesion in this country. A political party that appeals to holders of British citizenship not as Britons but as a religious or ethnic grouping, and on the affairs of their co-religionists overseas rather than any matter native to the UK, is engaged in the fracturing of our social contract for their own political advantage.

The Greens’ Israel-centric council election campaign is the inevitable product of a toxic doctrine posing as pluralism and tolerance. Britain is a successful multi-racial country but the gravest threat to multi-racialism is the grievance-based, resentment-stoking, segregation-encouraging multiculturalism peddled by the Greens and those like them. In addressing Britons as interested parties in religious, ethnic and cultural conflicts half a world away and several generations ago, parties like the Greens make it all the more difficult for Britain to cohere as a multi-racial liberal democracy. They prefer to pander to sectarianism and identity politics instead. They should be careful what they wish for.