Mick Hartley

Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph, on Zack Polanski’s latest stunt for the benefit of his new carefully cultivated Green constituency of Jew haters:

I’ll 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 party’s poll ratings – and thus electoral success – 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 Greens’ 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 “get out of jail free card” when the Greens’ professed anti-Zionism slips into accusations of barely disguised anti-Semitism.

But even by Polanski’s 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 – a list, in other words, of bad Jews – 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 “public safety and justice” to “track the movements of Brits who have served in the IDF” and “subject them to secondary screening where necessary at ports of entry”. Britons, that is, who just happen to be Jews.

Israel has national service, and all Israeli citizens (with the exception – which is deeply controversial in Israel – 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. “Nobody wants to live next to a potential war criminal,” 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.

As Pollard goes on to point out, no other dual nationals are mentioned – Pakistanis from the brutal 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, or Chinese tainted by the Uighur cultural genocide. Just Jews.

Why not make it easier, and just get Jews here to wear yellow stars?…