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This is a guest essay written by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Rachel Timoner, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer’s “rabbi,” had spent the years since October 7th denouncing Israel.
The trendy leftist clergywoman had been active with anti-Israel groups such as J Street and T’ruah, and had co-founded the leftist New York Jewish Agenda alongside Sharon Kleinbaum, who had faced an exodus from her “temple” after saying prayers for Hamas terrorists.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to speak at the United Nations last month, Timoner addressed a rally “to demand that Netanyahu be held accountable for his war crimes.” She went so far as to blame antisemitic attacks on Jews by Muslims, including a Muslim terror attack meant to kill Jewish preschoolers, on the Israeli leader.
It was, she said, “utterly unacceptable to take out one’s anger at Netanyahu on American Jews in any way — but Bibi Netanyahu’s victims include Jewish parents across America who are afraid of what might happen to our children because of antisemitic violence in response to his actions.”
Yet no matter what Timoner did, her political allies came for her anyway. A local elementary school dropped its 50-year relationship with her temple over Israel, leaving the rabbi bewildered.
“This decision was made without anyone at the school reaching out to us as neighbors to talk about their concerns or to see whether their assumptions about us were right, or even tell us that they were severing this tie,” Timoner complained to her congregants over Yom Kippur. “That made many of us feel lonely and misunderstood.”
Timoner had gotten herself arrested protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. President Donald Trump. She had hosted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a belligerent anti-Zionist, and written an article defending BDS. You could find her screeching outside the UN and the Israeli embassy about how much she opposed Israel’s war against Hamas. By any conventional measure, she had done everything possible to establish her leftist credentials.
And yet, when confronted with the consequences of her political alliances, Timoner found herself pleading for understanding.
“We need to quietly and gently approach and say, ‘Let me tell you why this hurts. Please don’t make assumptions about us,’” she urged, following a meeting where she no doubt laid out her leftist bona fides and her unyielding support for the entire leftist platform, even against Israel.
As they used to say, “By me you’re Park Avenue, by them you’re Fourth Avenue.”
Timoner is hardly alone. Her political ally, U.S. congressional candidate Brad Lander, had slimed his way to winning June’s primary by embracing Mamdani to oust a pro-Israel candidate. Lander had turned against Israel and Jews, delivered prayers at a mosque where the imam prayed for the death of non-Muslims, and showed up to support a Muslim assault on a Hindu event. Yet none of that prevented him from being thrown out and accused of being a “Zionist.”
Lander, who had falsely accused Israel of “genocide,” was reduced to whining, “They are making it very difficult for me to leave. They have no right to tell me where to stand.”
Much the same thing has now unfolded in the UK’s Green Party, led by Zack Polanski, who is of Jewish descent and has copied Bernie Sanders by making the bashing of Israel central to his political identity.
Members of Polanski’s family, who no longer speak to him, have said, “He’s currently the leader of the future Islamic party of Britain,” adding that “the mad thing is that he’s gay, he’s Jewish, but he’s cosying up to people whose ideology is the complete antithesis of everything that he’s supposed to stand for. It’s like he’s a chicken, telling us to vote for KFC.”
When a Somali Muslim man stabbed two Jewish people in an attack for which Iran claimed responsibility, Polanski condemned the police officers for using force to stop the terrorist. Green Party candidates had already promoted Hamas and argued that “ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge.” But even that was apparently not enough.
A Green Party resolution was introduced by a “close friend” of an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had called for “Zionists” to be “hunted” worldwide. The resolution demanded the destruction of Israel and threatened to ban Jews from attending synagogues considered to be “Zionist.” Considering that the Bible describes the Jewish journey to and life in Israel, and that Jews pray facing Jerusalem, the designation could apply to nearly every synagogue.
The resolution passed, while an amendment protecting members from expulsion for attending synagogues labeled “Zionist” was easily defeated. Polanski endorsed the call for the destruction of the Jewish state and, by definition, what would amount to the Muslim genocide of six million Jews. Some Jewish Green Party members, however, finally announced that they would be leaving the party.
The Green Party resolution also endorsed “the right of the Palestinian people to resistance,” an implicit endorsement of terrorism, and doubled down on that position by calling for the release of Islamic terrorists, including Marwan Barghouti, responsible for numerous killings of innocent people.
“The motion basically says Jewish members will have to decide between membership of a synagogue or of the party,” Elise Benjamin, the founder of the Jewish Greens, objected. “I don’t understand how this helps Palestinians? All this is an attack on Jews.”
The Green Party insisted that it was not engaging in antisemitism, even as its resolution included materials claiming that Zionism was “Jewish supremacy.” It also advanced the argument that the very concept of antisemitism was a Jewish conspiracy against Muslims, one that “erases the Semitic identity of Arabs and Palestinians” and is “weaponising language to privilege one group’s suffering while denying recognition to others who share the same Semitic heritage.”
The reaction from some of Britain’s anti-Israel Jewish establishment was revealing.
Yachad UK, an anti-Israel group that had pressed the Labour government for a harsher crackdown on Israel, defended BDS and defended the harassment of synagogues. Its leader, Hannah Weisfeld, had run a virtually nonstop feed of anti-Israel propaganda.
After the Green Party’s resolution, however, Yachad suddenly complained that “telling Jews they are acceptable only if they give up that understanding of collective Jewish identity, is not, as some have sought to explain it away, an attack on a political ideology. It is an attack on Jewish identity.”
The chair of Amnesty International, which had falsely accused Israel of “genocide” and tried to suppress a report about Hamas atrocities, also announced that he was leaving the Green Party. His complaint was that “in seeking to court the hard-Left vote, we have failed to confront prejudice when it appears on our own side.”
Then there were Charley Baginsky, the pink-haired lesbian co-leader of “Progressive Judaism UK,” and its other co-leader, Josh Levy. The two had been booed off the stage at a pro-Israel rally after calling for a deal with Hamas and a terror state. Baginsky had also attended a rally protesting against the war. But after the Green Party vote, the two issued a statement declaring that “the Green Party has made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party.”
And that was how it was always going to end. The campaign against Israel was never about self-determination; if that were the goal, the Oslo Accords would not have been followed by terrorism. Nor was it simply about Israel. If it were, anti-Israel activists and synagogues that happen to be Jewish would not find themselves under attack.
The issue was never really a “Palestinian state.” Or even Israel itself. It was about creating a permission structure for antisemitism, one that would normalize Islamic and radical leftist violence.
What has been happening to anti-Israel Jews is neither a mistake nor a misunderstanding. It is the point. Jews who try to become part of an anti-Israel movement eventually reach one of two destinations: Either its antisemitism becomes too much even for them, or their role is finally explained to them with a proverbial bullet to the head. No matter how hard they try to be more antisemitic than the antisemites, they cannot escape the fact that they are still Jews.
History has already shown us where this road leads. In the USSR, Jewish communists helped the regime persecute Jews, shut down synagogues, and kill “Zionists.” Then, in turn, they were arrested, tried, and murdered by the very Soviet regime they had helped empower.
There is no safety or security to be found in collaboration. The collaborators are simply the last to go.
These collaborators should be the FIRST to go. They’re endangering the rest of us.
And anyone who still thinks the Jew-hatred is about Netanyahu, Likud, or Trump is, to be kind, an utter fool.
If Trotsky has been a Zionist he would have died a pioneer, not brutally murdered in exile by his former comrade.
https://popularlogistics.com/2026/09/if-trotsky-had-been-a-zionist/