Another case study in the antisemitism scam: Guardian attacks Polanski

Straight after a German case study on the antisemitism scam this week in the German press, comes another closer to home. In the Guardian, unsurprisingly.

In it the German ‘antisemitism commissioner’ and the Israeli ambassador claimed the commissioner had been the victim of an ‘antisemitic’ arson attack by the ‘terrorist’ Palestine solidarity movement. It turned out that antisemitism had nothing to do with it — the two men accused of starting the fire are mates and business partners of… the antisemitism commissioner. None of the German scammers have retracted their smears, of course.

UK media is part of the political establishment

The UK media and political establishment (and apparently the Met Police) are desperate to derail the Green Party’s political surge in the run-up to next week’s local elections. So they’ve been wheeling out all the old tricks of the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam against the Greens and party leader Zack Polanski. Polanski is Jewish, but attacking Jews must be ok if he’s a leftie, since they’re all at it — including Labour Friends of Genocide’s worst horrors.

Including the Guardian, which was one of the worst offenders in the first series starring Jeremy Corbyn. But being the Guardian, the hit-piece has to be dressed up a bit and all that. So instead of the outright smears of the openly right-wing rags, the Guardian’s comes in costume, cosplaying a ‘both sides’ ‘balanced’ piece. But of course, it isn’t really.

In 2019, the BBC put out a blatant anti-Labour hit-job titled “Is Labour antisemitic”. That programme edited quotes from emails sent by Corbyn’s team to make them look bad, completely changing the meaning of the originals. But it also wheeled out a string of ‘victims’ of supposed ‘Labour antisemitism‘. They all stared wistfully into space as they made their claims. And they were all, every one of them, die-hard Corbyn-haters — and staunch supporters of Israel. At least one had worked in the Israeli embassy.

Panorama ‘forgot’ to mention that little fact. The programme completely misled viewers. The BBC marked its own homework and decided that those who complained about the programme were wrong.

Guardian — start as you mean to smear on

So to the Guardian. Its own hit-piece starts with a quote from a “Green party member for more than 30 years”, Elise Benjamin. It claims that Benjamin “admits to bittersweet feelings” about the Greens’ electoral surge and notes that she was “involved in drawing up the party’s guidance on antisemitism”. So Ms Benjamin isn’t altogether sure she’s happy the Greens are doing well. That should be a red flag — but the article, unsurprisingly, skims past it and then quotes her calling for a “review” of the guidance:

Now that we have such a large membership, I think there needs to be an urgent review of how to make our complaints process fit for purpose.

She doesn’t say what ‘purpose’ it needs to be fit for. The Guardian doesn’t ask. Nor does it wonder what she might mean — at least not enough to actually do any journalism on it and dig a bit. Maybe the writers already knew, maybe not. But Ms Benjamin is not the neutral, wistful commenter she might have been presented as. Her claims that anti-Zionist Greens are similar to the far right is quoted, but never scrutinised.

You see, Elise Benjamin is a committed supporter of Israel.

On her X profile, she describes herself as an “Indigenous Judean”. “Judea and Samaria” is the term used by settler-extremists to describe the occupied West Bank that Israel is continuing to rapidly steal from its Palestinian owners.

Transparent motives

Ok, so far so bad. But then you look at what’s in her X feed and it’s all even further downhill. For example, she reposts a post by Nicole Lampert, one of the ‘usual suspects’ of the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam. The post contains a screaming headline about ‘Jew hate’ in the UK:

Life for Jews in the UK…#NeverAgainIsNow https://t.co/7zKs6qFJhf

— Elise Benjamin 🇺🇦 (@EliseDB) May 1, 2026

Ms Benjamin is right on board with the campaign to outlaw anti-genocide marches, as she makes clear in another repost of Lampert that wants marches banned, but “so much more” too:

Absolutely this…#NeverAgainIsNow https://t.co/az17MA6caW

— Elise Benjamin 🇺🇦 (@EliseDB) May 1, 2026

She’s perfectly happy to quote the Israeli propaganda account mistitled ‘Honest Reporting’ for a bit more moral-panic-whipping:

#NeverAgainIsNow https://t.co/PlDmyiDtD3

— Elise Benjamin 🇺🇦 (@EliseDB) April 30, 2026

And she’s more than willing to claim that Israel didn’t really drive out 800,000 Palestinians in the Nakba to steal their land. That’s just ‘Iran-backed propaganda’:

So many people believe Iran backed propaganda. They need to read this. https://t.co/SJbIMFJuKk

— Elise Benjamin 🇺🇦 (@EliseDB) April 30, 2026

But Benjamin’s efforts for Israel are not just on X. She was one of the main agitators sabotaging the recent Green party conference motion that would have declared Zionism as the racist ideology it is:

Elisa Benjamin, a founder of Jewish Greens, is encouraging party members to back the emergency motion, which must secure 50 co-proposers to be debated on Saturday afternoon following the main motions.

She is hopeful that the antizionist motion will not pass.

But a pre-conference workshop held online on Tuesday attracted some 120 people, which Benjamin said was “worrying because there could be block voting going on.

“But even if [the antizionist motion] doesn’t get through, I hope it’s a wake-up call. Some of us have been trying to warn the party for two years now about this shift,” she said. …

… The antizionist motion “dehumanises” her and undermines the party’s values of non-violence and equality, she went on. “It shouldn’t even be on the conference floor.

“We are fighting for our identity,” she added, stating that she was “disgusted” by claims from some party members that opposition to the antizionist motion was driven by an “Israel lobby”. …

… Polanski has indicated he might support the motion if it referred specifically to the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, but Benjamin dismissed this as “a cop-out”. … It feels very hollow – almost like a bereavement,” she said, referring to the party’s recent surge in the polls.”

Silence speaks volumes

And in March, Benjamin was interviewed by former Labour Israel advocate Yvonne Maxwell in a training session on how to resist ‘antisemitism’ in the Green party. Maxwell has called the UN’s humanitarian special rapporteur Francesca Albanese a “vile woman”. The very premise of the discussion reinforced the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam, claiming that:

changes in left wing party politics … led to problems of antisemitism in the Labour Party, primarily during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

In March 2024, long before Polanski was party leader, Ieuan Einion described Benjamin as having:

a long track record of slinging mud at Corbyn. I wrote to a friend of mine who is a senior Green complaining about her downright lies in 2022. His response was “what do you expect, she’s a politician, her job is to attack other parties.”

None of this was hard to dig out, along with much more that would make this article too long to read. The fact that the Guardian article omits all of it and interprets everything that follows. Like the fruit of the poisoned tree, any ‘both-sidesing’ that flows from it becomes mere window-dressing: an attempt to avoid being seen as the hit-piece it is.

The nod to Israel’s genocide — window dressing. The equivalence drawn between the ‘necessary struggle’ of European Zionists to take ‘their’ ‘Jewish homeland’ from the people whose land it actually was: background scenery painted in disgustingly colonial colours. Chat about Polanski’s broad support and electoral successes so far — just padding to hide the barbs.

Guardian’s both-sidesing is complicity

And even in that, the dishonesty stinks to heaven: the fact that Zionism means the forcible expulsion of the Palestinians from their land is only “seen” as inevitable. “Critics” of Israel say the two are inextricably linked, but it is not acknowledged as the obvious inevitability it unquestionably is.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not presented as genocide — despite the findings of the UN, World Court, human rights groups and genocide experts that it is genocide. Instead, “the party’s willingness to describe Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide” is not a stand on established fact. It is treated as some kind of electoral blunder that:

has opened a space for bad-faith attacks from opponents … and [for] voters [to] be sceptical about criticisms that they see as eliding the two subjects.

And, of course, the last word is given to Polanski’s — and the anti-genocide movement’s — opponents, to make sure readers who plough through to the end get the right takeaway. An unnamed critic of the Greens’ opposition to genocide is quoted; so also the ‘apology’ to him from Adrian Ramsay.

The obvious point is that Ramsay has no business apologising on behalf of a party that just resoundingly rejected him as a potential leader in favour of Polanski. But — naturally — that point is only conspicuous by its absence.

A mistake that must not be repeated

In its own way, the Guardian’s hit job is just as prime an example of the way the Israel lobby is trying to transfer its ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam to the Greens as any right-wing rag’s and any Israel-bought politician’s. Polanski made the mistake this week of validating the tactic by allowing himself to be pushed into apologising for the ‘crime’ of objecting to police brutality against a mentally-collapsed and immobilised man because the Israel lobby demanded it.

The tactics are transparent, and only get more so the closer you look — they work only because the ‘mainstream’ press never looks. Polanski knows this and apologised to Corbyn for falling for them prior to 2019. He can’t afford to make the same mistake he did this week — and Corbyn made in during his era — again.

Featured image via the Canary