Zack Polanski, leader of Britain’s Green Party, is at the center of a public controversy after historical records contradicted his account of his ancestors fleeing the Nazis. The party has made headlines in recent days after passing a motion declaring Zionism to be racism and following revelations that one of its members is a close friend of an al-Qaeda terrorist.
In his keynote speech at the party conference in Bournemouth last year, Polanski, 43, said his Jewish ancestors fled pogroms in Latvia and Ukraine, made their way to Nazi-occupied Poland and ultimately escaped to England, where they encountered antisemitism. However, a review of public birth, marriage and census records from 1891 and 1901 found that his family had settled in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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'Jewish history can sometimes be confusing.' Zack Polanski
(Photo: Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images)
Despite the records, Polanski repeated the story of his family fleeing the Nazis on several occasions, including on “The Rest Is Politics” podcast and the BBC’s “Question Time” in December. The Daily Mail reported that the mystery deepened last month when Polanski himself acknowledged, during a podcast interview with Iain Dale, that his great-grandparents had arrived in Britain “way before the Second World War.”
In the same interview, he said they changed their surname from Polanski to Paulden to escape antisemitism in Britain, not the Nazis. Polanski, who was born David Paulden in 1982, changed his name to Zack Polanski to reconnect with his Jewish heritage and distance himself from his stepfather.
The Green Party declined to explain the discrepancy to the Daily Mail. A party spokesperson said that “Jewish family history is often confusing and muddled, as Zack has acknowledged” adding that “it’s astonishing that the only current Jewish leader of a British political party is having his family history raked over by the press in an attempt to discredit him.”
The controversy comes as the Green Party opens its 2026 conference in Brighton and less than a week before Polanski is due to contest a parliamentary election in Holborn and St Pancras in north London, a seat held by Labour since 1983 and previously represented by Keir Starmer, who stepped down as prime minister.
This is not the first time Polanski, who serves as a member of the London Assembly and earns nearly £66,500 ($88,000) a year, has faced scrutiny over contradictory statements. Earlier this year, he apologized for an “unintentional mistake” after failing to pay council tax on a residential property because of “financial hardship.”
In May, he admitted that he had not voted in local elections because he was not registered to vote, despite publicly promising his party’s candidate that he would vote for him. His spokesperson had claimed he had done so by postal ballot. The party attributed the incidents to a “misunderstanding.”
Anti-Zionism and ties to terrorists
The Green Party on Sunday approved a controversial motion declaring Zionism a form of racism. The wording of the motion implies a call for the effective elimination of the State of Israel. In response, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar decided to bar Polanski from entering Israel.
The approved motion calls for the establishment of “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.” It also calls for a sweeping boycott of Israel and broad sanctions similar to those imposed on South Africa’s apartheid regime, arguing that “Zionism has created, and seeks to maintain and, where possible, expand, a system of apartheid between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
Lubna Speitan
(Photo: Gary Roberts / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect)
On Tuesday, Britain’s Telegraph reported that party member Lubna Speitan, who spearheaded the motion, is a close friend of an al-Qaeda terrorist who plotted a suicide attack at Heathrow Airport that was intended to kill hundreds of people, with a particular focus on passengers arriving from Israel or the United States.
According to the report, Speitan had previously offered to testify in defense of the terrorist, Minh Quang Pham, who was convicted in the United States of membership in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, and of plotting the attack. Court documents from 2015 described her as a “close friend” of his.
Speitan has previously said Hamas should not be designated a terrorist organization. She has also called for Zionism to be “dismantled from the world” and said the time would come when Zionists would be “hunted down as the Nazi oppressors were hunted down.”
When initially asked about her relationship with the terrorist, Speitan called the question “insulting” and said it had “no relation to the work that I’m doing.” She accused the “mainstream media” of seeking to “demonise” Palestinians and suggested that Pham had been wrongfully accused.
Asked about his 44-year prison sentence, she said: “People are demonised for all sorts of things and wrongfully accused of all sorts of things.”