Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales since September 2025, faces calls to resign from within his own party after missing the conference debate and vote on a motion that defines Zionism as racism and calls for Israel to be replaced by a single Palestinian state. The motion passed. Polanski was campaigning in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, where he finished second to Labour. Vivien Lichtenstein, leader of the Jewish Greens, has directly called for Polanski's resignation. She told Times Radio that Polanski could have spoken and voted on amendments remotely — an option available to all delegates — but chose not to. She also disputed his claim to have been working with Jewish members, saying: "I don't know which Jewish members of the party he's been working with. It certainly hasn't been with the Jewish Greens committee." Caroline Lucas, the party's former leader and its first MP, stopped short of demanding resignation but offered only conditional support. "The jury is out about whether or not he will do that, but I very much hope he will. But that is a long way from full-throated support," she told Newsnight. Former co-leader Jonathan Bartley was blunter, calling the episode "a failure of leadership" and saying there is now "a certain toxicity" in the party. The structural problem runs deeper than one vote. The Greens have no formal mechanism for ejecting a leader. Polanski took over in September 2025 and will face re-election in less than a year under the party's two-year cycle. Until then, the only lever available is public pressure — which is exactly what is being applied, but with no institutional backstop. Two amendments Polanski supported, including one calling for a two-state solution, were voted down by conference delegates. The policy as adopted represents a maximalist position: Zionism equals racism, and Israel should cease to exist as a state. This is not a marginal factional document — it is now formal Green Party policy, passed through the party's democratic conference process. The episode illustrates a recurring vulnerability in small-party governance: conference floor votes can be captured by motivated factions when leadership is absent or distracted. Polanski's decision to prioritise a byelection campaign over a highly contentious policy debate handed the floor to the motion's proponents. Whether this was strategic avoidance or genuine miscalculation, the result is the same: his party adopted a policy he says he opposes, and he was not there to argue against it. The damage is now distributed across multiple dimensions. Jewish members are considering leaving. The party's former leaders are publicly distancing themselves. And Polanski holds a leadership title with diminished authority and no formal route to removal — only the slow clock of a scheduled re-election. The question is whether the party's institutional design can absorb this kind of shock, or whether the absence of a recall mechanism means the crisis simply festers until the calendar catches up.
