Broadly speaking, the general attitude on the British left towards the slightly surprising rise of the Greens has been positive. Everyone’s favourite student Leninist vanguard are open to discussion and the SWP are offering olive branches.

There are two exceptions of note.

Zarah Sultana, the co-leader of Your Party, has decided that a party which recently voted to designate the IDF as a terrorist organisation, a view not widely shared in the official political class, and whose leading figures have consistently been describing what the Israeli state is doing in Gaza as genocide, is dodgy on the question of Palestine.

Her basis for this argument is that the Greens haven’t committed to breaking off diplomatic relations with Israel. This has not been a demand which has been much highlighted in the last two years and seems like a sudden and arbitrary dividing line.

However, it was amplified by John Rees of Counterfire, the People’s Assembly (PA) and the Stop The War Coalition (STWC). I know nothing of the inner workings of Counterfire but the other two groups do have a similarity in organisational styles involving a permanent and immovable leadership and a close relationship to Jeremy Corbyn (76).

Zack Polanski (42) is a generation younger than Corbyn and has emerged as leader of a functioning political party with clear decision making processes, a rapidly growing membership and which is now seen as a major left force. Moreover, none of its prominent figures suggested that the best response to fascists on the streets of London was for anti-fascists to stay at home and ignore them. The Greens told people to get out and face them down.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained for the left by elevating third order hypothetical tactical questions to matters of principle. When the happy day comes when Zarah Sultana or Zack Polanski are sitting in Downing Street and need to make a decision on an embassy in Tel Aviv, we can have the argument. In the meantime let’s just enjoy the fact that for the first time in living memory there are two left organisations attracting large numbers of people who agree on most things.