Anti-Israel Greens Win UK Mayoralties Amid Active Antisemitism Scandals — Reform Elects Holocaust Denier

The UK’s anti-Israel Green Party — which entered this election with 25 candidates named for antisemitic posts and an active internal investigation — won two mayoralties and four council seats in Thursday’s local elections, including Hackney in London, home to a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Farage’s hard-right Reform Party is projected to become the largest party in Parliament following sweeping gains, and a Reform UK candidate who called the Holocaust a ‘hoax’ and ‘propaganda’ won a council seat in Merseyside. Labour was routed.

• Green Party wins mayoralty in Hackney, a borough with one of the UK’s largest ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations, despite 25 Green candidates having been named for antisemitic social media posts before the election.
• Reform UK elected a Holocaust denier — a candidate who publicly described the Holocaust as a ‘hoax’ and ‘propaganda’ — to a council seat in Merseyside, raising immediate questions about party vetting.
• Nigel Farage’s Reform is now projected to become the largest single party in Parliament based on local election results, representing a seismic shift in UK politics away from both Labour and Conservatives.
• Jewish community leaders warned that both electoral surges — from the anti-Israel left and the antisemitic hard right — represent a twin threat to British Jews unprecedented in the post-war era.
• Labour collapsed in both strongholds, losing to Reform in traditional working-class areas and to the Greens in progressive urban centers — squeezed from both flanks.

The simultaneous rise of an antisemitism-engulfed Green Party and a Holocaust-denier-tolerating Reform Party represents the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred at opposite ends of the UK political spectrum. The precedent is directly relevant to American politics: the same ideological forces — progressive anti-Zionism on the left, white nationalist conspiracism on the right — are fracturing U.S. party coalitions, and the UK results suggest neither flank self-corrects under electoral pressure. The question for 2026 U.S. midterms is whether Democratic and Republican party apparatuses draw the line the way the UK parties conspicuously failed to.

Someone dropped stink bomb vials at George Washington University’s Israel Fest event on April 27, injuring at least one Jewish student; GWU is now investigating whether the targeting was hate-motivated. Separately, new anti-Israel encampments have returned at Smith and Occidental Colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education opened a probe into Bay District Schools in Florida over ‘particularly egregious’ antisemitism failures including students performing Nazi salutes.

• GWU confirmed the vials were stink bombs and opened a hate-crime investigation to determine whether the Jewish students were targeted because of their faith — at least one student was injured.
• New encampments at Smith and Occidental Colleges mark the return of Tentifada-style campus occupation, with SJP’s ‘People’s University’ model revived for a third academic year.
• The DOE is investigating Bay District Schools in Florida — nearly 30,000 students across 50 schools — for failing to address students performing Nazi salutes, wearing kippahs mockingly, and sharing antisemitic imagery during class.

The GWU incident is the clearest indicator yet that campus anti-Israel harassment is escalating from intimidation to physical disruption — stink bombs are a chemical attack on a Jewish event, regardless of their classification. The simultaneous return of encampments and a new federal antisemitism enforcement action signal that the post-2024 enforcement deterrent has not neutralized the underlying movement; it has forced a tactical adaptation.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul confirmed Thursday to Jewish community leaders that New York will opt into the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit — a dollar-for-dollar credit of up to $1,700 annually for donations to scholarship-granting organizations — making New York only the second Democrat-led state to adopt the program. The announcement was first made at a private meeting with Agudath Israel, representing a direct win for yeshivas and Jewish day schools that have long sought state-level funding pathways.

• Starting in 2027, New York donors can claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit of up to $1,700 for contributions to approved Scholarship Granting Organizations benefiting private and religious schools.
• Hochul made the announcement privately at a meeting with Agudath Israel before any public statement — a signal of the political weight she assigns to Orthodox community support heading into a competitive midterm environment.
• 27 states, nearly all Republican-led, have opted in; New York’s participation as a blue-state exception breaks new political ground and creates pressure on other Democratic governors.

Hochul's embrace of the Education Freedom Tax Credit in a private meeting with Orthodox Jewish leadership is a deliberate political signal — she is buying community goodwill ahead of what promises to be a bruising 2026 cycle. For yeshivas and day schools, the practical funding benefit is real; the political meaning is that the Orthodox vote in New York is being actively courted by Democrats who cannot afford to lose it.

A new analysis published Friday found that more than two months of U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran have killed key personnel, destroyed critical infrastructure, and severely set back Tehran’s nuclear weaponization capabilities. Trump separately announced the end of Operation Epic Fury and a pause on ‘Project Freedom,’ while Iran continued to stall on the U.S. peace proposal and the Strait of Hormuz remains contested.

• U.S.-Israeli strikes have killed personnel central to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and ‘crippled essential infrastructure,’ according to a new strategic analysis — satellite imagery confirms the assessment.
• Trump declared the end of Operation Epic Fury but launched ‘Project Freedom Plus’ as a threat if Iran fails to engage meaningfully; Iran’s foreign ministry says Tehran is still reviewing the U.S. proposal.
• Hezbollah’s main funding arm, Al-Qard Al-Hasan, has resumed operations in Beirut despite IDF strikes on 30 of its branches — indicating Iran’s proxies retain funding resilience even as the main regime is degraded.
• U.S. intelligence assesses Iran’s new supreme leader remains isolated and wounded, communicating only through in-person meetings or couriers, but still playing a ‘critical role’ in shaping war strategy.

The nuclear weaponization damage report is the most substantive strategic indicator since the strikes began: if the assessment holds, the U.S.-Israeli operation has achieved a key objective that sanctions and diplomacy never did. The simultaneous Hezbollah proxy resilience data is the counterfactual — regime degradation does not automatically translate to proxy network collapse, and a nuclear deal without proxy restrictions remains strategically hollow regardless of the headline.