Jewish man says he was beaten after confronting anti-Israel vandals in London

A Jewish man said Wednesday that he was beaten during a confrontation with activists who were spraying anti-Israel graffiti in London.

Dan Levene, 52, told British media outlets that he intervened on Tuesday evening when he saw the two spraying a slogan calling Labour’s candidate in the local election, Sagal Abdi-Wali, a “puppet of genocidal Israel.”

According to Levene’s account, the pair were using a stencil for the graffiti, which he kicked away.

The incident took place in the Holborn and St. Pancras constituency, where voters went to the polls Thursday as Green Party leader Zack Polanski tried to win the seat vacated by former UK prime minister Keir Starmer. Polanski, who is Jewish, is one of the most vocal critics of Israel in British politics, and his party recently passed a motion declaring Zionism to be racism and calling for Israel to be replaced with a State of Palestine.

“I said, ‘No, you’re not doing that,’ at which point this guy got up and [it] transpired he was quite a lot larger than me. I told him what he was writing was neo-Nazi [propaganda],” Levene told The Times. “All this stuff about genocide and Israelis exerting puppetry control over people. This is the message of the Nazis that Jewish people escaped in the middle of the last century.”

“He started shouting at me and started punching me. I stood my ground and then he started kicking me in the side of my legs quite hard for about 20 seconds, clearly trying to get me down on the floor,” Levene said.

Levene told the outlet that he was then kicked to the floor, before he was punched and kicked in the head and ribs.

The altercation ended when two bystanders who witnessed the attack intervened, prompting the attackers to flee, Levene told the Jewish News.

The outlet reported that London police were treating the incident as an antisemitic hate crime.

Levene said he believes that the graffiti was linked to the Green Party’s  “Zionism is racism” motion.

“It’s exactly the type of anti-Zionist message that the Greens have adopted as policy. There have been other instances of Green activists using this or similar stenciled messages during the by-election campaign,” he told the Jewish News.

Following the confrontation, Levene uploaded a picture to X, showing a bleeding wound on his forehead.

“Thanks to all who have shown concern,” he wrote on X on Wednesday. “I’m OK. Uncomfortable night due to poss[ible] cracked rib. Bruises as you’d expect after being kicked around the pavement. All will heal. Thanks to strangers who stepped in.”

He added, “How do I know this was Green Party? This was in the literal constituency where there’s a by-election tomorrow. The messaging attacked their main opponent & used the line put into Green Party policy on Sunday. For the avoidance of doubt: the Green Party is a neo-Nazi party now.”

Abdi-Wali, who came to the UK from Somalia as a child refugee, has spent years fostering inter-community relations, including with the Jewish community, and told The Guardian last month that “if Greens stir up community antagonisms over Gaza, that would be disgraceful.”

Polanski’s party has been embroiled in a string of antisemitic scandals, with many Green candidates posting antisemitic and anti-Israel screeds on social media. Ahead of local council elections earlier this year, the Greens were reportedly investigating 30 of their own candidates for antisemitism.

The party leader himself faced a backlash earlier this year after retweeting a post criticizing police over how they arrested a knife-wielding attacker who had just stabbed two Jewish men in Golders Green, a Jewish neighborhood of London. His comments prompted a swift rebuke from London police chief Mark Rowley.