London Jewish man beaten after confronting activists over graffiti calling Labour candidate a ‘puppet of genocidal Israel’

A Jewish man says he was beaten when he confronted activists spraying anti-Israel graffiti in London.

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

The incident took place in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency, where voters will go to the polls today as Green Party leader Zack Polanksi tries to win the seat vacated by former UK prime minister Keir Starmer.

“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 tells 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 says.

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

The Jewish News reports that London police are treating the incident as an antisemitic hate crime.

Levene says that he believes that the graffiti was linked to the Green Party’s passing of a vote earlier this week declaring Zionism to be racist.

“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 tells the Jewish News.

???????? London, October 6: Proudly Jewish Dan Levene, 52, was kicked in the head and ribs after stopping two men stencilling an antisemitic slur on Queen Square cobbles. Met is treating it as an antisemitic hate crime.https://t.co/pxQjgmJ7q1 pic.twitter.com/pdNsiitYLg

— CAM Alerts (@Alerts_CAM) October 7, 2026