More on...well, you know. Melanie Phillips in the Times (£):

The current uproar over antisemitism is truly a wonder to behold. For the past three decades and more, antisemitism was the prejudice that dared not speak its name. It was deemed to have been stamped out, other than among cranks on the far right.

Anyone rash enough to protest that the anti-Israel animus in progressive circles was a mutation of ancient Jew-hatred was told they were “waving the shroud of the Holocaust” to sanitise the crimes of Israel. There could be no connection. The left was institutionally anti-racist, wasn’t it?

On the contrary, the left is institutionally anti-Israel and the connection is irrefutable. For sure, many who loathe Israel may not be hostile to Jews as people. Nevertheless the narrative of Israel to which they subscribe is inescapably anti-Jew....

Among the educated classes, Israel, the target of decades of Arab exterminatory aggression, is almost universally presented as the villain and the Palestinians as its victims. Israel is held to be responsible for the absence of a Palestine state and thus the obstacle to solving the Middle East conflict.

The fact that the Arabs turned down proposals or offers of a Palestine state alongside Israel in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, responding instead with terrorism or war, is ignored. The repeated statements of the Palestinian leadership that its real aim is to capture all of Israel are also ignored. It is never reported how the Palestinian Authority-controlled media and educational materials routinely incite Palestinian children to hate Jews, murder Israelis and capture every Israeli city.

Instead, Britain is told that the Israelis are child-killers. During the 2014 war in Gaza, when Israel finally responded to years of rocket attacks by launching airstrikes against Hamas, broadcast and print media claimed Israel was recklessly or deliberately killing hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians.

In fact, as the High Level Military Group of western top brass told the UN last year, the lengths to which Israel went to try to protect Gaza’s civilians far exceeded the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, even at the cost of its own soldiers’ and civilians’ lives, and going further than any other nation’s army would ever do.

Yet the British public had been told, virtually without contradiction, that Israel had wantonly killed hundreds of children. Among those on the left now vowing to root out antisemitism, I didn’t notice any of them rushing to condemn that particular blood libel.

Last year, the Islamic adviser to Mahmoud Abbas taught on Palestinian Authority TV that Jews throughout history have represented “falsehood . . . evil . . . the devils and their supporters . . . the satans and their supporters”. The Palestinian Authority daily published an opinion article claiming that Jews “are thirsty for blood to please their god (against the gentiles), and crave pockets full of money”. Children were shown on TV reciting poems portraying Jews as “most evil among creations”, “barbaric monkeys” and “Satan with a tail”.

Progressive Britain never reports any of this. Instead, it amplifies the hate in its own intellectual, cultural and media echo-chamber.

Denying the legal and historical rights of the Israeli “settlers” to the land, it demonises and dehumanises them. When they are murdered by Palestinians, this is rarely reported on the grounds that they had it coming to them. Dehumanisation of the “settlers” leads inexorably to the dehumanisation of all Jews.

Or, as Julie Burchill succinctly puts it:

And, hence, the Labour Party has found itself supporting a sexist, homophobic, nihilist death cult – Islamism – just because the majority of those who practice it are dark skinned and the majority of Jews white.

And finally, the view from Israel. Liel Leibowitz: Labour’s Anti-Semitism Issues? Sorry, Not Our Problem.

The point is this: we no longer have to plea—to the left or the right or the Islamists or the nativists or to anyone else. If Britain—or Belgium or France or Sweden for that matter—wants to hound its Jews, that’s too bad, and it would leave these countries Judenrein and scrubbed of any claim on the heritage of the Enlightenment. But try to really mess with Jews, and you’ll learn the real lesson of Zionism’s triumph: we can defend ourselves now, and, if needed, will do so with great and glorious fury.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the anti-Semites are likely to be at all dissuaded. Haters, as Jewish history has repeatedly taught us, will hate. But now that Jews have a state and an army and six decades of collective memory rich with proud moments of self-defense, the affairs of anti-Semites are now, more than ever, trivial.

That the Labour Party is being gnawed to death by anti-Jewish zealots bodes ill for the Labour Party and for Britain at large; a nation whose citizens have been decapitated in broad daylight and whose trains are exploded by crazed terrorists needs strong and principled parties to balance the demands of national security with the dictates of democracy. Remarkably, the least affected here are the Jews: if push came to shove, they’ll join their French brethren on Netanya’s beaches, not an easy move but not, all things considered, a devastating one, either.

So good luck to our British brothers in their struggle to save whatever’s left of their civil society. As they fight to preserve tolerance, diversity, justice, and all the other wonderful things that makes the United Kingdom the robust beacon of liberty it wants to believe it still is, they may want to consult recent examples of national movements that succeeded in building thriving democracies despite considerable external threats. They can begin by reading up on Zionism.

Update: And here's Alan Johnson, interviewed for Newsnight.