Currently, over 2,000 British servicemen are under official investigation for alleged abuses committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, a situation that the UK’s most senior officer recently attributed to sheer prejudice against the military on the part of government officials who see terrorists as freedom fighters. Agreeing with this analysis, Richard Kemp notes that many of these investigations have turned up nothing, and that “if there were any foundation to accusations of abuse on this scale, it would amount to a wholesale breakdown of military order and control.” He also points out that this anti-military campaign, waged by “unscrupulous, politically motivated lawyers” with the cooperation of vindictive Afghans and Iraqis, has important implications for the U.S. and Israel:

If powerful members of the British government establishment can turn on their own servicemen and undermine their national defenses, then it is hardly surprising that they would also be prepared to turn on a friendly country and its armed forces in furtherance of their mendacious objectives.

A pro-Arab and anti-Israel lobby has dominated the British Foreign Office since even before the birth of the Jewish state. But [the existence of anti-military prejudice] sheds further light on the unjust attacks against Israel’s defensive campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as false accusations over settlements and so-called occupation policies emanating from parts of the British government.

This is also highly dangerous. As well as directly inciting terrorists to further violence against Israel, it encourages the Palestinian leadership in its demands for statehood without negotiation, which in turn also inflames violence and helps perpetuate the conflict.

Although many of the actions of the Obama administration have had a deleterious effect on America’s armed forces, we have not yet seen a legal campaign on a comparable scale in the United States. Hopefully any such attempt would be blocked in a nation that seems to support and value its armed forces far more than does any European country. But Americans must watch out for it. What occurs on one side of the Atlantic sooner or later creeps across to the other.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.