Prime Minister Theresa May delivered a moving speech to the Conservative Friends of Israel last month, praising the “true friendship” between her country and the Jewish state. Yet only a few weeks later the United Kingdom lent its support to the UN resolution condemning Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank and Jerusalem—whose wording, it seems, British diplomats helped to craft. Douglas Murray, rather than seeing pure contradiction between May’s words and the actions of her diplomats, finds a common thread in two “discordant notes” in the speech itself. The first was an awkward attempt to balance complaints about anti-Semitism with others about “Islamophobia.” As for the second:

[It] came when she mentioned Israeli settlement building. It was carefully placed in the speech, after a passage in which May congratulated her own Department for International Development Minister, Priti Patel. In the days [prior], Patel had announced . . . an investigation to determine whether British taxpayer money being sent to what May called “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was being used to fund salaries for Palestinians convicted of terrorism offenses against Israelis. Following this, May said: “When talking about global obligations, we must be honest with our friends, like Israel, because that is what true friendship is about. That is why we have been clear about building new, illegal settlements: it is wrong; it is not conducive to peace; and it must stop.” . . .

[H]aving lavished praise on Israel, a castigation apparently seemed necessary. It is wrong, but hardly possible for a British prime minister currently to do otherwise. If there are terrorists receiving funds from British taxpayers thanks to the largesse of the UK government, then this may—after many years of campaigning by anti-terrorism organizations—finally be “investigated.” However, throughout any such investigation, the British government, while saying that it remains committed to a peace deal that comes as a result of direct negotiations between the two sides, has for years announced its own preconditions for peace: a freeze on the building of what it calls “settlements.” . . .

At the same time as the prime minister was talking about “true friendship” in front of friends of Israel, her government was conspiring with the outgoing Obama administration to kick that friend in the back. . . . The most obvious [response] is simply a reflection that friends do not kick friends in the back.

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.