While last Thursday’s vote in the UK was a nominal victory for the Conservatives, the relative success of the Labor party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn—a hater of Israel and lover of terrorists of all stripes who has allowed his party’s anti-Semitism problem to fester—does not, on its face, appear to be good news for Israel, its supporters, or Jews in general. But Walter Russell Mead sees some good news:

Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in various combinations have been a potent force in British politics among both Tories and Labor since World War II. The non-Thatcherite right and the Corbynite left don’t have much in common, but dislike for Israel and for America’s support for it are strong at both ends of the British political spectrum.

One of the few reservoirs of strong pro-Israel feeling in the UK lies in Northern Ireland. . . . Travelers in Northern Ireland will sometimes see Palestinian flags in Catholic neighborhoods and the Star of David banner in Protestant ones.

Last [week’s] election turned those Ulster Protestants into kingmakers; the ten seats of [their] Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) hold the balance in the British parliament, and [Prime Minister] Theresa May had no choice but to look to DUP as her best coalition partner and strongest ally. It’s unlikely that a British government that depends on Northern Ireland unionists will be eager to break new ground in the world of anti-Israel boycotts. Expect gnashing of teeth at the (mostly) anti-Zionist Foreign and Commonwealth Office. . . .

As post-Brexit Britain looks for partners, it could do worse than link up with a technologically advanced country that has made significant trade and diplomatic inroads in Africa and Asia—and that favors an open global trading economy.

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.