The current leadership of the Labor party, headed by Edward Miliband, is making life increasingly uncomfortable for many liberal British Jews who would otherwise support it. Josh Glancy writes:

There was a time in Britain when Jews overwhelmingly voted for the Labor party, much as [American Jews] do for the Democrats. In the old East End of London, Jewish support for Labor was as high as 80 percent. . . . The postwar British left has for generations contained the overlapping circles of the Labor-party faithful, much of the media, and assorted anti-colonial protest movements. Today, rightly or wrongly, many liberal Jews are now connecting the dots between the rhetoric of groups like the [anti-Israel, pro-BDS] Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and the current leadership of the Labor party. They identify the left not just with criticism of specific Israeli policies or politicians but also with a visceral loathing of the state’s existence. . . .

Last week Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary and a leading Labor figure, tweeted his concern over Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection. Nothing wrong with that in principle—except looking back over his Twitter [account], that tweet was the only time he mentioned a foreign-policy issue in 2015. He hasn’t mentioned Islamic State, or Ukraine, or Syria, or Iran, or death on the streets of Paris and Copenhagen. Only the election of Netanyahu roused him into looking beyond Britain.

There are good electoral reasons for the Labor party’s focus on real or imagined Israeli crimes. Edward Miliband’s Labor party is deploying a “core vote” strategy for the upcoming general election in May, which involves trying to nail down the 35 percent of the vote they need to win. This means appealing to the party’s base, which includes the trade unions, groups like the PSC, and Britain’s growing Muslim vote. Railing against the iniquities of Israel is a good way of garnering support in these constituencies. The sense of a disproportionate, unfair focus on Israel has left many Jews who might typically have voted for the Labor in the past feeling adrift.

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.