Earlier this year, as it headed ever deeper into anti-Semitism, the Labor party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (who once described Hamas as “an organization dedicated towards . . . bringing about long-term peace and social justice”) undertook to assuage concerns by commissioning an inquiry led by Shami Chakrabarti. Jamie Palmer, subjecting the resulting report to careful analysis, finds it less a diagnosis of the problem than another symptom of it:

On June 30, the inquiry released its findings, which Chakrabarti introduced with the following lines: “The Labor party is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race-equality law.”

It is worth lingering on these sentences, because they help to explain what is wrong with almost everything that follows. First, the elision of “anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or other forms of racism” . . . all but guarantees a report filled with generalities at the expense of the particular.

The second sentence is intended to substantiate the claim made by the first. It is not simply a statement of fact, but an affirmation of the Labor party’s presumed moral authority on the subject of racism, whereas the [subject] of the report was meant to be how the party had abdicated that moral authority on the issue of anti-Semitism. . . . This moral complacency percolates through the entire report, and Chakrabarti repeatedly returns to Labor’s history of anti-racism as if it were an unchallengeable alibi. . . .

In her concluding remarks, she further acknowledges “a series of unhappy incidents which did no credit to the Labor party”—an understatement on both counts. What she does not acknowledge is the anti-Semitic nature of those unhappy incidents, or that they emerged against a backdrop of escalating alarm about the party’s attitude toward Jews. . . .

Insofar as the particularities of anti-Semitism are addressed, Chakrabarti allows that presuming Jews control the media or finance is “wholly insensitive.” Holocaust denial and the analogizing of Nazism and Israel, however, are in “bad taste” and so best avoided. Lest we mistake the nature of her concern, she adds that such comparisons “are all too capable, not only of bringing the Labor party into disrepute, but of actively undermining the cause of peace, justice, and statehood for the Palestinian people.”

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.