Published in December last year, Anti-Semitism and the Labor Party is a collection of essays meant to serve as “a sober examination of the strange events that have warped British politics since 2015,” combined with the personal testimonies of 21 party members. The “strange events” in question are not the public and private statements of influential Labor figures—starting with the party leader Jeremy Corbyn—about sinister Jewish influence and other fabricated outrages but the reactions to these statements on the part of the media, Jewish leaders, and some moderate Laborites. Reviewing the volume, Sarah Brown notes that some of the authors slip easily from defending against accusations of anti-Semitism to defending hatred of Jews on the merits:

[Take for example] the collection’s final chapter, “Stereotypes Should Be Discussed Not Sanctioned,” by Jamie Stern-Weiner (the volume’s editor) and Alan Maddison. The authors’ reasoning is convoluted, but they are anxious to demonstrate that harboring anti-Semitic views doesn’t necessarily constitute hatred of Jews. Here is a sample of their logic: “If I believe that Chinese people are good at math, or that Jews are smart, it does not mean I love the Chinese or the Jews. By the same token, if I believe that Jews are cheap, it does not mean I necessarily harbor hatred toward them.”

It doesn’t indicate hatred, precisely, to believe that blacks are inherently intellectually inferior to whites, or that women are only fitted to be mothers and homemakers. But most would have no difficulty acknowledging such views as racist and sexist—and that includes, I would guess, Stern-Weiner and Maddison. [But] when it comes to anti-Semitism, only the most active hatred is allowed to be worrisome.

However, the most disturbing piece in the whole collection is Norman Finkelstein’s “The Chimera of British Anti-Semitism (And How Not to Fight It If It Were Real).” He takes as his starting point some research carried out by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), which made use of a series of anti-Semitic statements in a survey used to gauge the extent of racist views in the UK. . . . Finkelstein goes on to argue that nearly all of the stereotypical statements about Jews used in the JPR survey are not simply something we should be allowed to debate—but that they are in fact an accurate summary of Jews’ character and position in the world.

Rather than arguing that Jeremy Corbyn was falsely accused of anti-Semitism, Finkelstein and Stern-Weiner end up arguing that his anti-Semitism is wholly justifiable.

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.