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.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.