During the last week of September, Britain’s Labor party held its annual conference—a more substantive event than an American party convention. A year and a half have passed since the more moderate Keir Starmer took over the party leadership from the hard-left, obsessive Israel-hater Jeremy Corbyn, but the issue of anti-Semitism is still a live one, as Luke Akehurst reports, and indeed has come to symbolize the struggle between Corbyn’s faction, known as Momentum, and Starmer’s more mainstream supporters:

Even though Israel was only the subject of part of one short one-hour floor debate and a few fringe meetings, everything else the party does at its annual meetup reflects a political division in which the handling of anti-Semitism, and particularly anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, is a major factor. . . . The easiest way to work out which faction someone supports is the lanyard they are using to hold their conference pass. An unofficial Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) lanyard and you know the wearer is very likely to back the Corbynite group Momentum, an official one . . . and you know he is more likely to back Keir Starmer and the Labor to Win grouping.

Even the notorious hecklers during Starmer’s speech, though their slogans may have focused on the £15 minimum-wage demand, held up red cards distributed by “Labor against the Witch-hunt” (of anti-Semites), and a placard saying “Stop the Purge” (of anti-Semites).

[Thus they continue the] rhetoric of three years ago around anti-Semitism being a “scam,” “purges,” “witch-hunts,” and Zionist conspiracies to stop Corbyn from becoming prime minister. They may be increasingly marginalized and removed from power within Labor, but even if they are in the political wilderness, it’s not a healthy thing for them [to remain part of] the British body politic.

Starmer also managed to enact a series of procedural reforms that will make it far more difficult for a figure like Corbyn to take over the party again. Moreover, the conference passed a general policy statement—over the objections of the Corbynites—that condemned both Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and Israeli air strikes on Hamas rocket-launchers. Although this is surely an improvement over Corbyn speaking of Hamas and Hizballah as his friends, perhaps the new-and-improved Labor party isn’t quite a friend of the Jewish state either.

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.