Since Britain’s current government took office, it has dropped its objections to the International Criminal Court’s attempt to issue an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Netanyahu; restored funding to UNRWA, despite many of its employees being outed as terrorists; and restricted arms exports to Israel. “In none of these cases,” writes Tom Harris, “can we see any similarity with what previous Labor governments would have done.”

Usually, the Labor turn against Israel is understood in the context of the party’s former leader, the anti-Semitic radical leftist Jeremy Corbyn. But Harris believes the shift started in 2010, under Corbyn’s far more moderate Jewish predecessor, Ed Miliband.

In his first conference speech as [party] leader, Miliband generously announced that Israel had the right to exist—a peculiar statement, since he felt no compunction to say the same thing about any other nation. But Miliband’s equivocation on Israel, a product of his desire to flirt with the left that had given him the edge over his older brother in the leadership contest, only presaged what was yet to come.

Harris looks at the reasons for the shift, which has persisted even after Corbyn’s ouster by the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, who has made a point of repairing relations with British Jews:

[T]he case for concluding that these [anti-Israel] policies have been pursued specifically in order to assuage Muslim opinion in the UK is convincing, if not overwhelming. . . . In campaigners’ experience, will there ever be a point, short of declaring that Israel should abolish itself in favor of a Greater Palestine, that more extreme Muslim opinion is satisfied? How far must the government go along the path it has chosen before it starts to win back that lost support in northern and midlands seats?

The answer, of course, is that extremists tend to demand extreme things. Those who march each week for Palestine and who voted for pro-Gaza candidates at the general election will never, ever be satisfied with a government that does anything other than express complete opposition to Israel.

By reasserting its principled support for Israel and by helping its efforts to remove Hamas as a player in Gaza, the government would be honoring its own liberal principles. It would also be sending an important signal to the pro-Palestine movement and the Islamists and terrorist apologists who dwell in its shadow: our principles of tolerance are not for sale, however many votes you think you can deprive us of.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.