As members of the hard left of Britain’s Labor party defend its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, against mounting accusations of anti-Semitism, they have taken to blaming the Mossad and wealthy Jewish donors for orchestrating a “smear campaign.” They’ve also called one Labor parliamentarian who has dared to criticize Corbyn a “a nasty, venomous little jewess” and another “the honorable member for Tel Aviv,” and have likened the party’s deputy leader, who has expressed his own concerns about anti-Semitism, to the New Testament’s Judas. Such rhetoric has come not only from anonymous Internet users but also from high-ranking members of the party. Yet, argues Jonathan Foreman, Corbyn and his acolytes may also be cynically using anti-Semitism to their advantage:

[That Labor’s] leadership is so blithely unconcerned with the reaction of the Jewish community . . . may not be simply a reflection of Corbyn’s ideological extremism, intellectual limitations, or personal biases. It probably also reflects some basic political calculations by his hard-left advisers. There are only 260,000 Jews in the UK, out of a population of 63 million, according to the 2011 census. Except perhaps in one London constituency, they are electorally irrelevant.

On the other hand, there are at least 2.8 million Muslims in the UK, almost 4.4 percent of the population. While there is no obvious evidence that securing their votes requires taking ardent anti-Israel positions, still less anti-Semitic ones, there may be enough such sentiment apparent in certain British Muslim communities for Corbyn and others to believe it is worth pandering to. . . .

Dropping the party’s traditional relationship with and concern for a minuscule Jewish community could [thus] be just another sacrifice of principle for the greater good of securing a Labor majority in parliament. The fact that Corbyn and [his associates] are steeped in a traditional Marxism with a strong anti-Semitic component, and the New Left’s “anti-imperialist” loathing of Israel, only makes the sacrifice easier.

But this embrace of rhetorical anti-Semitism could also have dangerous consequences for Anglo-Jewry’s safety, writes Foreman:

Britain is not (yet) anything like France, Germany, or even Sweden in terms of incidents of anti-Semitic violence or anti-Semitic political rhetoric. However, this (along with a lot of other sureties Britons take for granted) could conceivably change in the event that Corbyn becomes prime minister. And that is the real threat that underlies serious concern about Corbyn’s attitudes. As it is, Britain’s once-admired police forces, encouraged by a craven, hopelessly politicized Home Office, have been infamously unwilling to enforce certain laws depending on the ethnic identity of perpetrator and victim. Female genital mutilation, forced marriage (i.e., kidnapping and rape), and the overtly racist “sexual grooming” of white and Sikh girls by predominantly Pakistani rape gangs have all been so studiously ignored by police in a number of cities that these crimes have been all but legalized. London’s Metropolitan Police, the most important and influential in the UK, notoriously holds different ethnic groups to different standards, especially when it comes to laws against violent rhetoric and “hate speech.” . . .

It is therefore far from inconceivable that violent assaults on visually identifiable Jews would become similarly invisible to police eyes (as seems to be the case in Sweden) if carried out by Muslims rather than by white far-right extremists.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”