Last week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, an organ of the British government, issued its damning report on anti-Semitism in the Labor party. The report, based on a months-long investigation, accused the party of illegal discrimination and harassment and blamed the leadership’s “lack of willingness” to deal with the problem. To Alan Johnson, however, the report fails to reckon with the underlying cause: not the leadership of the fanatical Israel-hater Jeremy Corbyn—who has now not only lost his post as Labor leader, but has been suspended by his successor—but the anti-Semitism that has been part of socialist thinking since its 19th-century beginnings:

To the smelly old idea about capitalism being “Jewish,” a smelly new idea has been bolted on since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948: imperialism is now “Zionist,” wars are “Zionist,” politicians are “Zionist tools,” the media are “Zionist,” 9/11 was “Zionist,” “global finance” is “Zionist,” and the anti-Semitism “smear” against the Labor party was, yes, “Zionist.”

Anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism have roots in the UK far left going back decades. It is largely (but not solely) the new anti-Semitism, this anti-Semitism dressed up as anti-Zionism, with its roots in . . . two vicious reactionary [ideologies]—Islamism and Stalinism—that has destroyed Labor.

The left needs to learn that anti-Semitism is the most protean and changeable of hatreds and it has shape-shifted yet again. Yes, Labor was poisoned in part by the flourishing of “classic” anti-Jewish stereotypes and slurs in the party. . . . (There were even a few “Hitler was right” types, believe it or not.) But the heart of the problem was “anti-Zionism” of such an obsessive, conspiracist, and demonizing kind that it long ago left the terrain of “legitimate criticism of Israeli policy” and merged itself with an older set of classical anti-Semitic tropes, images, and assumptions to create anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.

It is right that Corbyn has been suspended. But it will be even more important to wage a battle of ideas against anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.

Unlike Hamas, which merely receives support from the Islamic Republic, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—with which Israel engaged in a short round of fighting last week—is more or less under its direct control. In fact, the recent hostilities began with a series of terrorist attacks launched by PIJ from Samaria, which might in turn have been a response to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s call “to open a new front in the West Bank against the Zionist enemy.” Amir Taheri writes:

In Gaza, the Islamic Republic has invested heavily in promoting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. . . . Islamic Jihad is in a minority in Gaza, hence the attempt by Tehran to help it create a base in the West Bank.

Reliable sources in Baghdad say that [Iran’s expeditionary and terrorist paramilitary] the Quds Force has been “transiting” significant quantities of arms and cash via Iraq to Jordan, to be smuggled to the West Bank. The Jordanian authorities say they are aware of these “hostile activities.” King Abdullah himself has publicly called on Iran to cease “destabilizing activities.”

But such schemes, Taheri explains, are part of a larger strategic vision of creating a grand anti-Western alliance even while engaging in nuclear negotiations with the U.S. and Europe:

Last month, Khamenei praised Vladimr Putin for his invasion of Ukraine. And this month, China’s ambassador to Iran, Chang Hua, praised the Islamic Republic for supporting China in “asserting its sovereignty” over Taiwan.

It is clear that some dangerous pipe-dreamers in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran have fallen for the phantasmagoric vision of “three great powers” banding together and with help from “the rest,” that is to say, the so-called Third World . . . to destroy an international system created by the “corrupt and decadent.”