For 22 years, Hadley Freeman wrote for the British newspaper the Guardian, one of the world’s most influential English-language news outlets—and also a hotbed of obsessive anti-Israel sentiment. Freeman, having just stepped down from the publication, reflects on her experience as a Jew ensconced in a bastion of the British left. What strikes her most are the responses she received from non-Jewish leftists whenever she expressed concern about the takeover of the Labor party by the anti-Semitic politician Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes. She lists five characteristic comments:

1. “I don’t think you should write about anti-Semitism because you obviously feel very passionately about it.”

2. “What, exactly, are Jews afraid of here? It’s not like Corbyn is going to bring back pogroms.”

3. “Jews have always voted right so of course, they don’t like Corbyn.”

4. “It’s not that I don’t believe that you think he’s anti-Semitic. It’s just I think you’re being manipulated by bad-faith actors. So let me explain why you’re wrong . . . ”

5. “Come on, you don’t really think he really hates Jews.”

All of the above were said to me by progressive people, people who would proudly describe themselves as anti-racism campaigners. And yet. When Jews expressed distress at, say, Corbyn describing Hamas as “friends,” or attending a wreath-laying ceremony for the killers at the Munich Olympics, or bemoaning the lack of English irony among Zionists, we were fobbed off with snarky tweets and shrugged shoulders.

A lot of illusions were broken, and I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people I thought I knew, but it turned out I didn’t. Not really. Not at all.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].