RUTHFULLY YOURS

Britain’s leftists are patting themselves on the back for having resisted the lure of anti-Semitism. Sure, there were some ugly incidents in the U.K. during the Gaza conflict in recent weeks, including the smashing of a Belfast synagogue’s window and the pasting of a sign saying “Child Murderers” on a synagogue in Surrey. But for the most part, Britain’s anti-Israel protesters trill, we avoided the orgies of Jew-hate that stained protests about Gaza in Paris, Berlin and other European cities.

I don’t buy that Britain is an oasis of prejudice-free anti-Zionism in a European desert of anti-Semitic sentiment. Rather, Brits have simply proven themselves more adept than their Continental counterparts at dolling up their prejudices as political stands. In Britain, the meshing of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, the expression of ancient prejudices in the seemingly legitimate guise of opposing Israel, is more accomplished than it is in other European countries. Britain isn’t free of anti-Semitism—we’re just better than our cousins on the Continent at expressing that poisonous outlook in a more coded, clever way.

Consider the constant branding of Israelis as “child murderers.” The belief that Israel takes perverse pleasure in killing children is widespread. It was seen in the big London demonstrations where protesters waved placards featuring caricatured Israeli politicians saying “I love killing women and children.” It could be heard in claims by the U.K.-based group Save the Children that Israel launched a “war on children.” It was most explicitly expressed in the Independent newspaper last week when a columnist described Israel as a “child murdering community” and wondered how long it would be before Israeli politicians hold a “Child Murderer Pride” festival.

British MP George Galloway protests at the Israeli Embassy, July 2014. i-Images Picture Agency/ZUMA Press

It’s hard to think of a war in which, tragically, children haven’t died. In Afghanistan, for example, NATO bombs hit a school and more than one wedding, killing many children. But it is only Israel that is branded a child-murdering state. Where people seem willing to accept that the deaths of children in most war zones are horrible mistakes, in relation to Gaza it is assumed that Israel intends to murder children.

What we have here is the resurrection, in pseudo-political garb, of a very old prejudice about Jews. The double-standard branding of Israel as a proud murderer of children rehabilitates in antiwar lingo an anti-Semitic trope: the ancient blood libel about Jews murdering children (Christian children, in the old telling).

Or consider radical Brits’ depiction of Israel as the puppet-master of global politics. You could see it when marchers waved banners showing large-nosed Israeli politicians referring to Barack Obama and David Cameron as “My Most Obedient Puppets.” You could see it when the Guardian newspaper published a cartoon showing huge Israeli politicians puppeteering a tiny Tony Blair and William Hague. The puppet-master trope has even made an appearance in the über-respectable Economist magazine, which earlier this year ran a cartoon showing President Obama trying to make peace with Iran but being held back by a huge seal of Congress daubed with the Star of David. In short, Israel shackles the most powerful man in the world. The Economist pulled the cartoon following complaints from Jewish groups.

Here, too, we see polish being applied to an old prejudice: that Jews are the secret power behind the global political throne. Again, what is presented as a legitimate criticism of Israel is just an updating and political-correcting of a long-standing fear of Jewish influence.

Or consider the claim that Israel is the key source of global instability. A few years ago, a poll of Europeans found that a majority viewed Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Britons in particular seem convinced that Israel is a bringer of chaos: A BBC poll in 2012 found that 69% of Britons think Israel has a “negative influence” on the world. At recent protests, Israel was singled out as a destabilizing force—as one news report said, the protesters “declared Israel a rogue state.”

This, too, brings to mind old prejudices, in this case the view of Jews as a key source of moral and social rot. Protesters singling out Israel as a rogue that threatens the global order echo yesteryear’s belief that the presence of Jews made a society less secure and more unstable.

Alone among the states of the world, Israel is treated as perversely infanticidal, awesomely powerful and terrifyingly destabilizing. Thus are ancient prejudices updated and transferred from an apparently problematic people to an apparently uniquely barbarous state, so that it is now increasingly difficult to tell where anti-Semitism ends and anti-Zionism begins. Britain hasn’t escaped the anti-Semitism sweeping Europe—the British have merely found new and subtler ways of expressing it.

Mr. O’Neill is the editor of the online journal Spiked.