Addressing the rising tide of British anti-Semitism, the British columnist Nick Cohen recently wrote, "Anti-Semitism isn't a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It's everywhere, from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. If you challenge liberal orthodoxy, your argument cannot be debated on its merits. You have to be in the pay of global media moguls. You have to be a Jew."

Robert Wistrich, a scholar of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also examines the history of modern anti-Semitism in Britain, pointing out that "Great Britain is today second only to France in serious anti-Semitic incidents reported among European countries." Wistrich documents the persistence and wide reach of anti-Jewish mainstream prejudice, particularly among the media and the upper echelons of British society - "the same group that supported Hitler in the 1930s."

Thus, the Muslim promotion of anti-Semitism in England has been very successful, perhaps because it has been able to graft onto longstanding, well-established British anti-Semitism. Most disturbing, "anti-Semitic sentiment is a part of mainstream discourse, continually resurfacing among the academic, political, and media elites," often taking the form of unsubstantiated, unreasoning criticism of Israel, while Arab terror is condoned or excused.

We should not be surprised. The Brits have never much liked Jews - their unwritten law being, "no Jew can be a gentleman" - and their greatest writers, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Kipling, even the sainted George Orwell, have all had their innings at Jew-bashing.

And now, the Israeli Jews are taking on, in the eyes of the Brits, and especially the British left, all the grossness that Shakespeare once imputed to Shylock: that they are bloody-minded, implacable killers of their helpless, innocent victims. The only difference between Shakespeare's portrait and that drawn by both the British extreme right and the left is that now Shylock goes armed: now he has his own country and his own army.

As long as the Jews were weak and dispossessed, the Brits limited themselves to well-bred anti-Semitism: snide references to "Sammies," and the like. But with the advent of Zionist pioneering, when Shylock started amassing land and collecting an arsenal, British cultural anti-Semitism escalated: it became politicized, and even militarized. The cycle of British wars against the Jews was initiated.

The British war effort was at the outset ambivalent, indecisive. From '36 to '39, when the Palestinian Arabs, upset by the influx of Jewish refugees from Hitler, started a three-year Intifada, the British Mandate authorities in Palestine alternated between grudging support of the embattled Jews and outright sabotage of their efforts at self-defense. On one hand, they made Jewish arms illegal, and forced the Hagana people to hide their store of antiquated rifles under kibbutz manure piles. On the other hand, they assigned one of their most brilliant field officers, Orde Wingate, to be a kind of T.E. Lawrence of the Jews, and to train them, in his Special Night Squads, in the arts of irregular warfare.

However, as the Brits mobilized for the coming war against Hitler, their policy makers resolved their ambivalence in favor of appeasing the Arabs, and outright hostility to the Jews. Together with Hitler, they acted so as to create the maximum tally of dead European Jews.

Thus, just before Hitler invaded Poland and intensified his own war against the Jews, the Brits - by imposing their strict White paper policy against unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine - became Hitler's de facto collaborators in that war. The Brits, who were about to declare war on Germany for the sake of the Poles, at the same time allied themselves implicitly with Hitler's war aims in regard to the Jews. Even as Hitler turned occupied Poland into a killing ground for trapped Jews, the British White Paper of 1939 restricting Jewish immigration locked them out of Palestine - the one refuge especially created (by the Balfour Declaration of 1921) to take them in. The Brits have never owned up to this, but they bear a responsibility for the Holocaust that is second only to that of Nazi Germany.

The Brits did have a superficially plausible excuse: Facing a desperate war, they needed all the allies they could get, particularly the oil-rich Arabs. In this respect, the curtailment of Jewish immigration to Palestine was a bribe to keep the usually anti-British Arabs, who could have shut down the vital Suez Canal, at least neutral during WWII.

However, despite the large contribution of Zionists to the Allied war effort, the Englishmen's antagonism to Jews persisted even after the war, when they no longer had a pressing need for Arab friends. Thus, when WWII ended, the Brit's war against the Jews - which until then had been masked by Hitler's genocidal fury - declared itself openly, in its own right. The post-war British Labor Government, which had campaigned against the White Paper of '39, now - at a time when their military resources were exhausted by War II - applied that ruling even more stringently against the Jewish Holocaust survivors. Hitler was beaten, but in the British-Jewish relationship, nothing much had changed: The survivors were still trying - now with help of the Zionist underground - to escape to Jewish Palestine from the killing grounds of Europe, and the Brits were still grimly dedicated to keeping them out.

The blockade that the Brits mounted against the Jewish "Illegal Immigration" to Palestine was backed up by 100,000 troops, a thick network of coastal radar stations, a squadron of Royal Navy destroyers, a light cruiser, a wing of long-range patrol aircraft, and an extensive network of prison camps for the captured "illegals" in Palestine, in Kenya and on the island of Cyprus.

I was a sailor on two ships of the Illegal immigration (Hebrew name, "Aliya-Bet"), was captured twice by the Royal navy, and served time in two of their so-called "internment camps." They were not pleasant places - not at all up to Geneva Convention or Guantanamo standards.

This truth was revealed when the Brits drove our captured refugees by convoy from the Cypriot harbor at Famagusta to our prison at Xylotymbou. En route, we did pass through a well-appointed camp - lighted barracks, indoor toilets, the works. Thinking this was our destination, the Jews - who were connoisseurs of camps - perked up: "dus ist a gute lager" ("This is a good camp"), they murmured approvingly. But their happy mood ended when our road suddenly filled up with Germans - undeterred by their British guards - who shouted "Heil Hitler!" and flipped us the Nazi salute.

It seemed that the "Geneva" camp was for Afrika Korps POW's - Hitler's heroes. The muddy, squalid hole that we Jews ended up in was for his victims, including traumatized Jewish pre-adolescents. The orphaned children of the Holocaust should have been cherished by the victorious allies, not penned up, sometimes for years, in His Majesty's fetid keeps. More to the point, they should not have been barred from the Palestinian Jews who were fighting to take them in and heal them.

Though bad enough, Cyprus was only the beginning. Unable to bear the heavy costs in material and moral reputation of their Jewish wars, in 1947 the Brits turned the Palestine problem over to the UN. Their secret hope was that the world body would attempt to partition Palestine between the Jews and Arabs and that the Arabs would reject this settlement and in the ensuing war would easily destroy the nascent Jewish state. As the Arab's senior partner in this scheme, the Brits would hold on to a de facto stake in Palestine, and - as Egypt became troublesome - use the Holy Land for their primary Middle Eastern base. The Brits had once out-sourced their war against the Jews to Hitler; now they subcontracted it to the Palestinian Arabs.

The Brits protected their investment in an Arab victory with political and military aid. During the early, irregular phase of Israel's Independence War, while the Brits were still occupying, I witnessed their soldiers looking the other way during Arab actions, while continuing to confiscate Hagana weapons. The crack Arab force, the Jordanian legion, was officered by Brits, and equipped with state of the art armored equipment and field artillery, which they used to devastating effect against the young Jews - many of them Holocaust survivors just off the boat from the Cyprus camps - who attacked their fortress of latrun. In this and other battles involving survivors, the Brits, if only on a minor scale, continued the work of the Holocaust.

Finally, even after the the Egyptians were routed, and their proxy war was clearly lost, the Brits - worried about their threatened holdings in the Sinai - entered the war openly, and threw the RAF against the advancing Israelis, losing five aircraft.

But that was rare. The Brits don't mind seeing Jews killed, but they are fastidious about it, generally leaving the dirty business to others. Thus, as I charge, they indirectly abetted the Nazi Holocaust, and then stood by while the Palestinians attempted with less success to continue it.

It appears that the game is afoot once again, with the task no longer out-sourced to Palestinians alone, but to the much larger body of radical Islamists now piling into Britain, all eager for the treat. The Brits still limit themselves to talk, but from all accounts, the chatter in the trendiest salons, at party congresses both of the Left and the Right, at A-List dinner parties and scholarly gatherings, has become obsessively, fiercely anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and at times frankly anti-Semitic, to the point where the received and conventional wisdom has it that Israel has no right to exist, and should be eliminated. Again, this genocidal act will presumably be left to radical Islam, or to Iran's nukes, while the British gentlefolk avert their eyes - or in a few cases, feast them.

The Brits tolerated Hitler's anti-Semitism because, out of fear, they wanted to appease him, and because many of them covertly shared his obsession with the Jews. They fostered Arab anti-Semitism as a way of keeping their access to Middle-Eastern oil, and later as a way of holding on to Palestine. But now, when there are fewer, obvious strategic reasons for their Jew-hatred, it appears to be more vigorous than ever. Explaining this, the Brits will cite the Jews' oppression of the Palestinians, and more recently, their punishment of Lebanon. In effect, they might hint, the Palestinians have become the body of Christ, and the Jews are up to their dirty tricks, crucifying him yet again in Palestine.

In effect, the Brits are telling us how compassionate they are, in contrast to those bloody Christ-killers. Bully for them; but as they stress Brit idealism, they avoid any mention of Brit fear - the fear of militant Islam that appears to be gripping all of Europe now, and that - I would suggest - is partially alleviated through anti-Semitism. The Brit's rationales for that anti-Semitism are designed to do them credit, as possessors of superior conscience, but they mask some smelly motives.

We have never truly appreciated the terror inspired by terror tactics - especially suicide bombing, and in particular the destruction of the Twin Towers. As the great towers collapsed into billowing smoke and fire, they called to mind the fearsome imagery of nuclear war, combined with the retributive judgment of Almighty God. Linked to such overwhelming images, the terrorists and their faith have become more terrifying than we are willing to admit.

But denied motives can still drive our acts and our ideas. Along with the rest of what is now being called "Eurabia," the Brits are soothing the Muslims among them by acts of appeasement. In 1938, they bought a year of peace by offering Czechoslovakia to Hitler; now, for a temporary peace, they offer Muslims a piece of the Jews who are like the unlucky passenger tossed from the sled to appease the ravening wolves.

Once again, Albion may have found the cohort that will kill Jews for it, leaving the Brits, temporarily at least, "sans peur et sans reproche" - without fear and without blame.