Engage has an excellent article by David Hirsh on what he calls 'The new conservatives':

The fire of 1968 has become a yearning to conform to those sections of the intelligentsia that understand Israel, and the Jews that ‘support’ it, as constituting a unique evil in the world and the greatest obstacle to world peace. It is a milieu that is increasingly ambivalent about the ‘legitimacy’ of Israel.

...When academics seek to blacklist Israeli colleagues, the new conservatives go silent. When a political test is proposed to weed out supporters of ‘Israel’s apartheid policies’ they sympathise. When Republican professors claim that ‘The Lobby’ forces America to go to war for Israel, they call for a serious discussion about Zionist influence over governments and the media. When the EU tries to find ways of funnelling aid to Palestine that by-pass Hamas, they claim this is undemocratic. When the straight-arm Jew-haters of Hezbollah pepper Israel with Iranian missiles they blame Olmert for provoking them. When the Independent prints the US flag with stars of David, when it portrays Sharon eating babies, when the Guardian pictures a pustuled Jewish fist smashing a child’s face or a huge Magen David dominating Europe, when the New Statesman talks about ‘Kosher conspiracy’, when Tam Dalyell blames Jewish influence for Tony Blair’s wrongs, when Jenny Tonge defends suicide bombing, when George Galloway glorifies Hassan Nasrallah, when Ken Livingstone fetes an antisemitic cleric, the new conservatives have nothing to say. Except to accuse Jews of paranoia and of faking concern over antisemitism in order to hide the crimes of Israel. They reply sagely, criticising Israeli policy is not antisemitic. As if anyone thought that it was. The pose is one of mature, measured and detached wisdom; they have themselves adopted the very pose that so embarrassed them in their own fathers.

The central message of the new conservatives is that if people are hostile to Jews, it is because they have good reason to be. If intellectuals stumble into antisemitism then it is an understandable over-reaction to their righteous hatred of Israel. If students, in the name of socialism or of jihad, come to loathe ‘Zionists’, who can blame them? It is Israel that claims to speak and act for all Jews, they say, so holding Jews collectively responsible for its ‘crimes against humanity’ is not unreasonable.