The decision of the British Labor Party Thursday to suspend its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, over anti-Semitism is an astonishing development. It follows an official finding that party officials had failed to deal with anti-Semitism in the party and committed “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination.” When Mr. Corbyn reacted by blaming exaggerations by his political opponents, the party promptly suspended him.

It is, at least from this side of the Atlantic, a breathtaking moment — all the more so for the failure of the our own Democratic Party to address anti-Semitism in its own ranks. In the left-of-center parties on both sides of the Atlantic, this sentiment is entangled with ideological hostility to Israel. Both parties have seen top leadership fail to address the problem adequately, and instead to make excuses.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the top names of our own Democratic Party — Speaker Nancy Pelosi, say, Senator Chuck Schumer, and the party chairman, Tom Perez — are themselves hostile to the Jewish cause the way Mr. Corbyn has been. It got so bad in Britain that all three of the country’s Jewish newspapers issued an editorial that a Corbyn-led government would present an existential crisis for British Jewry.

Neither, though, is the Democratic Party without a problem. The emergence of an anti-Israel faction, albeit small, is a dismaying development. This burst into the national debate a year and a half ago, when the Democrats refused to condemn anti-Jewish remarks of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Instead, Congress insisted on condemning all bigotry. That was a failure of leadership by Mrs. Pelosi, even if she herself is no bigot.

In July 2019, the Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly joined the GOP in voting to condemn the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. Yet Congresswomen Omar, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib voted against it. They are a vanguard for the leftwing of the Democratic Party, a wing that has been happy to support Senator Sanders.

At a key moment of his primary campaign for president, the Vermont socialist shocked Americans when, in a nationally broadcast debate at South Carolina, he labeled Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel a racist. In 2015, in one of the bitterest controversies over Israel, the party’s future vice presidential nominee, Senator Kaine, led a mini boycott of Mr. Netanyahu’s speech to a Joint Meeting of Congress.

In isolation, none of these moments amount to much. As a trend, though, they have exposed the Democrats as the weaker of our two parties on Israel. They raise the question of whether the Democrats could be on their way to the kind of reckoning the Labor Party is going through now. It has just seen its new leader, Keir Starmer, accept the finding of the official probe, and, before the nation, declare it a “day of shame for Labor.”

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Image: Mr. Corbyn at the #StopTrident rally in February 2016 at Trafalgar Square. Garry Knight via Wikipedia.