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New British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is just 43 years old. Perhaps that is why, when it comes to Israel, Clegg sounds as though he was born yesterday.

"Is the idea of Israel as a Jewish state something new?" Clegg asked last year, in response to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's call for Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Clegg said he had not heard an Israeli leader refer to Israel as a "Jewish" state in the past.

Clegg is the leader of the Liberal Democrats, a leftist British party. Because new British Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative party didn't win a majority of seats in parliament in this month's elections, he has formed a coalitional government with Clegg's Lib-Dems.

But perhaps stunning ignorance is too generous an explanation for Clegg. It turns out Clegg knows enough about Israel to have authored an op-ed in the U.K. Guardian during Operation Cast Lead calling for "an immediate suspension of all arms exports from the EU" to Israel and a suspension of all European trade agreements with Israel in response to Israel's "disproportionate" response to rocket attacks from Gaza.

As pointed out by the Telegraph's Nile Gardiner, Clegg was the lead signatory on a December 2009 letter that said the following: "Israel's blockade of Gaza, described by the U.N. fact-finding mission as 'collective punishment,' stops reconstruction materials and humanitarian aid from reaching those who so desperately require it... The confinement and punishment of an entire population is no way to bring about peace for all the people of the Middle East."

Keep in mind that Clegg is essentially calling for the "confinement and punishment of an entire population" himself -- it's just that the "entire population" he wants to confine and punish is a Jewish population. He's only opposed to "collective punishment" of Arabs.

It gets worse. During the election Clegg's Lib-Dem party distributed leaflets in heavily Muslim districts featuring a photograph of a dead Palestinian child in Gaza and the words "The world watched in horror..." and demanding the U.K. cease all weapons shipments to Israel.

Believe it or not, in modern-day Britain the deputy prime minister owed part of his electoral success to his party's endorsement of a classic anti-Jewish blood libel. Clegg's party happens to be a cesspool of Israel hatred, and he has proudly led them to power.

But the lead party in the coalition, the Conservative party, prides itself on being friendly to Israel. It's true that Cameron's Conservatives are better than the reprehensible Lib-Dems -- and surely better than Gordon Brown's Labor party, which refused to change a law that prevented Israeli officials from visiting Britain because they would be indicted on war crimes charges. But how much better is "better"?

In a March 31 interview with the Financial Times, Cameron boasted of his evenhanded Middle East approach.

"Unlike a lot of politicians from Britain who visit Israel," Cameron crowed to the Times, "when I went I did stand in occupied East Jerusalem and actually referred to it as 'occupied East Jerusalem.' The Foreign Office [staffer] who was with me said most ministers don't dare say [that]."

How brave. Cameron's incoming foreign secretary, William Hague, wrote in August 2006 during the Second Lebanon War that "ministers were wrong to be so slow and reluctant to warn Israel of the dangers and injustice of attacks on purely civil infrastructure and other areas of Lebanon. The government should have been able to say clearly two weeks ago that elements of the Israeli response were disproportionate...."

Many protested this representation of Israel's actions during the war. Cameron's office, in response, sent out a letter written by his sister-in-law that included this line: "We believe it is important to maintain a balanced approach to the issue which does not give precedence to either of the parties to the conflict."

Don't give precedence to Israel over Hezbollah? Cameron's office soon backtracked on the letter as well.

In fairness to Cameron, his party did blame the war on Hezbollah, and the Conservatives' reaction to Operation Cast Lead contained no such moral equivalence, so they may be coming to their senses. Cameron has said many nice things about Israel, which we appreciate -- it's more than we can say for the spiteful propagandist Clegg. In addition, the Conservatives are the only British party in which Jews today can feel comfortable.

"With [Benjamin] Disraeli, we were the first party to have someone who was ethnically Jewish become prime minister," Cameron told London's Jewish Chronicle. "With Michael Howard, we had the first practicing Jewish leader of the opposition (from 2003-2005). And we've just seen a conservative member of parliament, John Bercow, become the first Jewish speaker of the House of Commons."

Clearly, the Israel-U.K. relationship would be in better shape had Cameron's conservatives won an outright majority. The reality is, unfortunately, that Cameron seems to be about as pro-Israel as a mainstream British politician gets, and the survival of his premiership will be in the hands of the anti-Israel crusader Nick Clegg.

One wonders if Disraeli would even have a chance in 21st century Britain.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.