Not long ago, the Economist ran an unsigned editorial called the “Auschwitz Complex.” The unnamed author blamed serial Middle East tensions on both Israel’s unwarranted sense of victimhood, accrued from the Holocaust, and its unwillingness “to give up its empire.” As far as Israel’s paranoid obsessions with the specter of a nuclear Iran, the author dismissed any real threat by announcing that “Iran makes an appealing enemy for Israelis,” and that “Israelis have psychologically displaced the source of their anxiety onto a more distant target: Iran.”

It is hard to fathom how a democracy of seven million people by any stretch of the imagination is an “empire.” Israel, after all, fought three existential wars over its 1947 borders, when the issue at hand was not manifest destiny, but the efforts of its many enemies to exterminate or deport its population. I would not otherwise know how to characterize the Arab promise of more than a half-century of “pushing the Jews into Mediterranean.…” [Also], The Economist’s choice of “appealing” is an odd modifying adjective of the noun “enemy,” particularly for Iran, which has both promised to wipe out Israel and is desperately attempting to find the nuclear means to reify that boast.

The Economist article is fairly representative of European anger at Israel, a country that is despised by most of the nations that make up the UN roster.… What then are the sources for widespread hatred of Israel? Such venom cannot be explained just by political differences with its Arab and Islamic neighbors. After all, take any major issue of contention—occupied land, refugees, a divided Jerusalem, cross border incursions—and then ask why the world focuses disproportionately on Israel when similar such disputes are commonplace throughout the globe.

Does the world much care about the principle of occupation? Not really. Consider land that has been “occupied” in the fashion of the West Bank since World War II. Russia won’t give up the southern Kurile Islands it took from Japan. Tibet ceased to exist as a sovereign country—well before the 1967 Middle East War—when it was absorbed by Communist China. Turkish forces since their 1974 invasion have occupied large swaths of Cyprus.… The 112-mile green line that runs through downtown Nicosia to divide Cyprus makes Jerusalem look united in comparison. Over 500,000 Jews have been ethnically-cleansed from Arab capitals since 1947, in waves of pogroms that come every few decades. Why are they not considered refugees the way the Palestinians are?

The point is not that the world community should not focus on Israel’s disputes with its neighbors, but that it singles Israel out for its purported transgressions in a fashion that it does not for nearly identical disagreements elsewhere. Over 75 percent of recent United Nations resolutions target Israel, which has been cited for human rights violations far more than the Sudan, Congo, or Rwanda, where millions have perished in little-noticed genocides. Why is the international community so anti-Israel?

A new sort of fashionable and socially acceptable anti-Semitism looms large. For much of the past two millennia in the West, hatred of the Jews was a crude prejudice, rich with state-sanctioned religious, economic, and social biases. By the same token, dissidents, leftists, and anti-establishmentarians once took up the cause of decrying anti-Semitism, an Enlightenment theme until well after World War II.

No more—with the establishment of Israel, anti-Semitism metamorphosized in two unforeseen ways. First, it became a near obsession of the modern Left, which associated the creation of the Jewish state with a sort of Western hegemonic impulse. That Israel was democratic and protected human rights in a way unlike its autocratic neighbors mattered nothing. To the international Left, [especially after the 1967 war], Israel was a religious, imperialistic, and surrogate West in the Middle East.…

There was a second facet of the new anti-Semitism. The establishment of the state of Israel itself also served as a respectable cloak for anti-Semitism. One now spoke not of disliking Jews, but only of despising the Jewish state and seeing Palestinians as if they were victims analogous to minority groups within the West. From Oxford dons to award-wining novelists, it became socially acceptable to decry the creation of Israel in a way it was not to say that the Jews were again causing trouble.…

Oil, of course, played an even larger role. By the 1960s, the West was heavily dependent on Persian Gulf and North African oil and gas, and by the 1990s, was in a rivalry with emerging economies in India and China to ensure steady Middle East supplies. After the deleterious oil cutoff of 1973, the Arab world proved not just that it was willing to use oil as an anti-Israel weapon, but also that it could do so quite effectively.

On the flip side, since the 1960s, trillions of petrodollars have flowed into the Islamic Middle East, not just ensuring that Israel’s enemies now were armed, ascendant, and flanked by powerful Western friends, but through contributions, donations, and endowments also deeply embedded within Western thought and society itself. Universities suddenly sought endowed Middle East professorships and legions of full tuition-paying Middle East undergraduates. Had Israel the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, then “occupied” Palestine might have resonated at the UN about as much as Ossetia, Kashmir, or the Western Sahara does today. Size matters as well. Israel is tiny; its enemies, legion. For many in the world, demography is everything: would an opinion-maker or journalist rather side with seven million Israelis or 400 million of their enemies in the largely Islamic Middle East?…

The terrorism of the last thirty years loomed large as well. If in the 1970s, Western governments feared that their Olympic games, their jet airliners, their embassies, and their sports teams might be attacked by secular left-wing Palestinian terrorists, by the late 1990s they were even more afraid that radical Islamist suicide bombers and terrorists would strike not just abroad, but inside Europe and North America itself. After 9/11, to draw a cartoon in Denmark mocking a Jewish rabbi would earn either praise or indifference; but to caricature Mohammed or the Koran ensured threats of assassination in the heart of postmodern, humanitarian Europe.…

Finally, Israel…[seems] as a sort of cachet or membership card into the right circles. Filmmakers do not usually shoot sympathetic documentaries about Israel—not if they want grants from foundations and social acceptance from their peers and overseers. Visiting journalists and authors might hotel in Israel, but their professional work on the West Bank will be praised and supported to the degree that it is pro-Palestinian and shunned should it be either balanced or pro-Israeli.

Will the image of Israel ever be reversed? Only if the above criteria are altered—a damning indictment that popular antipathy has little to do with the reality of Israel’s predicament.