There’s a lot of hardship and hard situations in the world, in quite a few cases you have a clear and unambiguous division between victims and the groups victimizing them, such as the case in Myanmar, Ukraine, victims of pogroms in Sudan, Australian immigration camps in Papua New Guinea, the US separating children from families in camps. A lot of that kind of thing. Few of those events get the sort of the lasting, intense, coverage and attention loaded with inflammatory buzzwords that the “Israeli Palestinian conflict” does. Few of those events are treated like a team sport for decades, often by people the furthest away from those events.

The only other comparable thing I can imagine is the “Free Tibet” movement, but even that has largely petered out as people realized that China wasn’t going to listen to them. But not this, not Israel. It’s always the same fury, the same certainty and the same muffled hatred, even when the “victims” of the conflict are not especially sympathetic and the conflict is far from one-sided. Funny isn’t it? How that works.

So I hope you understand why it’s so notable that this is the thing that makes people this intent on vilifying one party to an ongoing conflict. That’s doubly true when the party in question just happens to be the largest group of Jews in the world, and when so much of the “criticism” comes in the form of ahistorical and hysterical rhetoric.