While the instinct to find a universal message in the destruction of European Jewry is understandable and in some ways admirable, it has increasingly taken the form of an effort to downplay the fact that the Holocaust happened, specifically, to Jews. James Kirchick comments on this tendency:

[T]o the mandarins of the progressive left, the Holocaust’s meaning is always and necessarily to be found in its “universalism.” According to this line of interpretation, the evil of the Nazis can be located in their abandonment of the European cosmopolitan tradition and descent into bestial particularism and nationalism—the very qualities that Israel, foremost among the nations, is charged with embodying today. This sleight of hand has the miraculous effect of clouding the causes of the Holocaust so that anti-Semitism is relegated to a background role, if it is mentioned at all.

Harping on the fact of six million dead Jews [in this atmosphere of opinion] becomes weirdly tribal, even Nazi-like; asserting Jewish peoplehood is too close to asserting Aryan-ness, the disastrous results of which Europeans have been expiating for the past seven decades. It doesn’t matter that there is no Israeli Auschwitz, or anything even approaching it; the particularism and nationalism of Israel is enough to implicate everything that has followed. . . . Israel is [seen as] the carrier of the European disease that wise Europeans have transcended through their enormous, Christ-like suffering, and their formation of the European Union. . . .

Today’s progressive narrative of the Holocaust-without-Jews is not altogether different from the last, great leftist attempt to deny the truth of the Shoah. After World War II, the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes in Central and Eastern Europe solemnized the Nazis’ victims as “anti-fascists,” lumping together the six million Jews who were, by dint of their birth, singled out for execution with the Communists and socialists who were targeted because of their political disposition. Emphasizing the specifically anti-Semitic nature of the Holocaust, Communists worried, would work against their political purposes as the populations over which they ruled were quite anti-Semitic themselves—and had by and large looked away, or even eagerly participated, as their Jewish neighbors were carried off to the gas chambers. . . .

Yet the Holocaust’s universal meanings are not inconsistent with an appreciation of its singularity. . . . Without independently acknowledging both the universality and the historicity of the Holocaust, we will fail to understand what happened, and to whom—and how to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again, to anyone.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.