In the classic, angst-laden, self-absorbed, you-shouldn’t-know-from-it comedic tradition of everyone from Lenny Bruce to Larry David, it is a difficult time to be Jewish. Only now it isn’t funny. “Many people in the Jewish community, especially liberals, don’t know what to think,” says J. J. Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Forward. “They feel powerless. They see their hopes and dreams, indeed their world, in flames, and they don’t have any idea what to do about it.”

One critical issue is how much of the resurgent anti-Semitism is the result of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Billionaire George Soros infuriated many in the Jewish community a couple of weeks ago when he was quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency blaming the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon for the rise in anti-Semitism. But he is certainly not alone in this view, even among Jews.

“I have no doubt that the occupation and our policies in dealing with the Palestinians are an integral part of the return of anti-Semitism,” says Zeev Sternhell, a political-science professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who specializes in anti-Semitism.

Most Jewish leaders, however, instinctively respond that blaming Israel is blaming the victim. “It’s not about this or that Israeli policy,” says Malcolm Hoenlein, head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a mix of anger and exasperation in his voice. “It’s about Israel’s right to exist.”

Indeed, public opinion has swung so far to the Palestinian side that for the first time in decades, the very legitimacy of a Jewish state has been widely called into question. Columnists in mainstream European newspapers like the Guardian in England and Le Monde in France regularly challenge the validity of Israel and of Zionism.

Even here, serious (albeit leftist) publications like The New York Review of Books have published pieces attempting to revive the notion of a one-state solution. In this scenario, all of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza would become a binational Jewish and Palestinian state, which would, by virtue of the population figures, become a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority in a very short time.

The language of the debate has become so polarized, so grotesquely distorted—words like genocide, apartheid, and fascism are used regularly—that legitimate criticism of Israel is near-impossible to hear.

This is unfortunate, because within Israel and in the diaspora there continues to be disagreement over policy. Sharon remains a divisive figure even at home, where Israelis have begun to tire of his hard line with the Palestinians. Recently, for example, Moshe Ya’alon, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff, said that the continuing military pressure on the Palestinians was fueling hatred of Israel. He called for gestures to ease Palestinian hardship and for Israeli leadership to do a better job of trying to work with Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qureia than it did with his predecessor.

In a piece written for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot and reprinted in The Forward, Avraham Burg, former speaker of Israel’s Knesset and currently a Labor Party Knesset member, lamented, “We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.”

Even more strikingly, Burg writes later in the piece: “Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry.”

In the churning swirl of anti-Israel hostility, some of the most powerful World War II imagery has been excruciatingly (for anyone who suffered during the war) co-opted: Israelis have become Nazis committing genocide against the Palestinians. Ariel Sharon is the modern incarnation of Hitler, the Israeli army is the Wehrmacht, or, worse, the SS, and Ramallah and Jenin are Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The Israelis are racists, imperialists, colonialists. And the suicide bombers, the murderers who pack bombs with nails and razor blades to cause the maximum civilian carnage, are freedom fighters, objects of sympathy and (in some quarters) even admiration, as long as the innocent people they’re killing are Jewish. (Even Avraham Burg’s emotional plea runs the risk of sounding like an apologia for the murderers.)

Israel, the democracy with a freely elected government; Arab representatives in the Knesset; a thriving, often hysterical free press; and a citizenry that is still, after all that’s happened, overwhelmingly in favor of a negotiated two-state solution (two thirds of Israelis are believed to support a two-state solution), is the object of hate, scorn, and revulsion among the left everywhere in the world.

Even in America. At a crisis center called San Francisco Women Against Rape, volunteers are asked to fill out a three-page application. Most of it is what you’d expect, a request for basic personal information and an introduction that says the center is seeking compassionate women who want to support survivors of sexual assault.

But on the last page, the application states that the center believes “it is important to be informed and take action on other social justice struggles.” One of these struggles is “supporting the Palestinian liberation and taking a stance against Zionism. Can you commit to this?”

Since the implosion of peace talks about three years ago, France, England, Germany, Italy, Poland, Greece, and the rest of Europe have all seen a bone-chilling rise in expressions of anti-Semitism. European synagogues are bombed, Jewish schools are torched, and physical attacks on individuals readily identifiable as Jews have become shockingly routine.

In a recent European Union poll, 60 percent of the respondents chose Israel as the country that poses the greatest threat to world peace. In the Netherlands, of all places, where Jewish citizens were steadfastly protected during World War II, 74 percent of the Dutch fingered Israel.

Belgium wanted to try Ariel Sharon for war crimes committed at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. An Oxford professor would not allow an Israeli student in his class because the man had served in the Israeli Army. In Italy, La Stampa ran a front-page cartoon depicting an Israeli tank with its huge gun pointed right at the baby Jesus. The caption read, “Surely they don’t want to kill me again.”

“The Jewish communities of Europe are seen by the public,” says David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, “as extensions of and advocates for a regime in Israel that is rapidly losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the intelligentsia, the media, the left, and the anti-globalization crowd. So the question really becomes, how do you fight anti-Semitism in France or Belgium if the image of their Jewish citizens is inextricably linked to Israel? You either change the image or break the link. And there’s no easy answer for doing either.”

Two key factors in the virulent outbreak of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Europe may be fatigue and fear. People are tired of the Middle East conflict. They’re burned out on the suffering, the killing, and the blood-soaked barrage of bad news. They are also worried about terrorism. Most Western European countries have growing, restive Muslim populations that are having trouble assimilating. Yet they are gaining political power. France has more than 6 million Muslims, and it is no accident that President Jacques Chirac began to crack down on anti-Semitism only after national elections last summer.

Feelings of fatigue and fear were candidly expressed by Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to England, when he thought he was speaking off the record at a London dinner party in December 2001. He remarked that the world’s current troubles are all because of “that shitty little country Israel.” Undoubtedly expressing the view of many, he asked, “Why should we be in danger of World War III because of these people?”