It's really not that hard to understand. We tolerate bad behavior by our friends more readily than from our enemies. Individuals do it, countries do it. Why are they our friends? For a number of reasons. One is that, while they represent only a small percentage of the US population (around 1.7%), American Jews tend to be better educated and have higher incomes than their non-Jewish white peers. There are a variety of reasons for this, including the fact that certain high-income professions (lawyers, bankers, physicians) have a disproportionate number of Jewish practitioners. Jews value education, tend to have strong family and community ties and the social supports they bring, and have a strong work ethic influenced by an Abrahamic religion particularly heavy on guilt. Any group with those traits (see Armenians) tends to do well. People get jealous.
That said, the modern-day State of Israel has a persecution complex. I think the psychology of this is well understood (trauma affects societies in much the same way it affects individuals), and need not be explained here. It does not excuse their behavior, mind you. But it does explain it. Consider: They are the single outpost of Western society in the Middle East — the frikkin' Holy Land — completely surrounded by hostile (to one extent or another) Arab Muslims. The history of the self-identification by the Palestinians of themselves as a nation is interesting but ultimately irrelevant. Like it or not, the Palestinians are a recognizable and legitimate nationality now. I have lived in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia), and there is a clear distinction among the various Arab nationalities. Yes, they are all Muslims, and yes, for the most part they are all Arabs, but there are a number of subdivisions within that group, and further subdivisions within the subdivisions. And it is a hierarchical system, almost caste-like. Saudis consider themselves to be at the top, since their nation contains the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. The birthplace of Islam, they consider themselves as a step above the other Muslim Arabs. Iraqis are next in line, and being that before shit went south they were the best-educated, most Westernized of the Arab Muslim nations. Still, in Arabic movies, if you want the badguy to sound erudite and elitist (like an upscale English accent to us), you get an Iraqi actor, or at least get the actor to do an Iraqi accent. But I digress.
The point here is that Palestinians are widely considered to be at the bottom of the Arab social strata, or, as it has been sometimes put, "the niggers of the Arab world." In Saudi they would be employed for relatively menial labor. As Saudis consider anything technical to be menial, many IT guys are Palestinian. But Saudis definitely look down on them socially. Jordanians and Syrians would be just above that. Iraqis and Eqyptians are probably the most-respected Arab nationalities (among Saudis) beside the Gulf States, who are almost as elitist as the Saudis themselves. But at least there you can drink.
The whole Arab-Israeli thing was weird in Saudi. Their newspapers routinely ran articles and cartoons every bit as ugly and antisemitic as anything you'd see in Nazi propaganda from the 1930s, or certain areas of the American South to this very day. Yet whenever I talked about the issue with Saudis, no one seemed to care. I never met ONE Saudi who said a genuinely antisemitic thing. And I made a point of asking after a while, because I was curious. The general response could best be described as "meh." It was not an issue that they considered important. Frankly, I got the distinct impression that they would be happy to do business with them (Israel needs oil, too, and a pipeline to the Mediterranean would be no small thing) but must maintain face in the Arab world. Religion plays a part. Palestinians or no, they are still their fellow Muslims. But I never sensed any malice or hatred on the part of any Saudi I spoke to about it. Unless you brought up the Iranians. THAT would never fail to elicit an angry response. But that's a tale for another day, I think.
According to Wikipedia (peace be upon it), there are 13.8 million Jews in the world, representing less than 0.2% (0.00196, to be precise) of the human population. If societies and nations operated like purely rational robots, we (by "we" I mean the Western world) should have cast Israel to the wolves a long time ago. Such a tiny percentage of the world's population could not possibly be worth it, right?
Fortunately that's not how we operate. And it brings us back to where we started, with the Jews as a group tending to have a disproportionate amount of education and wealth, and a consequently major impact on Western society. On all of these points so far I probably agree with the majority of neo-Nazis and their ilk. Where I depart with them is with the idea that this is the result of some planned conspiracy, as in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and all the variant theories that have emerged before and since that pamphlet's first appearance in the Victorian age. Rather it is the natural result of a group with a specific set of socio-cultural traits and traditions.
Did you know that Harrison Ford is half a Jew? Not too shabby.
