It is quite obvious that this applies to the current sympathy of Western leftists for Palestinians and Hamas and for other jihadi terrorists as well. As I indicated in my essays about terrorists and romanticism, the intensity of the horror terrorists perpetrate only makes their Western sympathizers regard them as all the more dedicated and long-suffering; why else but from justified rage at oppressors would people labeled as “oppressed” be so cruel? So identifying with the perpetrators who are defined as victims – and who seek to increase the number of their casualties at the hands of their more well-to-do oppressors, the Israelis/Jews, the better to become more numerous victims – seems a good way of shedding one’s own detested privilege.

In other words, the Palestinians envy the Jews the Holocaust and seek to appropriate it and convince the world that the Jews are the real Nazis vis a vis the Palestinians who are today’s Jews. Then the Western leftists buy the Palestinians’ reframing and in turn envy Palestinian victimhood and sympathize with it. It’s victim envy all the way down.