The following excerpt comes from the memoir of Israeli author Amos Oz: A Tale of Love and Darkness.  London: Vintage, 2005.

It makes a lot of sense to me.  I find it "interesting" that Europeans were the people who committed the Holocaust (and a long history of persecution of Jews before that).  Europeans, especially the English and French, were the ones who created the political problem of the Israeli-Palestinian division.    Many Americans may not know that England promised the Arabs that they could have what is now Palestine if they fought on the side of England against the Turks in World War I.  The Arabs did so, and of course the Allies won the war.  At the same time, however, England and France also promised the same land to the Jews.  The tragedy of that perfidy is still with us today.  Of course, it's not the Europeans who are suffering the results of the holocaust and political double-dealing, it is mainly the Arabs.  And then we (the Western media) blame the Arabs for being fanatical and inherently violent.

In the lives of individuals and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted.  It is mere wishful thinking to imagine that the persecuted and the oppressed will unite out of solidarity and man the barricades together against a ruthless oppressor.  In reality, two children of the same abusive father will not necessarily make common cause, brought close together by their shared fate.  Often each sees in the other not a partner in misfortune but in fact the image of their common oppressor.

This may well be the case with the hundred-year-old conflict between Arabs and Jews.

The Europe that abused, humiliated and oppressed the Arabs by means of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and repression is the same Europe that oppressed and persecuted the Jews, and eventually allowed or even helped the Germans to root them out of every corner of the continent and murder almost all of them.  But when the Arabs looks at us they see not a bunch of half-hysterical survivors but a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East—in Zionist guise this time—to exploit, evict and oppress all over again.  Whereas when we look at them we do not see fellow victims either, brothers in adversity, but somehow we see pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel, put keffiyehs on their heads and grown moustaches, but are still our old murderers interested only in slitting Jews’ throats for fun.  (330)