Is Europe's Zionhass a Function of Its Trying to Expiate Residual Guilt for the Holocaust By Projecting It Onto Israel?

Well, that's one way to look at it:

The acclaimed British novelist Howard Jacobson opened his speech at the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem last October with piercing sarcasm: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.”

However, there has been a shift in the underpinnings of anti-Semitism. Israel has become the collective Jew among the nations, as the late French historian Léon Poliakov said about the new metamorphosis of Jew-hatred.

Jacobson was piggy-backing on the eye-popping insight of the Israel psychoanalyst Zvi Rex, who reportedly said: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

The anti-Semitic logic at work here is Europe’s pathologically guilt-filled response to the Holocaust, which, in short, is to shift the onus of blame to the Jews to cleanse one’s conscience. Two German-Jewish Marxist philosophers – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno – coined an esoteric sociological term for what unfolded in post-Shoah Germany: Guilt-defensiveness anti-Semitism...

I think that's only part of it, though. As David Nirenberg posits in his brilliant book, Anti-Judaism, Western culture as well as Islam evolved to a great extent by distinguishing itself from "the Jews." More often than not, that effort had little to do with real, live Jews and everything to do with that idea that "Judaism" was the epitome of all that was wrong and bad, and that "we," whoever "we" are, are cognizant of that "truth." Therefore, the stuff "we" believe, because it (supposedly) represents the antithesis of Judaism, must be correct. Pre-Holocaust, that conviction--and animus--could only affix itself to "the Jews." Post-Holocaust, when it's unacceptable in polite society to hate Jews qua Jews, it has attached itself like a toxic barnacle to Israel, the Jewish state. Thus, Israel is held out as the exemplar of all that is bad/rotten/evil in the world while "we"--again, whoever "we" are (and these days the "we" is most likely to consist of leftists and/or Islamists")--are not at all like Israel, and are therefore unquestionably virtuous/sensible/on the right track.

In essence, it's the same sort of nuttiness, updated for our time.