Too many Israelis seem to believe they have a God-given right to occupy, suppress, disenfranchise and displace non-Jews—particularly Arabs—in Israel. That right seems to be implied in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence that Palestinians affirm the State of Israel as the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

It is a belief that, by extension, also leads some Israeli Jews to discredit and disenfranchise fellow Israeli Jews on Israel’s political left and NGO humanitarian and civil rights activists who criticize Israel’s behavior as deeply violative of democratic and humanitarian norms. That is why there have been repeated efforts in Israel’s Knesset to outlaw these NGOs.

That belief may also account for the fact that adherents to a Jewish religious tradition that stresses the sanctity of human life and man’s creation in the image of the divine react so callously to the destruction of innocents as Israelis have, 80 to 90 percent of whom approved Israel’s incineration of so many of Gaza’s non-combatant population. It seems not to have occurred to them that this sense of special entitlement that characterizes their behavior resonates an ideology that lead to the Holocaust—even as they invoke the memory of the Holocaust in justification of measures they say are intended to prevent its reoccurrence.