Since Israel’s establishment in May 1948, the world’s preoccupation with the country has been far greater than its size, influence, or global role would merit. For decades now, hardly a day has passed without some mention in the international press of this tiny nation, the size of Vermont, whose seven-million-strong population is smaller than the Middle Eastern cities of Cairo, Tehran, and Istanbul. How many people outside their particular countries know the identity of the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Brazilian, Spanish, or even German heads of state? How about the premier of Indonesia, who is, after all, the leader of the most populous Muslim country in the world? By contrast, virtually all Israeli prime ministers have been household names throughout the world during the past 60 years, from the state’s founding father David Ben-Gurion, to Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and more recently Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Olmert.

What is the source of this extraordinary attention? Not empathy with the Palestinians; Israel attracted huge international interest well before it conquered the territories in the June 1967 war, indeed well before the “Palestinian problem” gained international prominence. In fact, there has never been a genuine international interest in the “Palestine question,” especially by the Arab states, whose decades of mistreatment of the Palestinians has gone virtually unnoticed. It is only when they interact with Israel, the only Jewish state to exist since biblical times, that the Palestinians win the world’s attention — not on their own merit but as a corollary of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and Muslim worlds.

On occasion, notably among devout and/or born-again evangelical Christians, this obsession has manifested itself in admiration and support for the national Jewish resurrection in the Holy Land. In most instances, however, anti-Jewish prejudice and animosity, or anti-Semitism as it is commonly known, has served rather to exacerbate distrust and hatred of Israel. Indeed, the international coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the libels of Zionism and Israel (such as the despicable comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa) have invariably reflected a degree of intensity and emotional involvement well beyond the normal level to be expected of impartial observers. Rather than being a response to concrete Israeli activities, it seems a manifestation of longstanding prejudice.

In “The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews” (Schocken, 208 pages, $19.95), the distinguished playwright, filmmaker, essayist, and novelist David Mamet doesn’t pull his punches about the direct link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. “The outright denunciation of Israel as ‘acquisitionist, bloodthirsty, colonial, et cetera’ is to me simply a modern instance of the blood libel,” he writes. “The world was told Jews used this blood in the performance of religious ceremonies … Now, it seems, Jews do not require the blood for baking purposes, they merely delight to spill it on the ground.”

It has long been a staple of Israel bashers to argue that they have never had anything against Judaism or Jews but only against Zionism and Zionists. Yet for all their protestations to the contrary, opponents of Zionism and Israel have never really distinguished among Zionists, Israelis, and Jews, and often use these terms interchangeably. When, in June 1967, the Israeli government ignored a French warning against breaking the tightening Arab siege by force of arms, President de Gaulle lambasted the Jews — not the Israelis — as “an elite people, self-assured and domineering.”

The truth of the matter is that since Israel is the world’s only Jewish state and since Zionism is the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, anti-Zionism — as opposed to criticism of specific Israeli policies or actions (“a salient fact of life in Israel, as abroad” in Mamet’s words) — means denial of the Jewish right to national self-determination. Needless to say, such a discriminatory denial of this basic right to only one nation (and one of the few that can trace its corporate identity and territorial attachment to biblical times) while allowing it to all other groups and communities, however new and tenuous their claim to nationhood, is pure and unadulterated racism.

Yet it is precisely because it has been tacitly construed as epitomizing the worst characteristics traditionally associated with Jews that Israel is the only case where one party to a territorial dispute — Israelis and their supporters across the world — is collectively stigmatized for government actions and targeted for political, economic, and academic boycotts.

“Imagine the anti-Israel propaganda currently engaged in on college campuses and other institutions of enlightenment — imagine it directed against Canadians,” Mamet writes, “not that Canadians are misguided, indeed wrong, but that they are ‘bad’ — devoid of the capacity for goodwill, duplicitous, inspired by some nefarious and implacable power to wrong those around them; possessed of a power so diabolical it induces their neighbors to strap bombs on their young and send them into the marketplace to slaughter women and their babies.”

A saddening thought, indeed. But is there any other explanation for why, 60 years after its establishment, Israel remains the only state in the world whose citizens are presented as the heirs to the Nazi mantle; whose economy faces relentless calls for sanctions, boycotts, and divestment; whose policies and actions year in and year out are condemned by the international community, and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged? As the poet Heinrich Heine, himself a convert from Judaism, once wrote, Judaism is “the family curse that lasts a thousand years.” No matter how much it has tried, Israel has never been able to escape this disturbing reality.

Mr. Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and author, most recently, of “Islamic Imperialism: A History,” available from Yale University Press.