Arguments for Israel have a way of reflecting the preoccupations of their times.

In the 1940s support for Zionism was sold as a way to drive a final nail in the coffin of Nazism. In the early years of decolonization, Israel was touted as a fledgling nation fending off the massed armies of British-aligned Arab monarchies. In the 1970s and 1980s, pro-Israel politics captured a mood of post-1968 anti-utopianism, with leftist Third Worldism standing in as the new god that failed. And by the 1990s — after Likud’s Thatcherite reorganization of Israel’s economy and the country’s emergence as a globalized tech juggernaut — support for Israel became a sign of judicious alignment with the new liberal, post–Cold War Davos dispensation.

So it’s not surprising that today, serious criticism of the Jewish state is condemned, above all, as a breach of multicultural etiquette. It goes with the spirit of the age. If it was sexist for Bernie Sanders’s campaign to chide Hillary Clinton for her Goldman Sachs speeches, and if it was borderline racist to want to break up the banks, it stands to reason that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments about the pro-Israel lobby would be singled out for being — as the staunchly pro-Israel Rep. Eliot Engel put it — “deeply offensive,” “deeply hurtful,” and a “vile anti-Semitic slur.”