Mark Lilla has a fascinating piece in the New Republic, arguing that European distaste for Israel is rooted in the latter's devotion to the nation-state while European elites swear fealty to the ideal of transnationalism:

It is not the idea of tolerance that is in crisis in Europe today, it is the idea of the nation-state, and the related concepts of sovereignty and the use of force. And these ideas have also affected European intellectual attitudes toward world Jewry, and specifically toward Israel.
...Anyone who pays close attention to how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is handled in the European press, and even in intellectual journals, will see this frustration expressed on a regular basis. I do not think this can be ascribed solely to European pro-Arabism, just as American press coverage cannot be attributed entirely to the feelings of Jewish Americans for Israel. I am convinced that at a deeper level the differences have something to do with the way Americans and Europeans think about political life more generally today, differences that Robert Kagan has highlighted in his powerful little book Of Paradise and Power. While it may not be true that Americans are uniformly Martian (Woodrow Wilson was not Belgian, after all), Kagan is correct that the European consensus today, from left to right, is thoroughly Venutian in spirit. This causes occasional friction with the United States, but it is a source of fundamental disaccord with the Zionist project. For Zionists today are indeed from Mars, par la force des choses.
Even European sympathy for the Palestinian people, which is understandable and honorable, has an oddly apolitical quality to it. One would think that those concerned about the future of the Palestinians, and not simply about their present suffering, would be thinking chiefly about how to remove them from tutelage to terrorist and fundamentalist organizations, and how to establish a legitimate, law-abiding, and liberal political authority that could negotiate in good faith with Israel and manage Palestinian domestic affairs in a transparent manner. But there is almost no intellectual awareness in Europe of the political obstacles to peace that exist among the Palestinians, nor has there been much encouragement of political reform. To judge by what is written, the European fantasy of the future Middle East is not of decent, liberal nation-states living side by side in peace, but of some sort of post-national, post-political order growing up under permanent international supervision. Not Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shaking hands, but Hans Blix zipping around Palestine in his little truck.
Anyone schooled in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is well aware of the political pathologies of the nation-state and the idolatry that it invites. The legitimacy of the nation-state should not be confused with the idolatry of the nation-state. But for many in Western Europe today, learning the grim lesson of modern history has also brought with it a forgetting of all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve. The Zionist tradition knows what those problems were. It remembers what it was to be stateless, and the indignities of tribalism and imperialism. It remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. It recognizes that there is a cost, a moral cost, to defending a nation-state and exercising sovereignty; but it also recognizes that the cost is worth paying, given the alternatives. Eventually Western Europeans will have to re-learn these lessons, which are, after all, the lessons of their own pre-modern history. Until they do, the mutual incomprehension regarding Israel between Europeans and Jews committed to Zionism will remain deep. There is indeed a new Jewish problem in Europe, because there is a new political problem in Europe.

Read the whole thing.