AS THE Middle East conflict burns on, more Europeans are turning against Israel. A growing number subscribe to the belief that the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians is the wellspring of much of the world's ills today , and that the blame for all this lies squarely with Israel - and by extension, with its staunchest ally, the United States.

As President Bush seeks to find common ground with Europe in his second term, he might do well to acquaint himself more thoroughly with this reality. For as surely as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict divides Jews and Arabs, it also divides Europeans and Americans. If you're looking for root causes of the growing transatlantic split that go beyond the easy cliches about US unilateralism, it's time to sit up and take notice.

Go to a dinner party in Paris, London or any other European capital and watch how things develop. The topic of conversation may be Iraq, it may be George Bush, it may be Islam, terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. However it starts out, you can be sure of where it will inevitably end - with a dissection of the Middle East situation and a condemnation of Israeli actions in the occupied territories. I can't count how many times I've seen it. European sympathy for the Palestinians runs high, while hostility toward Israel is often palpable.

And the anger is reaching new levels: A poll of 3,000 people published last month by Germany's University of Bielefeld showed more than 50 percent of respondents equating Israel's policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi treatment of the Jews. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed specifically believed that Israel is waging a war of extermination against the Palestinian people.

Germany is not alone in these sentiments. They have been expressed elsewhere, and often by prominent figures. In 2002, the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago declared, "What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz." In Israel just last month, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the Irish winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, compared the country's suspected nuclear weapons to Auschwitz, calling them "gas chambers perfected".

Moreover, in a poll by the European Union in November 2003, a majority of Europeans named Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Overall, 59 percent of Europeans put Israel in the top spot, ahead of such countries as Iran and North Korea. In the Netherlands, that figure rose to 74 percent.

Anti-Semitism is not likely to be the chief explanation for European hostility to Israel. After all, surveys show that some anti-Semitic attitudes persist in the United States as well, but they don't translate into visceral animosity toward the Jewish state. Instead, the intense antagonism toward Israel appears to be a subset of the wider European hostility, emanating mainly from the left, to the United States.

Many European intellectuals see Israel as one of the central pillars of US hegemony in the modern world. European leftists implacably opposed to America are implacably opposed to Israel as well, and for exactly the same reasons. Over dinner in Berlin not long ago, a Frenchwoman told me emphatically that Israel was "America's policeman in the Middle East". Her companion, nodding in furious agreement, insisted that the two countries are partners in a "new imperialism", leading the world inexorably into war. Israel is at once America's servant and the tail that wags the dog - doing America's bidding while forcing it into madcap adventures such as Iraq.

As that sentiment grows, American support for the Jewish state will continue to scratch raw nerves in the Old World.-Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post