Eight armed Hamas terrorists fought Israeli troops last Monday. All were killed — then counted in the day’s death toll of “60 protesters.”

Hamas itself identified 50 of the 60 “martyrs” as Hamas members and admitted to “terminological deception,” because it was deploying “peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force.” The widespread condemnations of Israel caused by characterizing those 50 violent fence-invaders as “peaceful” suggests how Palestinians are playing so many for dupes.

Reporters love playing the “peaceful, oppressed protesters-of-color” against “the armed, white, persecuting soldiers” card (even though there are many dark-skinned Israelis and light-skinned Palestinians; the conflict is national not racial). Images of flak-jacketed Israeli soldiers and injured Palestinians trigger waves of simplistic stereotypes. Suddenly, the Palestinians are Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi and Black Lives Matter all in one.

On May 14, the opening of America’s embassy in Jerusalem gave lazy meme-makers a “two-fer, casting Ivanka Trump as Marie Antoinette, essentially sneering “let them eat cake” — partying while “Palestinian protesters” died. This distortion confirmed the stereotype of the Trump family’s insensitivity.

Yet those 50 Hamas fighters disprove all these political “truths.” There’s nothing peaceful about marching toward an internationally recognized border in a coordinated assault, under cover of burning tires, fueled by shouts to mass-murder your neighbors, side-by-side with armed terrorists.

Israel didn’t learn anything by discovering the Hamas Facebook page instructing Gazans who breached the fence how to kidnap Israelis — every Israeli understands Hamas’ intentions. It’s why Hamas — which controls the Gaza Strip undemocratically — builds tunnels instead of roads, trains fighters instead of teachers and shouts “Death to the Jews” louder than “Long live Palestine.”

It’s striking how easy it is to discover the truth — or at least see some complexity behind these stereotypes. You need not be a pro-Israel fanatic to assume the story must be more complicated — just as you can be a pro-Palestinian critic of Israel without caricaturing Israelis as Nazis or Ku Klux Klanners.

When people so willingly engage in self-deception, something deeper is taking place.

While in the Middle East and Europe, Jew-hatred still fans the flames of anti-Israel ugliness, Gallup polls consistently report that over 70 percent of Americans sympathize with Israel. Such numbers, despite negative media coverage, suggest something deeper fuels this pile-on and mass misconception.

Call it “what’s-wrong-with-us-ism.” If in the 1940s and 1950s, America suffered from too much “what’s-right-with-us-ism,” since the 1960s, we’ve been overcompensating. Our culture — and especially our media — emphasizes our social flaws, political failures, moral defects.

Such self-criticism helped encourage some reforms. It opened society to necessary protests, especially from African-Americans, women and other once-disenfranchised groups.

But this sensationalist New Nihilism has also shaken American confidence, undermined faith in our institutions, treated many of our leaders as punchlines — long before this president.

And, while the breast-beating appears to be a mass act of humility, there’s an arrogance to it, too. We take blame for much that goes wrong, for the same reason we used to take credit for much that went right: If the world revolves around us, we dismiss others as bit players and cast ourselves as the main actors.

While that sense of “us-ness” is mostly “we Americans,” it extends to our closest allies. This explanation, then, uncovers two mysteries.

We have been conditioned like smokers to nicotine; we buy into the obviously simplistic, one-sided, sensationalist media narrative about Israel because we have become too used to buying into similarly crude, finger-pointing stories about ourselves.

That explains the bigger whodunit: Israel has suffered such harsh media coverage yet remained popular with most Americans because, as Pogo’s cartoonist Walt Kelly famously put it, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” We criticize Israelis because we identify with them, citizens of the Middle East’s only democracy, forced to make difficult calls in defending themselves against dictatorships and terrorists calling for their destruction.

Sometimes criticism is a compliment.

Gil Troy is the author of “The Zionist Ideas” and a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University.