Last week, the nation joined in a chorus of condemnation when a self-avowed white nationalist killed one woman and wounded three other worshippers at the Chabad of Poway, Calif. It was a senseless anti-Semitic hate crime that deserved to be condemned without reservation.

A week later, four Israelis, including one Bedouin, were killed and 10 others were wounded by rocket fire from Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza that rained down on their streets, homes and places of work.

This time, many of the same voices that were so loud about Poway and the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last October were either muted or — as in the case of Reps Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — actually rationalized and even defending these acts of terrorism.

Why the empathy deficit for Israelis?

While the circumstances are different, the motivation of those pulling the triggers or launching the missiles isn’t. The contrast between the reaction to synagogue shootings in America and terrorist rocket barrages in Israel shows the common thread of anti-Semitic hate that links white nationalist murderers in the Untied States to Middle East terrorists and their American cheer squad.

To some on the left, while synagogue shootings are hate crimes, the murderous actions of Palestinian killers are an understandable part of a “cycle of violence,” for which Jews bear the larger share of the blame. In this view, Israelis are merely paying the price for their supposed oppression of Arabs.

But while the conflict in the Middle East is complex, understanding the motivation of those who shoot rockets into Israel in the hope of causing death and destruction isn’t terribly complicated. The terrorists and their apologists in the boycott, divest and sanction movement in the United States, which Omar and Tlaib support, have the same goal: the destruction of the world’s sole Jewish state.

Omar and Tlaib have both trafficked in anti-Semitic slurs in recent months and then posed as victims of President Trump’s “Islamophobia” when they were called to account for their hate. But they condemned the Poway shooting, and Tlaib even blamed the Trump administration for “ignoring” the threat of “homegrown white nationalism.”

Yet both took a very different attitude about the rocket attacks from Gaza.

Omar asserted a moral equivalence between Israel’s killing of “little kids” and “protesters” and the jihadist rockets. Tlaib asked: “When will the world stop dehumanizing our Palestinian people who just want to be free?” She added: “The status quo of occupation and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unsustainable.”

Both of them are lying about what is going on in Gaza.

Gaza isn’t occupied. Israel withdrew in 2005. Yet instead of trading land for peace, Gaza became an enclave run by Hamas terrorists. While Palestinians there may yearn for freedom, their oppressors are their Islamist rulers, not the Israelis who allow convoys of food, medicine and fuel into Gaza every day — even when the rockets are flying. The blockade that both Egypt and Israel maintain on Gaza is quarantine on a terrorist entity that threatens the region.

The “protesters” they claim are being shot are Hamas operatives who seek to infiltrate the border into Israel to commit mayhem. The kids who are killed are either human shields cynically deployed by the terrorists or, as happened this past weekend, unlucky victims who are slain by Islamist rockets that fall short of their Israeli targets.

The conflict would end if the Palestinians were finally willing to live in peace alongside Israel. But they can’t, because the avowed goal of Hamas is destroying Israel. The “justice” Omar and Tlaib demand is a world without Israel.

Stripped of its fake appeals to human rights, Hamas’ ideology is rooted in raw Jew hatred that is little different from the beliefs of American neo-Nazis like the killer at Poway.

Omar’s and Tlaib’s support for the anti-Semitic BDS movement and their willingness to rationalize rocket attacks gives the lie to their pose as progressives. The same applies to others on the left who mouth platitudes about hate and condemn Poway and Pittsburgh but express ambivalence about those who seek to murder Jews in Israel. They’re not just hypocrites. They are giving aid and comfort to terrorists who are morally equivalent to synagogues shooters.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review. Twitter: @jonathanS_Tobin