I’m used to hearing Israeli officials complain that the Palestinians are stuck in their own paradigm of victimhood, that if they want a state they’d better start building it.

But when George Deek says it, the words carry a different weight.

It’s an understatement to say that the 30-year-old Arab Christian is not your typical Israeli diplomat. His background — he attended a French Catholic school as a Greek Orthodox child in Arab Jaffa in the Jewish state — is so multicultural it’s almost comical. In 1948, his grandparents fled Jaffa on foot to Lebanon, ahead of the conquering Jewish army, and then snuck back across the border and returned to their old home, where they raised five children. George grew up next door to an Arab Muslim family, across the hall from an Orthodox Jewish couple, and downstairs from a Catholic priest who was a “hidden” Jewish child during the Holocaust.

“I never thought my story was interesting,” he said over coffee in San Francisco. “It seemed normal.”

Well, it wasn’t normal, and neither is he. Most recently Israel’s deputy ambassador to Norway, Deek has a unique perspective on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, one that several Bay Area audiences were privileged to hear last week when he was here on a speaking tour organized by the Israeli consulate. Plus, as the child of refugees with family scattered throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank, he has the street cred to chastise his Palestinian brethren.

“The reason I’m sitting here as an Israeli diplomat and not a Palestinian refugee is that my grandfather took a decision unthinkable to others,” he said, referring to his grandfather’s return to Israel.

Deek notes that one of his cousins, who lives in Canada, represents his country as a canoeing champion, while another, who lives in Dubai, has no citizenship “and is denied basic human rights,” illustrating how the Arab world uses the Palestinians as pawns. No one, he says, not the United Nations, not Arab leaders, not the BDS advocates on North American campuses, really want them to have their own state. Instead, they use the refugees to bash Israel and the Jewish people. When Palestinians are mistreated by anyone other than Israel — as, for example, two years ago in Yarmouk, Syria, during deadly fighting between government forces and rebel militias — “there is no outcry from the [Arab world], because no Jews were involved.”

“That’s the real tragedy of the Palestinians,” he told me. “It’s not them leading the efforts, but those who believe the Palestinians are poor, passive victims, and that’s a racist, appallingly condescending attitude.”

In Deek’s analysis, anti-Semitism is connected to the struggle for human rights in the Arab world. How does that play out? He says it’s not a Jewish issue, but an issue of accepting difference. Jews were targeted throughout history because they were different and refused to assimilate.

“That forced the West to face a moral question: Can we live peacefully with a people that insist on the right to be different? Sadly, the answer is no,” he said. “And what’s happening today in the Arab world is the same thing. After ’48, the Arab world had to ask, can we tolerate a state in our midst that is different? The answer was, and remains, no.

“I do what I do not just because I care about Israel, but because I love and worry about my own Arab community in Israel, the West Bank and in the Arab world,” he said. “The hate that began with Jews does not end with Jews. Today when children in our Arab world are taught to hate Jews, the result is the persecution of minorities and the emergence of al-Qaida and ISIS.

“A Europe or a Middle East that has no room for Jews has no room for humanity.”

Israel may not be perfect, he says, but when it comes to acceptance of difference, it is a model for the region, “the only place in the Middle East where a Christian like me can wear a cross or build a church without fear.” And that openness is needed for new ideas to take root. That’s why Israel, and not its neighbors, is the startup nation. If any Arab society wants to flourish, the first step has to be acceptance of the minorities in its midst, including the Jewish state.

“Only when the Middle East accepts Israel will Christians, Yazidis, Bahai, Sunnis and Shia also be able to live free.”