"Jew haters know they can’t start a movement to eliminate the Jews, so they do the next best thing: They work to undermine, in sneaky ways, the world’s only Jewish state"

I'd never really considered it from quite this angle, but David Suissa, in his current piece at Jewish Journal, lays out, as his title puts it, "Why Anti-Zionism is more lethal than Anti-Semitism."

The real question is: How did the issue of Israel’s “right to exist” ever come up?

After all, we never hear about Syria’s right to exist or Libya’s right to exist or Sudan’s right to exist or Yemen’s right to exist. A country can commit genocide against its people and inflict the worst humanitarian disaster and no one will ever bring up its “right to exist.”

So, why is it OK to single out Israel?

Here’s my theory: If you hate Jews so much that you want to challenge their very presence, your best bet is to go after Israel. Jew haters know they can’t start a movement to eliminate the Jews, so they do the next best thing: They work to undermine, in sneaky ways, the world’s only Jewish state.

A stark example is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the leading global force against Israel. Its very name is misleading. Words like “boycott” “divestment” and “sanctions,” which are taken straight from the social justice manual, create a façade of genuine protest to hide a purely destructive agenda.

This shouldn’t shock anyone who’s been paying attention. In recent years, it has become more and more evident that the BDS agenda is not to criticize Israel but to crush it.

Even prominent BDS activists, like Ahmad Moor, have come clean: “OK, fine. So BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state.” Or BDS activist Anna Baltzer: “We need to wipe out Israel.” Or university professor As’ad Abu Khalil, another BDS activist: “The real aim of BDS is to bring down the State of Israel.”

Omar Barghouti, the founder of BDS himself, has said on the record: “Definitely most definitely we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.”

To undermine the 3,000-year Jewish connection to the land, Barghouti uses language like “acquired rights” and “indigenized.” His vision includes “de-Zionization” of Israel and the return of up to five million Palestinian “refugees” to flood the Jewish state.

Had BDS called itself the WIN movement– Wipeout Israel Now– no one would have taken them seriously. Instead, it uses the messaging of protest and intersectionality to attract well-meaning activists who don’t want to see Israel wiped out. This subterfuge is their strategy, and for the gullible crowd, it’s working.

One aspect of this method of selling Jew-hatred is to relegate Judaism to the status of just another of myriad "belief systems" in the world, with no tie to a particular place, or no special role in God's design for humankind.

Underlying the whole assault on Israel, he adds, “is the rejection of us as a people– we are just supposed to be a ‘nice’ religion confined to our synagogues and JCC’s, not a people taking up real space in the international arena.”

Of course, to look at it that way is to ignore what God told Moses when he brought him up to the bluffs overlooking the land extending beyond the Jordan River - which in turn requires looking at the Holy Bible as just another text regarded by some as sacred scripture.

Get people to buy relativism. That's the first step. That sets the stage for selling the message of "all the other belief systems and peoples of the world would get along fine if we didn't have this thorn in our side to contend with."