Drawing on a report released yesterday by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, Natan Sharansky explains why the movement to boycott the Jewish state, which in the U.S. has gained footholds in academia, left-wing activism, and even Congress—and in Europe is far more influential—is, at its heart, just a new window-dressing for the hatred of Jews:

Many who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement may do so out of a naive belief that it is working to achieve a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It has but one goal: the destruction of the state of Israel, . . . cleverly masked behind the veneer of fighting for human rights. . . . When caricatures of Israeli leaders employ the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany, only this time it is Israelis who are crucifying Palestinians or making ritual use of their blood, and when Palestinians are portrayed as living in Nazi death camps—that is . . . the blood libel of today; that is anti-Semitism.

When the legitimacy of the Jewish state is denied and, in the language of some of the founders and key promoters of BDS, there is no place for a Jewish state in the Middle East in any borders—that is . . . anti-Semitism. The true aim of many of the movement’s key figures has been the destruction of Israel as we know it. Indeed, the movement’s co-founder and leader Omar Barghouti has said so, unequivocally: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.”

Just as the anti-Semites of yesteryear sought to prepare the ground for the expulsion and murder of Jews, leaders and key figures in the BDS movement seek . . . to bring the level of hatred against Israel today to what existed in the past, to delegitimize the Jewish state to the point where it is seen by the world as a cancer that should be removed.

As this has led to bloodshed in the past, writes Sharansky, such anti-Semitic propagandizing will inevitably lead to bloodshed in the future.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.