I went to Toronto, Ontario last week to attend the anti-Israel conference sponsored by Sabeel, the organization that is driving a divestment campaign in Protestant churches across America and Canada. I wanted to see for myself.

I had heard talks against Israel before: I was a student at Concordia University in Montreal, where Jews and Israel supporters were harassed on a daily basis, sometimes physically. It never ceases to amaze me how new allegations against Israel seem to emerge out of thin air, as if someone woke up in the morning and devoted all of their time to finding another way to demonize the Jewish state. But this time I was to hear something I had not heard before: Reverend Naim Ateek, founder of Sabeel did not hide his hatred for Jews under the veil of criticizing Israel.

I knew that Ateek wrote things about Israel that were straightforwardly anti-Semitic. In 2001 he wrote “Jesus is on the Cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him…The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.” But most Churches have dismissed the use of anti-Semitic, deicide imagery after the Holocaust, and I wondered what Ateek would do here.

As I sat in the chapel of the Bloor Street United Church, waiting for Ateek to speak, the crowd grew to roughly three hundred people. Ateek’s topic was “morally responsible investment” -- his euphemism for divestment from Israel.

Reverend Ateek began his presentation by labeling Israel as an apartheid state, whose policy is to “oppress the Palestinians through occupation.” His language for Israel was harsh. I’ve heard it all before. He rehearsed the Palestinianist line, effectively. But his contempt for modern Judaism shocked me. He seemed proud to point out the “flaws” in Judaism.

Hundreds of heads nodded in the audience as Reverend Ateek taught that the Torah promotes ethnic cleansing. But he is a healer, and so he told us that it was his and everyone’s duty to help save the Jews from themselves. There is something inherently wrong with modern Judaism that needs to be fixed. A call to a moral duty.

In Reverend Ateek’s fevered account, Zionists, who Ateek labeled “the racists,” hijacked Judaism; implying that all those who have an attachment to the land and the State of Israel are bigots.

One of Ateek’s weapons, one of which he seemed most proud, is his definition of the “new” anti-Semitism. He argued that while in the past anti-Semitism was hatred against the Jews, today “anti-Semitism is used to describe those that the Jews hate.” He thus seeks to turn Jewish defense against the longest hatred in history, into an attack: We are the haters, not those who hate us. And the crowd nodded their heads as if Ateek was delivering a Sunday sermon, and there were murmurs of agreement – “amen.”

The question period turned into a heated debate between our small group of supporters, and roughly two hundred attendees. While most of the allegations thrown our way were focused on the Israeli “occupation,” there was one instance which stands out in my mind. Speaking on rights of peoples, I stated that “Israelis have the right to go for dinner with their families, without the threat of a homicide bomber murdering them in cold blood.” One church congregant stared at me with contempt and stated, “I had a friend killed by a Jewish terrorist in Los Angeles.” These events have clearly become gathering places for Jew haters.

Sabeel claims to be an organization of peace, but its intent is to defame the Jewish state to Western Christians. Ateek’s hope for a solution to the conflict is for Israel to disappear into a single state of Arabs and Jews. In 2004, Sabeel proclaimed that its vision for the future was “one state for two nations and three religions.”

As a strong supporter of Israel I have seen and heard the entire palette of accusations against the Jewish State. But at the Sabeel conference, I saw in the flesh what I knew intellectually: that hatred for the Jewish state has become a proxy for anti-Semitism. While criticizing Israel is surely not anti-Semitic, singling it out and creating double standard for the Jewish State by holding Israel to impossible standards, and ignoring terrorism is anti-Semitism. But Naim Ateek and his supporters let the veil slip. They used to argue that the problem is only with Israel, with the occupation, not with Jews or Judaism. It worked for a long, long time. But not anymore.

Lawrence Muscant serves on the faculty of The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership