February 5, 2014--Boycott Israel?

When the American Studies Association late last year voted to exclude Israeli academic institutions from participating in events it sponsors, it was a blip on the academic landscape. After all, the ASA has only a few thousand members and, truth be told, who cares.

But when Secretary of State John Kerry made some relatively innocuous comments about a larger, economic boycott of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nearly had a stroke.

Forget for the moment that Kerry was not advocating a boycott but rather referring to talk about it that he feels will grow louder if the American-sponsored peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis fail to produce even a fig leaf of results, the very fact that Netanyahu went, pardon the reference, ballistic should tell us something.

That "something" being that there is a growing movement among some Western people (Jews as well as non-Jews, which is significant) and corporations to boycott Israel if the government in Jerusalem continues to expand the occupation of the West Bank and refuses to get serious in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu and his associates can try to ignore more local calls for a boycott (by New York Times op-ed columnist and Palestinian human rights activist, Omar Barghouti, for example) but they cannot so easily  shrug it off when the $200 billion Dutch Pension fund PGGM begins to divest itself of investments in Israel and Secretary Kerry says that unless there is serious progress on a deal the nascent boycott will be dwarfed by what will follow--in his words, a "boycott on steroids."

That's what friends are for--not to threaten (as Netanyahu sees it), but when necessary for your well-being, to tell you the unpleasant truth. And, in Kerry's case, to, by implication, imply such a boycott would be understandable. Kerry also knows how to play hardball.

So, he's not Netanyahu's best friend.

A boycott would be understandable because even reasonably objective observers are seeing comparisons between today's Israel and yesterday's South Africa.

How else to put it--with so many Palestinians forced to live behind militarized fences, allowed to enter and leave at the behest of Israeli occupiers of their territory, it feels to many to be too much like the old South African apartheid state.

And, recall, the worldwide imposition of economic sanctions ultimately brought an end to that hideous era. And, it appears, equivalent sanctions may be gaining the attention of even Iran's formally impervious "supreme leaders."

Perhaps, then, an expanding boycott of Israel may be the best and only thing that will enable the peace movement there to again assert itself.