By Omar Barghouti

If Secretary of State John  Kerry’s attempts to revive talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority fail because of Israel’s continuing construction of illegal settlements,  the Israeli government will likely face an international boycott “on steroids,” as Mr. Kerry warned last August.

These days, Israel seems as terrified by the “exponential” growth of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or BDS.) movement as it is by Iran’s rising clout in the region. Last June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, effectively declared BDS. a strategic threat. Calling it the “delegitimization” movement, he assigned the overall responsibility for fighting it to his ministry of strategic affairs. But BDS doesn’t pose an existential threat to Israel; it poses a serious challenge to Israel’s system of oppression of the Palestinian people, which is the root cause of its growing worldwide isolation.

The Israeli government’s view of BDS as a strategic threat reveals its heightened anxiety at the movement’s spread into the mainstream lately. It also reflects the failure of the foreign affairs ministry’s well-endowed ‘”Brand Israel” campaign, which reduces BDS to an image problem and employs culture as a propaganda tool, sending well- known Israeli figures around the world  to show Israel’s “prettier face.”

Launched in 2005 by the largest trade union federations and organizations in  Palestinian society, BDS calls for ending Israel’s 1967 occupation, “recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab- Palestinian citizens of Israel to full  equality,” and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and  lands from which they were forcibly  displaced and dispossessed in 1948.

Why should Israel, a nuclear power with a strong economy, feel so vulnerable to a nonviolent human rights movement?

Israel is deeply apprehensive about the increasing number of American Jews who vocally oppose its policies – especially those who are joining or leading BDS campaigns. It also perceives as a profound threat the rising dissent among prominent Jewish figures who reject its tendency to speak on their behalf, challenge its claim to be the “national home” of all Jews, or raise the inherent conflict between its ethno-religious self-definition and its claim to democracy. What I. F.  Stone prophetically wrote about Israel back in 1967, that it is “creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry” because of its “racial and exclusionist” ideal, is no longer beyond the pale.

Israel is also threatened by the effectiveness of the nonviolent strategies used by the BDS movement, including its Israeli component, and by the negative impact they have had on Israel’s standing in world public opinion. As one Israeli military commander said in the context of suppressing Palestinian popular resistance to the occupation, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”

The landslide vote by the American Studies Association in December to endorse an academic boycott of Israel, coming on the heels of a similar decision by the Association for Asian-American Studies, among others, as well as divestment votes by several university student councils, proves that BDS is no longer a taboo in the United States.

The BDS movement’s economic impact is also becoming evident. The recent decision by the $200 billion Dutch pension fund, PGGM, to divest from the five largest Israeli banks due to their involvement in occupied Palestinian territory has sent shock waves through the Israeli establishment.

To underscore the “existential” danger that BDS poses, Israel and its lobby groups often invoke the smear of anti-Semitism, despite the unequivocal, consistent position of the movement against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This unfounded allegation is intended to intimidate into silence those who criticize Israel and to conflate such criticism with anti-Jewish racism.

Arguing that boycotting Israel is intrinsically anti-Semitic is not only false, it also presumes that Israel and “the Jews” are one and the same. This is as absurd and bigoted as claiming that a boycott of a self-defined Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, say, because of its horrific human rights record, would of necessity be Islamophobic.

The BDS movement’s call for full equality in law and policies for the Palestinian citizens of Israel is particularly troubling for Israel because it raises questions about its self-definition as an exclusionary Jewish state. Israel considers any challenge to what even the Department of State has criticized as its system of “institutional, legal, and societal discrimination” against its Palestinian citizens as an “existential threat,” partially because of the apartheid image that this challenge evokes.

Tellingly, a recent attempt by Israeli liberals to have their civic national identity as “Israelis” recognized by the state  was squarely rejected by Israel’s Supreme Court on the grounds that it posed  a serious threat to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish  people.

Israel remains the only country on earth that does not recognize its own nationality, as that would theoretically avail equal rights to all its citizens, undermining its ‘‘ethnocratic’’ identity. The claim that BDS, a nonviolent movement anchored in universal principles of human rights, aims to ‘destroy’ Israel must be understood in this context.

Would justice and equal rights for all really destroy Israel? Did equality destroy the American South? Or South Africa? Certainly, it destroyed the discriminatory racial order that prevailed in both places, but it did not destroy the people or the country.

Likewise, only Israel’s unjust order is threatened by boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

– Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights activist and the author of “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.” (This article was originally published in the New York Times – Jan 31, 2014)