The demand of the French customs authorities that Jordan Valley farmers mark their products as "Produce of Palestine" is a sign of bad news.

The assessment in Israel is that the French customs authorities will widen the demand to other manufacturers operating beyond the Green Line, because the EU countries are going to toughen their stand on such products and may even tax Israel for them.

This is an initial breach that could widen in the future. Israel could soon find itself kept at a distance, economically and otherwise, from Europe.

The countries initiating the boycotts and excommunication of Israel are not doing so with clean hands. A new anti-Semitism focused on Israel has emerged in them.

The new trend of damaging economic and cultural ties with Israel on the grounds of nearly automatic, one-sided, sweeping accusations about Israel's guilt for the conflict with the Palestinians, sometimes borders on incitement resulting from an ignorance too lazy to get to the roots of the conflict.

That one-sided approach was particularly evident in those days when the only news from the Middle East was the slaughter of innocent people by terror attacks in the cities of Israel, and was especially grating when the people being boycotted were scientists, writers, architects, artists, and other intellectuals who encountered a solid wall of tendentious indifference by international academic and humanitarian groups.

Sometimes, the victims of the boycotts belong to the very camp that supports a peaceful compromise with the Palestinians.

This boycott should not be dismissed lightly, the way the Yesha Council's spokesman said that anyway the French are anti-Semitic, "so the worst that will happen is that they won't be eating dates on the Champs Elysee."

After 35 years of occupation, during which too little was done to enable millions of Palestinians to live an independent, dignified life of economic prosperity and too much was done to establish settlements aimed at scuttling any attempt to mark borders or to create a territorial contiguity that could lead to a peace agreement - Israel should not be surprised by the threat to isolate it from the the economy and cultural life of Europe.

Peace-loving Israelis, for whom the Zionist dream is the Jewish state's integration into the family of nations, are paying - and may yet pay even more - the price of political and moral thuggery by a group whose standing phrase is "Yesha is here" - meaning everywhere in Israel.

That group's agenda, which has dictated policy to all the prime ministers since 1967, is based on the view that "the people shall live alone, without consideration of the Gentiles."

Israelis don't have too long for European pressure to end the occupation and evacuate the settlements - there are more important reasons to be free of the occupation.

But it is clear that the price of insisting on forcibly controlling the Palestinians is going to skyrocket. If we do not return to the path of dialogue and conciliation, the efforts to harm Israel's economy and to turn it into a pariah, will continue.