The world, Naftali Bennett says, cannot exist without Israel. “Look, if today you pressed the button, and you stopped using Israeli products, you wouldn’t wake up in the morning because the chip in your cell phone doesn’t work, because it’s made in Israel,” he told the Saban Forum in Washington earlier this month. “You wouldn’t get to work because you don’t have Waze. You might have a heart attack because the stent in your heart doesn’t work. The vegetables you eat would be lousy because you’re not getting [the] Netafim [drip irrigation system]. Your account would be hacked, and I could go on and on.”

These, Bennett says, are the 10 plagues that Israel will bring on the world if it even dares to boycott it. He said these things in response to a question from Haim Saban about whether he, Bennett, was prepared for Europe to sever its ties with Israel in response to his plan to annex 60 percent of the West Bank. Well, Bennett is ready, and how. All that’s left for a frightened Europe to do is hope that the minister doesn’t carry out his secret plan to disable the world.

At first, Bennett’s remarks sent national pride soaring. But when you think about it a little more, you understand that Israel, according to him, is no more than a sophisticated factory for consumer products. Neither its culture nor its semi-democracy, nor even the fact that it’s a haven for Jews are the grounds for its existence, or the basis for calculating its global market value. By his lights, the chip and the stent define the Jewish state.

Thus, even according to Bennett, Israel has no advantage over the Indian or Chinese programmer who will successfully reproduce Israeli products, or, God forbid, come up with something of his own. If this is the case, not only must the grounds for Israel’s existence meet the tests of the market, its very lifespan is conditioned on the industriousness of its competitors.

Yet despite the anxiety that was supposed to seize the weak hearts of the citizens of Europe and the United States, the wave of anti-Israel boycotts continues. This week it was joined by the junior faculty at UC Berkeley; the American Anthropological Association is also considering a boycott; the Middle East Studies Association is allowing its members to stop cooperating with Israel; the largest Danish bank, Danske Bank, has added Bank Hapoalim to the list of companies it boycotts; the German government is making grants to Israeli high-tech companies conditional on the funds not being invested over the Green Line; European supermarket chains are not buying vegetables grown in the Jordan Valley; Norway’s pension fund has sold its shares in Elbit Systems, and that’s just a partial list.

It’s true these boycotts are not being felt in every Israeli home. They are very far from the sanctions imposed on Saddam’s Iraq or those being imposed on Iran. But the image they create indeed affects every citizen. Israeli tourists have not encountered admiring looks recently because they come from the land of chips and stents.

The encouraging thing is that Israel is beginning to respond to the wave of boycotts just like Saddam Hussein or Iran’s Ali Khamenei. Saddam was certain the world was wrong, and Khamenei is careful to demonstrate Iran’s technological abilities as proof of its superiority. Now Bennett has brought Israel into this group of elite countries. And please note that if Iraq could survive a dozen years of sanctions and if Iran hasn’t collapsed after some 35 years of sanctions, Israel, the home of the Lord of Hosts, will surely be able to hold out even if forced to swallow all its chips itself.

Bennett is not just another religious nut case. He is the messiah of more than 350,000 eligible voters, and tens of thousands more who couldn’t yet vote in the last election. He has the potential to be a senior minister in the next government, if not prime minister. Israeli citizens should start inquiring of their friends in Iran and Iraq about how to safely survive a regime that’s certain the sun shines out of its rear end.