Throughout the early 2000s, boycott momentum was building with calls from European universities and American  churches. Thus BDS was, in effect, well under way by the time of the 2005 statement, which was therefore known as the “final call”. That statement, a result of those early efforts, crystallised the movement’s goals vis-à-vis Israel as follows:

1. Ending Israel’s occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;

2. Recognising the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality;

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

The movement remains true to this platform, which calls for nothing short of the dismantling of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The “occupation . . . of all Arab lands” is crafted to sound to Western ears as a reference merely to the lands Israel captured in 1967 (which include the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the eastern portion of Jerusalem). But to the supporters of BDS it encompasses all the land over which Israel is sovereign — even within those borders that are internationally-recognised.

The first demand is thus an emphatic repudiation of Jewish sovereignty in toto. The idea of the Arabs’ “fundamental rights” means, in the terminology of the conflict, opposition to the insistence that Israel be a Jewish state and a rejection of, among other things, the associated Israeli Law of Return, by which Jewish immigration to Israel is privileged. Finally, the “right of return” of Arab refugees to Israel, a category that (uniquely) includes their millions of descendants, is code for flooding the Jewish state with Arabs and assuring Arab demographic superiority. In other words, if BDS wins, there will be no Israel.

This ultimate aspiration of the BDS movement is actually no secret. Omar Barghouti routinely casts Israel as an apartheid state engaging in actions reminiscent of the Nazis, opposes a two-state solution to the conflict and insists that even a total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would be insufficient. “A Jewish state in Palestine, in any shape or form, cannot but contravene the basic rights of the land’s indigenous Palestinian population,” he has argued, concluding that “most definitely we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” Moreover, among the first groups to sign on to the 2005 “final call” were terrorist organisations dedicated to Israel’s destruction, such as those within an umbrella group known as the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, which comprises Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other terror groups proscribed by the West. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Council of National and Islamic Forces was formed with the authorisation of the architect of the second Intifada himself, Yasser Arafat, and led by Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah terrorist convicted and imprisoned by Israel for a series of attacks; he is also a distant cousin of Omar Barghouti.