This double standard is not the only type of hypocrisy of which BDS is guilty. BDS founder Omar Barghouti is a PhD student at Tel Aviv University. Furthermore, contrary to the conceit that BDS is a mass movement with the support of the Arab “street”, many of the original signatories of BDS’s “final call” were in fact one-man NGOs or non-existent organisations of which no trace can be found beyond their endorsements of that statement. Meanwhile, in the West, academics who loudly  announce their support for boycotting Israeli universities are in doing so trampling over the free exchange of ideas, eschewing collaboration with their peers and depriving students of a particular nationality a full education, thereby abandoning the foundational principles of their profession. Other BDS activists readily use Israeli technology — for example when building their websites — to promote boycotts of Israel.

The NUS, which refused to condemn the Islamic State out of fear that it might be “Islamophobic”, was happy to resolve to boycott the Jewish state without any concern for the impact of that decision on Jewish students. While Norway, Sweden and Finland boycotted SodaStream’s products made in its West Bank factory, those countries, as the company’s CEO observed, nevertheless had no issue selling its products manufactured in China, the “mother of human rights”, as he sardonically put it.

The second double standard is more elemental — and is rarely noted by observers. It is that, regardless of the substance of opinions on Israel, people have opinions on Israel at all. For while nobody takes much notice of the behaviour of other states of Israel’s size, only Israel receives such a huge amount of attention. That is also thanks in part to BDS, which helps to keep Israel at the forefront of people’s minds. It is inevitable that such attention will be negative.

The third double standard that BDS has helped to cultivate is to encourage questions in the West about Israel’s legitimacy: in the language of pro-Israel advocates, BDS “delegitimises” the Jewish state. Israel is so odious, the logic goes, that it really ought not to exist at all. This ghastly notion is becoming one of the central planks of discussion about Israel on campuses, within trade unions and in some religious denominations. Yet not only is active opposition to the sole expression of Jewish self-determination — the state of Israel — undoubtedly anti-Semitic, but no other country in the world is undermined in this way. Of no other country is it asked whether it has “a right to exist” (an absurd and meaningless question in international relations, in any case).

BDS’s anti-Semitism problem runs even deeper than double standards, however. The idea of boycotting Israel did not in fact begin with BDS or its precursors during the second Intifada. There were earlier iterations, including the Arab boycott of Israel, launched in 1945 against the Jewish communities in the area and sustained for decades after Israel’s establishment in 1948; and local boycotts by Arabs of Jewish shops in the 1920s. BDS is, in this respect, simply the latest manifestation of Near Eastern opposition to the very idea of Jewish sovereignty through boycott.