Even some of Israel’s most vociferous critics, such as Norman Finkelstein, have chastised BDS for its ultimate goal. Finkelstein said:

They call it their three tiers . . . We want the end of the occupation, we want the right of return, and we want equal rights for Arabs in Israel. And they think they are very clever, because they know the result of implementing all three is what? What’s the result? You know and I know what’s the result: there’s no Israel.

Thus there can be no doubt that the vision of the BDS movement is to eradicate the state of Israel. Loud calls for a boycott were made during the second Intifada and certainly played a supportive role in that violent campaign. BDS itself, coming into its own in 2005 after the terrorist groups had been crushed, was a continuation of that violence and its goals by other means.

For various reasons, however — whether due to a misunderstanding of the terminology used by actors in this conflict, or as a result of deliberate obfuscation by supporters of BDS — many Western observers still believe that BDS has more modest objectives. In particular, the delusion that BDS is only interested in ending the Jewish presence in the West Bank and Gaza, rather than in all of Israel, persists. Even casting aside the profound moral and practical issues raised by the notion of cleansing the West Bank of Jews, the idea that BDS is only about those limited territories is entirely without foundation. But because the myth endures, it merits debunking.

To begin with, the “final call” came on the eve of Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, immediately indicating that territorial withdrawals alone would never suffice for the boycotters. Had withdrawals truly been their aspiration, they would have sought to praise Israel rather than launch a movement to punish it. Even the EU ambassador to Israel (yes, there is such a person) has tried to distance the EU’s concerns with Israeli policies from the means and goals of BDS, which he acknowledges are singularly nefarious. When former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters and other BDS activists try to dissuade musicians from performing in Israel — most recently Bon Jovi (who ignored them) — they have in mind not simply the West Bank but everywhere in the Jewish state. When students at Kings College London passed a BDS motion, they chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In other words, the boycott will help “free” Palestine by destroying Israel. And when Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who in the past has shown sympathy for boycotts of Israel, addressed the Labour Friends of Israel meeting at the party’s conference last autumn, he couldn’t even bring himself to utter the country’s name. These people cannot reasonably be classed, as their apologists sometimes insist, as friends of Israel who simply wish to see it take a different political course.