A record that's anything but straight

I clearly do not buy into the two-state solution… If the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution. You would have a Palestine next to a Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to Israel.

In another interview, Barghouti stated:

If the occupation ends, would that end our call for BDS? No it wouldn't.

He wrote an even more damning piece in Electronic Intifada on 31 May 2009:

...people fighting for refugee rights like I am, know that you cannot reconcile the right of return for refugees with a two state solution. That is the big white elephant in the room and people are ignoring it ­ a return for refugees would end Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Note that a 'right of return' is demanded not just for the limited number of 1948 refugees who are still alive but for all their descendants ad infinitum, who were born and have lived in other countries for their entire lives. Thus, somebody born and bred in Lebanon or Syria, who has never fled from anywhere, is considered to be a 'Palestinian refugee' if that person has, say, a grandfather or great grandfather who was a 1948 refugee. This is without parallel in international law. A right of compensation for lost family property can legitimately be inherited, but not refugee status itself.

It follows that the final goal of BDS, as Barghouti himself admitted in his 2009 piece, is not merely to end Israel's military and civilian presence in the West Bank but to change the demographic composition of Israel itself. This would transform the existing Jewish majority into a disempowered and vulnerable minority.

BDS thus implicitly rejects the internationally-endorsed principle of "two States for two peoples" and is at odds with the global consensus which has always recognized Israel's right to exist specifically as the nation-State of the Jewish people legitimately created under international law and the UN Charter.

The objective effect of the BDS campaign, regardless of the naive and well-intentioned wishes of some of its supporters, is thus to attack Israel's legitimacy so as to isolate it internationally and clear the way for its eventual destruction.

What is too terrible to be stated, but is implicit in the assault on Israel's legitimacy placed in historical context, is that the fate of Israel's Jewish majority if BDS realises its final goals will be mass expulsion or even extermination and, for the remnant who survive, disempowerment and the denial of basic rights. Even though the leaders of the global BDS movement are political and philosophical opponents of Hamas, this end result is the secular equivalent of the "Islamic" solution which is called for in explicit terms in the Hamas Charter.

For all his high-sounding talk about universal human rights, Barghouti's prescriptions would result in the fundamental rights of the Jewish people, including their internationally recognized right of national self-determination, being trampled into the dust. But of course, that's just a view he has expressed in his "personal capacity".