While many Israelis were enraged by comments from the chief executive of the French telecommunications company Orange, who told journalists in Egypt that he would like to cut ties to an Israeli cellphone service provider that operates in the occupied West Bank, pro-Palestinian activists working to isolate Israel argued that the statement was insufficient.

The Orange chief executive, Stéphane Richard, made the comments in Cairo on Wednesday, but his company has been under pressure from activists in France and elsewhere who are seeking a radical change to Israeli policies through a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions, known as B.D.S. The campaign is modeled on the 1980s movement that helped undermine international acquiescence to apartheid in South Africa.

As Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian rights activist, explained in a New York Times Op-Ed essay last year, the movement, started in 2005, has three demands: the end of Israel’s occupation and control of the territories it seized in 1967, full equality for “Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel,” and “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced and dispossessed in 1948.”

While many international observers and diplomats see Israel’s control over the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza as the major obstacle to peace, it is the activists’ third demand, concerning Palestinians displaced the year Israel was founded, 1948, that disturbs many Israelis the most, because a return of those refugees and their families would threaten the country’s Jewish majority.