Calling to boycott Israeli academic institutions is also undesirable, [Chomsky] says, since it opens the door for "glass house" principle: "if we boycott Tel Aviv University because Israel violates human rights at home, then why not boycott Harvard because of far greater violations by the United States?" he asks.
Chomsky says that efforts should be directed at initiatives that are likely to succeed.
"Failed initiatives harm the victims doubly — by shifting attention from their plight to irrelevant issues… and by wasting current opportunities to do something meaningful."
He also questions with the analogy between apartheid South Africa and Israel, which is commonly used by the boycott movement. Chomsky writes that while discrimination within Israel does exist, it still doesn’t constitute as "South African-style apartheid."
Nope. Same old Noam:
As for the occupied territories, "the situation is far worse that it was in South Africa," he says.
In South Africa, "the white nationalists needed the black population: it was the country’s workforce, and as grotesque as the bantustans were, the nationalist government devoted resources to sustaining and seeking international recognition for them. In sharp contrast, Israel wants to rid itself of the Palestinian burden," he explains his stance. "The road ahead is not toward South Africa, as commonly alleged, but toward something much worse."
Why is it Israel's burden? Why isn't it, say, the Arabs'? And why is Israel's self-sufficiency a bad thing and not a model for the Palestinians' "road ahead"? Isn't it because, as Mark Steyn points out, the Palestinians have no real taste for statehood?:
Palestinian "nationalism" is a euphemism for a death-cult whose pathologies seep into almost every routine daily transaction: The last time I was there, a few years ago, the affable proprietors at almost every convenience store had various local Martyrs of the Week pinned up on the wall behind the cash register, and the Education Ministry was giving first prize in its letter-writing competition to a seventh-grader from Jenin pledging to his deceased father to become a suicide bomber and "propel my living-dead body into your arms". Their own corpses are historic victories, and Jewish corpses are the spoils thereof. There is no evidence of "nation-building", nor any appetite therefor. Invited to choose between nation-building and Jew-killing, they plump for the latter, every time.
I fear there is "something much worse" ahead--an Iran with nukes at odds with the Sunni neo-caliphate. But I don't expect Noam, the quintessential out-to-lunch lefty, to worry about the bigger picture when it's so much more comforting to zero in on what itsy-bitsy Israel is supposedly doing wrong.
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