Alan Dershowitz published an op-ed in Haaretz on Wednesday giving his top 10 reasons why boycotting Israel is immoral. What if he wrote the same article in 1974 about the anti-Apartheid movement? It might look something like this.
By Sol Salbe
Ten reasons why the anti-Apartheid movement is immoral and hinders peace
The anti-South African movement threatens the reconciliation process by promoting extortion rather than negotiation, and discourages blacks from agreeing to any reasonable peace offer.
By Alan M. Dershowitz | Feb. 12, 1974 | 4:00 PM
1. The anti-Apartheid movement immorally imposes the entire blame for the continuing Apartheid and the Bantustan policy on South Africa.
2. The current anti-Apartheid movement especially in Europe and on some American university campuses, emboldens the blacks to reject compromise solutions to the conflict.
3. The anti-Apartheid movement is immoral because its leaders will never be satisfied with the kind of two-state solution that is acceptable to the government of South Africa.
4. The anti-Apartheid movement is immoral because it violates the core principle of human rights: namely, “the worst first.”
5. The anti-Apartheid movement is immoral because it would hurt the wrong people.
6. The anti-Apartheid movement is immoral because it would encourage the Soviet Union and China.
7. The anti-Apartheid movement is immoral because it focuses the world’s attention away from far greater injustices, including genocide.
8. The anti-Apartheid movement is immoral because it promotes false views regarding the Afrikaner people, exaggerates the country’s flaws and thereby promotes a new variation on the prejudice against them dating back from a century earlier.
9. The anti-Apartheid movement is immoral because it reflects and encourages a double standard of judgment and response regarding human rights violations.
10. The anti-Apartheid movement will never achieve its goals.
This article is a parody of Dershowitz’s original article.
Read more:
The boycott isn’t economic warfare, it’s psychological
The academic boycott of Israel: No easy answers
Sol Salbe is an Israeli-Australian journalist and translator based in Melbourne. He has spent the last 13 years as a full-time monitor of the Israeli media looking particularly at the differences between Hebrew and English-language coverage of events. His specializes in translating and disseminating articles, and segments of articles, which have not been made available in English.
