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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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It's a bit hard to remember at such a remove, but there was more hope of pressuring leftist organisations inside Israel to support at least a right of return.
Also i was significantly more Council-com at the time and knew a lot of Syndicalists and Chomsky was against it, not because he thought it was bad but that support for right of return and other demands of BDS could backfire due to lack of public understanding of the conflict. His reasoning was that Israel was not an apartheid state, it was a genocidal state. South Africa needed the Bantustans to provide cheap labour, and was thus open to international censure on their existance. Israel would very much like Gaza and the West Bank to stop existing and increased international pressure might result in "May as well send in the tanks now and wait out the backlash" rather than a forced negotiation.
Also, the general opinion was that localised boycotts of vocally pro-setter businesses were appropriate, but that more robust boycotts would be tarred as a prelude to Kristallnacht by right-wing and pro-israel press (as, indeed, they were). In any case, the public education for a boycott wasn't there.
So instead, efforts should be made to increase diplomatic censure and engage in anti imperialist action to reduce weapons shipments. The argument here being that Israel needed those shipments to maintain existence and were thus a single point of failure.
These were all dumb, because it turned out all Israeli political factions were pro genocide. The US will never stop weapons shipments to anyone, and BDS has in fact accomplished the public education effort Chomsky said was a precondition, despite a substantial propaganda effort against it.