This answer doesn't make any sense: people decided to go work for israeli companies, but pressure of activists from US and Europe made them lose their jobs.
The point is that all the same arguments were brought up against the previous anti-apartheid movement (the one in South Africa) at the time, and today almost no one would argue that those sanctions (and boycotts and divestments) weren't justified. Least of all on the basis that they "hurt, not help" the oppressed population. So this objection to the same tactics now is unconvincing.
The difference is that Israel is not apartheid (obviously).
The Palestinians are a different country. In South Africa they are all one country so they have to work together.
In contrast with Palestinians it's a different country entirely, so when you prevent them from working, you have little effect on Israel at all, you just hurt the Palestinians.
Officially, the black areas of South Africa during apartheid were different countries too. It seems to be something we've forgotten because apartheid South Africa has few supporters these days and it was obvious they weren't really since they were completely dependent on white South Africa economically and politically.
> Officially, the black areas of South Africa during apartheid were different countries too.
Well, no. Some black areas in South Africa (and South West Africa under South Africa's occupation) were converted into notionally internally self-governing regions, but of the twenty (10 each in South and South West Africa), only 10 (4 in South Africa, 6 in South West Africa) were ever even nominally (that is, according to the South African government -- no other government recognized any of them) independent states, and, in any case, there were a lot of black areas in South (and South West) Africa that were not part of either these "homelands", whether the notionally independent ones are otherwise.
(Now, in 1970, all of the black people of South Africa, whether they lived in the "homelands" or not, were assigned citizenship in one of them and had their South African citizenship cancelled. But that doesn't mean that the "homelands" covered all the black areas.)
Please provide an example of a software engineer living in Gaza that was working for an Israeli company but lost their job because of pressure from US and European activists.
I would be pretty surprised if you can find even one example. Heck, I'd be surprised if you can even find an example of a software engineer living in Gaza that has ever worked for an Israeli company at all.
Or, perhaps, an example of someone living in Gaza attending an Israeli university (they can't).
Why restrict yourself to Gazan software engineers? There were hundreds of Palestinians working for SodaStream in the West Bank. When it moved within the Green Line they all lost their jobs. It's not entirely clear the move was to do with pressure for activists but it seems reasonable to hypothesise that it had something to do with it.
Parent comment that changed conversation to this topic clearly didn't limit the subject only to software engineers — neither did I.
> Or, perhaps, an example of someone living in Gaza attending an Israeli university (they can't).
Yes — Gaza citizens wanted independence, and they got it, with everything that goes along. I'm pretty sure that there are PA citizens learning in israeli universities though, especially Ariel.
> I'm pretty sure that there are PA citizens learning in israeli universities though, especially Ariel.
Ariel is probably the worst example you could have chosen. Palestinian residents of the West Bank are not allowed to enter the settlement of Ariel that Ariel University is in, so that seems unlikely. I'm pretty sure there are zero PA citizens enrolled at Ariel.
