Harvard and MIT professors petition calling on the universities to divest their holdings in companies which deal with Israel

Over a hundred Harvard and MIT professors have signed a petition calling on the two universities to divest their holdings in companies which deal with Israel. The chances of this actually occuring are, of course, slim. Still, the Harvard Crimson has an excellent editorial on why divestment is wrong and comparisons with apartheid South Africa are unsubstantiated.

But any comparison between today’s Israel and Apartheid-era South Africa is so fundamentally flawed as to be offensive. The Israeli legal code does not discriminate against Arab Israelis the way that the Apartheid laws discriminated against black South Africans. In Israel, the law provides for the equal treatment of all of its citizens, both Jewish and Arab. In South Africa, however, blacks were the victims of laws that controlled their day-to-day lives, dictating where they could live, work and travel. And in South Africa, the government slaughtered blacks when they protested the government’s policies; Israel has done nothing even approaching that level of repression—to either Israeli Arabs or to Palestinians in the West Bank.