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Last edited Fri Apr 5, 2013, 08:38 PM - Edit history (1)
Just about every single physician teacher at my hospital will be at local Yom Haatzmaut festivities .
I don't imagine an academic boycott of Israel ever taking hold in any country outside the Middle East and probably not even .. EVER..
Especially not in the Medical Physician field..
maybe their recent history has a bit to do with that or something 
Starting from an economic boycott, something any consumer can contribute to and so both applying an all too easily dismissible pressure internally but a not so easily dismissible large-scale involvement from outside. But economic boycotts don't work unless applied multinationally at a state level, at the level of sanctions as now in place against Iran and NK. Even at that it's a bit doubtful that they work. They sometimes just force states to become more resilient, self-reliant, and to look for other economic avenues.
In the case of putting pressure on SA to eliminate the apartheid ideology (I deliberately put it in those terms rather than anything like "the elimination of SA" because the aim is to change the orientation of a political rule from anti-equality to equality, not to "wipe a state off the map" , it was found that cultural boycotts, in particular an international boycott of SA sports proved quite effective.
1. SA took great pride in the achievement of its athletes, and
2. SA did not like being ostracized from international venues where those states that it wanted to associate with were participating.
It worked because it was visible to all SA people, it couldn't be hid, and it hit the people most at issue in "the moral/cultural gut".
Israel rightly takes pride in its intellectual achievements. An "intellectual boycott", per se, isn't achievable and I agree with you that any attempt at such a thing is both undesirable and counter-productive (so I disagree with that ass Galloway, refusing to debate with an Israeli. WTF???). Hell, nobody participating in DU I/P could agree with such a boycott without self-contradiction. But at some level I see cultural boycotts as being possibly useful - producing long term gain out of the short term pain.
