Despite the annoying questions, Chomsky, as always provides useful insights into the current situation. The focus is on the parallels and difference between Israel and South Africa.
“I don’t use [the term 'Apartheid'] myself, to tell you the truth. Just like I don’t [often] use the term ‘empire,’ because these are just inflammatory term. I think it’s sufficient to just describe the situation, without comparing it to other situations. Every country is going to have its own way: Jim Crow is different from South African apartheid.”
“I grew up here in the U.S. during a period of extreme anti-Semitism. When I was a child in the 1930s, when my father managed to put enough money together to buy a second-hand car and we would drive together on the weekend into the nearby hills near the city where we lived, you had to check the motels. If a motel said “restricted” on it, that meant we couldn’t go there, because that meant Jews weren’t allowed-this is not blacks, this is Jews. And by the time I got to Harvard in the early 1950s, there were virtually no Jewish faculty because it was so anti-Semitic. One of the reasons that MIT became a great university is that other Jewish faculty couldn’t get jobs at Harvard, so they went to the engineering school down the street. That’s not the same as South African apartheid, I don’t know what name you can give it, but it’s something. You have to describe it for what it is.”