While I agree with Boris's claim that the difference between the US and
Europe in showing sympathy for the Palestinian cause is related to the issue
of American power and its client state Israel, to be fair to Wallerstein he
was not making a comparison between the two. Rather, and I think quite
correctly, he was making the general claim that the issue of guilt about the
Holocaust limits the level of support for the Palestinian issue in a way that
the anti-Apartheid movement did not experience.
However, I would go a step further than Wallerstein. As Norman G.
Finkelstein has argued in his book "The Holocaust Industry", right wing
Jewish groups, particularly those located in the US, have been hard at work
exploiting the Jewish genocide during World War II for political and
financial gains. It is, of course, done in the context of US power, and it
is not by accident that such politics is generated in the heart of world
power.
Israel has been presented by these groups as a "victim state", a place for
refuge for a "nation" of the persecuted. In the same way that you do not
scrutinize a victim of a horrendous crime, this has provided Israel with a
tool to place fear in any government or movement that takes on the horrendous
human rights records of Israel. Victimhood has been used against the
Palestinians in a way that the Apartheid government, having no recourse to
being victims as such, could construct. In other words, the world community
has more at stake in supporting the Palestinian Intifada than they do the
anti-Apartheid movement. The issue of the Holocaust, as presented by "the
Holocaust Industry", has allowed Israel to torture, kill, and demolish the
livelihood of Palestinians for fifty years without any serious repercussions.
Of course, the US involvement in the region is first and foremost to blame
for this, for they have not only giving Israel the green light to go ahead
with this destruction but themselves have created the context and the means
in which Israeli violence is reproduced on a daily basis. But from the point
of view of the facts on the ground, Palestinians have had their lives
destroyed partly on the backs of a State that claims to be the refuge of a
persecuted people who now have the right to create a home for themselves,
even if it means thrashing and wasting the lives of the Palestinian.