> How were they right in apologising?

It wasn't at all a question of being right or wrong, I was just happy to see that despite whatever their opinions could be, this didn't prevent them from finding that making the link between a company and a country was intellectually dishonest.

> Would you have bought technology from apartheid South Africa? It's not a matter of what the people at the company that developed the product actually think or are, it's a matter of boycotting business with a country that it's doing deeply wrong things.

To answer your question, I don't know. For the record, while I am personally hostile to a lot of things Israel is doing in the region, I don't think it's very intelligent or realistic to assume that all Israeli companies de-facto support all its most controversial policies. At the very least, a little bit of common sense could be used I think. If the technology you are talking about is sold by a company that obviously encourages and participates in something I disagree with (e.g: an arms manufacturer inherently part of the military industrial complex of Apartheid South Africa, or an Israel company located on illegal settlements in the West bank manufacturing products with prison labor). But in absence of such evidence, isn't it a sort of collective punishment? In our case btw, the whole project was in jeopardy because someone found that our infrastructure had one PCI card made by an Israeli/American company.

When I think about it actually, I'm afraid that the concept of boycott is completely idiotic to begin with.
Let me just give you a funny example: you see, I happen to be French, and I don't know if you remember but circa 2002-2003, there was a little bit of a disagreement between the government of my country and the government of the US with regards to a UN resolution for a regime change in Irak. Rapidly, a classic campaign of demonization and boycott of anything French was activated by some politicians and propagated by the media. I'm not going to remind you the grotesque Freedom Fries or the bottles of wine being poured on the sideways. I have been on the receiving end of this idiocy personally. During this period, I was on vacation on the east coast, and one evening in Boston, as I was having dinner with some buddies, the waiter who had just taken our order came back to the table, asked me where I was from, and informed us that he had just talked to the manager and had his agreement to not serve us because I happened to be French and that was his way to protest against the government of France. The waiter left the table, my friend and I stared at each other in disbelief and left shortly afterwards.

Not doing the crybaby here and needless to say how little i cared about this pathetic incident. In the end, I remember how laughable I found that however noble the patriotic intentions of this waiter were, the only thing this poor soul really achieved was to piss me off, and embarrass my American friends. Politically speaking however, nada. In a way, I almost wish I had been equally as brainwashed, naive, and ignorant of the world at this guy, buying all sorts of nonsense such as links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (lol) - In fact, since he didn't even bother asking me what I thought, he would have made even more of a fool of himself punishing a guy sharing his own opinion.