Matt Yglesias notes that it would directly hurt Palestinians to close the Sodastream plant in the West Bank. But he says it should be closed anyway, in order to try to change the status quo to the Palestinians' long-run benefit.
It would be nice if he explained how this is supposed to work.
Matt compares such actions with sanctions against the South African apartheid regime a generation or so back, which surely made life worse for the black majority at the time. But I think I understand how that did the anti-apartheid cause some good - and I don't see how that would work here.
The idea of sanctions against South Africa was pretty simple. You had a fairly sizable white minority that benefited from apartheid - sizable enough so that if sanctions substantially hurt the South African economy, the ruling white minority couldn't be shielded from the effects of those sanctions.
In the short run, you'd make life even more difficult for the black South Africans, but the point was that you'd also make it difficult for the whites at the same time. Keep this going for long enough, and they'd have reason to negotiate.
The thing about closing a factory in the West Bank is that it hurts the Palestinians who work there, but there's no obvious mechanism by which that has much of an effect on the well-being of the Israelis.
Maybe there's some less-than-obvious way in by which it would hurt Israel if Western companies closed all their plants in the West Bank, but if so, Matt needs to be explicit about what that mechanism is, and how it works. Waving one's hands and saying that this situation is analogous to South Africa, so the same approach we used there will work here, just isn't enough.
Especially when this wouldn't even be the same approach. Sanctions against Israel proper would be the same approach, and those might work. The problem is, it would be far more difficult to get people to go along with sanctions against Israel than it was in the case of South Africa.