Is Israel Apartheid?: Reporting the Facts on Israel and South Africa

348 Pages·2014·3.72 MB·English

by  Benjamin Pogrund

Additional Praise for Drawing Fire
‘While many label Israel “an apartheid state”, Benjamin Pogrund actually experienced
apartheid, from Sharpeville to Mandela’s liberation. He is therefore well placed to
dissect the easy analogy between Zionist Israel and apartheid South Africa. This
critical and detailed account of the complexity of Israel’s situation will not please
some, but it will be an eye-opener for many who have hitherto accepted the
conventional wisdom. For those who do not think in monochrome, this is an important
book.’
—Colin Shindler, Pears Senior Research Fellow in Israel Studies,
SOAS, University of London
Drawing Fire
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Robert Sobukwe: How Can Man Die Better
Nelson Mandela
War of Words: Memoir of a South African Journalist
Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue (coeditor)
Drawing Fire
Investigating the Accusations
of Apartheid in Israel
Benjamin Pogrund
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pogrund, Benjamin, author.
Drawing fire : investigating the accusations of apartheid in Israel / Benjamin Pogrund.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-2683-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4422-2684-5 (electronic) 1. National characteristics,
Israeli—Political aspects. 2. Israel—Social conditions—21st century. 3. Israel—Politics and government—1993– 4.
Israel—Ethnic relations. 5. Zionism. 6. Apartheid. 7. Human rights—Israel. 8. Human rights—South Africa. 9.
Palestinian Arabs—Government policy—Israel. 10. Arab-Israeli conflict—Influence. I. Title.
DS119.76.P64 2014
956.9405'4--dc23
2014006848
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For my parents, Bertha and Nathan Pogrund, who gave me life,
and for Anne, who shares it with me
Foreword
Is Israel an apartheid state? There is nobody to trust more for a dispassionate,
informed answer than Benjamin Pogrund. He has unique experience. He has lived the
question as a victim of apartheid for twenty-six years of valiant reporting in South
Africa and more than fifteen years as an Israeli citizen in Jerusalem, deeply
sympathetic to Palestinians under occupation. In Israel, he founded the Yakar Centre
for Social Concern in 1997, which was dedicated to fostering dialogue between Jews
and Jews, Jews and Muslims, Jews and Christians, and Palestinians and Israelis.
In South Africa, he was jailed and persecuted as an enemy of the state and for
five years denied a passport. His crime was to recognise and objectively report the
lives of blacks under apartheid, the cruelties inflicted on the leaders, and the seeds of
the political aspirations that finally led to freedom. The mainstream press was not
doing that. The townships were off limits. His brave newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail,
was critical of the policies of apartheid, and its owners yielded to government
pressure and shut it down in 1985. But it was the scrupulously accurate reporting by
Pogrund, of torture in the prisons among much else, that most enraged the Afrikaner
government (and eventually stirred world opinion), and it was the honest competence
of this straight journalism that impressed the nascent black leadership. Here was a
white Jewish reporter prepared to risk his neck to find and reveal what was
happening – favourable or not to their movement – and whatever the pressure never
reveal his sources. It was a stand for which the government put him in prison, and
persecuted and investigated him as a threat to national security. It was also a stand
that won Pogrund the trust of the African resistance, in particular, Nelson Mandela
and Robert Sobukwe. Pogrund was the first non-family guest in twenty years
welcomed in prison by Nelson Mandela. He became a biographer of both Mandela
and Sobukwe, and in the later years continued speaking for them.
He found it hard to write this book. It had to be hard because when you know
both scenes so well, and don’t come loaded with preconceptions, you have to think
and find the right words. That’s an exercise in cognition and judgment unknown to the
grandiose ideologues and unthinking boycotters prominent on the Left in Europe, and
fringe academics and credulous students whose vehemence in indicting Israel as an
apartheid state is matched only by the depths of their ignorance of both societies. Far
easier for the glib to purloin the odium of ‘apartheid’ than painstakingly to assemble
evidence for the indictment and assess it judiciously, sparing no one. Look how
Pogrund sets the scene:
Each of the two main competing groups, Jews and Arabs, has right on its side,
through history, land, religion, geography and tradition. The dilemma is how to
satisfy their separate demands and aspirations to a tiny piece of land. The
problem is bedevilled because in the long struggle between them, neither side
has always behaved well, inflicting death and destruction on the other.
He empathises with Jewish fears about annihilation, and he empathizes with
Palestinian cries for freedom. He believes in Israel’s right to exist but thinks
occupation is wrong. I know the anguish of his ambivalence, but also the
determination he brings to resolving the dilemmas. He tracks the history of Israel
since its founding, the displacement of Palestinians, the Arab invasions, the intifada,
the incursions of the settlers, the attempts to achieve the two-state solution he
supports, and the war of extermination by Hamas, who pledged never to recognise
Israel. He has compiled an incisive comparative tabulation of all the civil society
discriminations against Arabs in Israel and whites against blacks in apartheid South
Africa. There is no comparison. The apartheid propagandists stand as vainly naked
as the fairy tale emperor admiring his gorgeous raiment. This is not because Israel is
without sin, but because the anti-Semitic mob never lets a certainty stand in the way
of a slogan. Forget the democratic practices of Israel, its elections and higher
education open to all, its free and highly critical press, its independent judiciary, its
equal welfare benefits and medical treatments caring for Jew and Arab. Close an eye
to all the oppressions of the Arab states surrounding Israel, the suicide bombings by
the jihadists glorified by the Palestinian Authority, which poisons the minds of children
in its schools and viewers of its television programs. Why do the apartheid
propagandists ignore, and thereby implicitly condone, the human rights abuses of
others? Why do the United States and Europe continue to finance the odious
‘education’ programs of the Palestinian Authority that expunge Israel from the map?
One hears Yeats again: ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of
passionate intensity’.
Pogrund is gentle in his assessment of the most credible of the campaigners for
a boycott of Israel, Archbishop Tutu. How is it, one may ask, that this good man
became associated with apartheid defamers? The sad answer is that while he was
an inspiring leader in South Africa, he knows too little about Israel. Pogrund has
conversed with Tutu. He corrects his factual errors on discrimination in Israel. The
archbishop means well, but he is close to selective sanctimony when he says he
supports Israel’s right to exist while lending his good name to people who would like
to see every Jew dead.
Pogrund, by contrast, roundly exposes the liars and hypocrites among the
committed enemies of Israel – but he is unflinching in his criticisms of Israel. He
condemns the occupation of the West Bank ‘with all the consequent injustice,
harshness and cruelty together with the creeping settlement of Jews in the territory
and East Jerusalem, plus its siege of the Gaza Strip’. The blindly arrogant settlers
and their right-wing supporters are ‘guilty of colonialism, a crime in international law’.
They must be checked in discrimination against Palestinians, he says, or they will
deserve the apartheid label with consequences grave beyond measure for Israel.
The boycott of Israel called for by the apartheid campaigners provides a cheap
moral thrill, but it intensifies the fears of Israelis, driving them to the Right, and it does
nothing for the Palestinians whose livelihoods are tied to the innovative Israel. The
Left’s case for boycotts is that sanctions freed South Africa. It is questionable. The
opposite has been argued – that industrial sanctions increased the society’s reliance
on the conservative agricultural sector, the core of what became the Afrikaner
Volksfront of extremist separatist groups.
Pogrund’s view is that apartheid collapsed in South Africa ‘when it became clear
to those whites in power that it was not in their own self-interest to perpetuate by
force what was clearly an unjust system of oppression, and when black leaders
extended the hand of reconciliation to their former oppressors’. He is too modest to
underline his part in that. Pogrund’s years and years of reporting of the human rights
abuses were surely central to the gradual disaffection with apartheid among decent
South African whites and governments worldwide, but especially the US Congress.
An opinion formed into a conviction: apartheid could not be tolerated any longer.
I have known Pogrund and his work for forty years. As, successively, editor of
the Sunday Times of London and the Times, and editorial director of US News and
World Report, I came to admire more and more his courage and judgment in
reporting for us from South Africa, as I now applaud him for the intellectual integrity
that has enabled him to distil what he learned in both the incipient black nation of
South Africa and the embattled nation state of Israel.
Everyone who cares about how Palestinians and Israelis may live together in the
same neighbourhood in freedom and without fear should read this compelling book,
but especially the genuine idealists worldwide among the apartheid campaigners.
Amid the detritus of the propagandists, the dedication to truth of Benjamin Pogrund,
reporter, is morally exhilarating.

Sir Harold Evans
former editor of the Sunday Times and the Times
author of The American Century and My Paper Chase
Preface
Living in apartheid South Africa was easy in moral terms. Living in Israel is
difficult.
In apartheid South Africa the choice was clear and beyond escape: it was good
versus evil. Apartheid was the Afrikaans word for apartness, which meant racial
segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority on the country’s black,
coloured and Asian peoples. It was wrong and inhuman, denying freedom and
stunting and destroying lives. The problem for concerned people was not merely to
do the obvious thing and reject apartheid, but to decide what to do about it. That is,
how far to go in opposing it against an increasingly tyrannous government: from being
a passive bystander to imperilling your liberty, even your life.
In Israel, the moral choices are many and complex and are a daily challenge.
Each of the two main competing groups, Jews and Arabs, has right on its side,
through history, land, religion, geography and tradition. The dilemma is how to satisfy
their separate demands and aspirations to a tiny piece of land. The problem is
bedevilled because in the long struggle between them, neither side has always
behaved well, inflicting death and destruction on the other. Each side believes that it is
in the right, and each side fears and rejects the other. Jews and Arabs are a mirror
image of each other: each believes that force is the only language that the other
understands; each believes that the other is trying to wipe it out. That there is some
truth in these beliefs on both sides adds to the complexities.
I straddle both apartheid South Africa and today’s Israel – not merely by having
lived in both countries, but because I have been immersed in the problems and
conflicts of each and in search for solutions.
I was born in Cape Town and before the age of ten was taking part in Habonim
(The Builders), a Jewish socialist youth movement. As a teenager I held leadership
positions. In May 1948, as a fifteen-year-old, I was in the Habonim group which
performed folk dances at the Jewish celebration in Cape Town of the creation of the
State of Israel. I grew up steeped in belief in Zionism as a beautiful and pure creed of
Jewish emancipation after centuries of persecution. I was emotionally filled with
awareness of my Jewishness: with the knowledge that the aunts and uncles and
cousins whom my parents had left behind in Lithuania in the villages of Abel and
Dusadt when they emigrated to South Africa in the 1920s had been murdered by the
Nazis on 25 August 1941. The report of the SS Einsatzgruppen – Action Groups –
signed by Jager, SS-Standardartenfuhrer, on 1 December 1941, recorded the killing
of ‘112 Jews, 627 Jewesses, 421 Jewish children’ in Obeliai (Abel). It said: ‘In
Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families. The
distance between from [sic] the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to
5km’.
Also in May 1948, I was politically interested enough as a high school pupil to go