Benjamin Pogrund - 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)

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

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, IsraeliPolitical aspects. 2. IsraelSocial conditions21st century. 3. IsraelPolitics and government1993 4. IsraelEthnic relations. 5. Zionism. 6. Apartheid. 7. Human rightsIsrael. 8. Human rightsSouth Africa. 9. Palestinian ArabsGovernment policyIsrael. 10. Arab-Israeli conflictInfluence. 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

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 dont come loaded with preconceptions, you have to think and find the right words. Thats 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 Israels 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.