Introduction
Benjamin Pogrund, a renowned and courageous journalist, put the reality of South African’s apartheid regime on the map from the late fifties to the eighties, despite much harassment which included having his passport removed, being put on trial several times, imprisoned once.
He emigrated to Israel in the late eighties to launch the Yakar Centre for Social Concern.
For the past two decades and more decades, Pogrund was one of the most vocal opponents of attempts to label Israel an apartheid state.
Here he explains why he has changed his mind.
I’ve lived through it before: grabbing power, fascism and racism, destroying democracy. Israel is going where South Africa was 75 years ago. It’s like watching the replay of a horror movie.
In 1948, as a teenager in Cape Town, I followed the results of the May 26 election on a giant board on a newspaper building. The winner-takes-all electoral system produced distorted results: the Afrikaner Nationalist party, with its smaller partner, won 79 parliamentary seats against 74 for the United Party and its smaller partner.
But the Nats, as they were called, in fact won only 37.7 percent of the vote against the opposition’s 49.18 percent. Although the opposition got more than 11 percent BDS, Hunfary, Poland, more votes, the Nats said they had a majority and could do what they wanted.
In the Israel of 2023, I’m reliving some of these same experiences. Our proportional election system can distort results as well: last November, Likud, with its smaller partners, won 64 seats against 56 for the opposition. In fact, the right-wing bloc won by only 0.6 percent of the vote.
The 0.6 percent government says that it represents the will of the majority and can do whatever it wants. It goes on saying this even though a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute shows that less than one-third of Israelis back its law to end the so-called reasonableness standard, which allowed the High Court to overturn government decisions it deemed unreasonable.
South Africa enjoyed democracy – that is, among the whites who were 20 percent of the population. Blacks had no right to vote; only some multiracial and Asian South Africans could vote. Those who were not white suffered heavy racial discrimination in every part of their lives.
In Israel, Arabs, who form about 21 percent of the population, can vote. But they do suffer discrimination: Muslims and Christians are not drafted, and those who do not do army service lose out on benefits. The Jewish National Fund owns about 13 percent of Israel’s land and bars non-Jews – that is, Arabs – from owning or renting it.