'Oppression is not apartheid'

Benjamin Pogrund, former deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, who spent over a decade working toward social change in Israel, refers to his efforts against apartheid when discussing his work in Jerusalem.

"Over the years, I wrote - and later inspired, directed or ordered - God knows how many hundreds of thousands of words on all the evils of apartheid," says Pogrund, who is stepping down this week as director of Jerusalem's Yakar Center for Social Concern to refocus on his writing career. "And at times I looked at was I was doing and thought I was the walking, talking, living example of the failure of the written word to achieve anything. Because the more we wrote the worse it got."

However, the Cape Town-born Pogrund continues, in some sober moments he saw that the reporting was "seeping into people's consciousness and there'd be a trigger event and suddenly you could see that all those thousands of words would come to the surface" and have an impact.

At Yakar, he recalls, "What we were trying to do was [like] drops of water from the tap. We were trying to influence thinking, inject new ideas - and it's a slow process." He explained, "It doesn't happen overnight, but that's really what we've been trying to do: to offer people alternatives, show them the problems of society, offer people new ways [to] bridge the chasm [between Israelis and Palestinians] which has been growing and growing."

Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to Pretoria and past director-general of the Foreign Ministry, says Pogrund is "almost a legend" in South Africa. Pogrund's book on apartheid, he says, is one of the few books sold on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years.

In the 1960s and 70s, Pogrund was among the pioneers who reported about black politics in South Africa - which was routinely ignored by the white press - eventually becoming the deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail, the country's leading newspaper. Indeed, Pogrund's reporting got him imprisoned once and investigated as a "threat to the state" by security police. His reporting on the 1960 Sharpeville massacre and biography of dissident Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, who organized the protests leading to the massacre, brought him prominence.

Liel said last week that Pogrund took up a considerable challenge at Yakar. "The idea behind Yakar is contrary to the nature of Jerusalem, a city with so many tensions, between secular and Haredim, between Jews and Arabs," he said. "With Yakar, [Pogrund] was trying to build bridges, and while building bridges in such a city can be frustrating sometimes, it is very much needed. If we had 20 Yakars all over the city, Jerusalem would be a very different city."

Making progress

Pogrund says he believes Israel is going in the right direction and is better off now than it was in 1997, when the late British-born Rabbi Michael Rosen recruited him to establish the center affiliated with Yakar - an inclusive Orthodox congregation popular with Anglos.

The mere fact that a right-wing prime minister now supports a Palestinian state is "a hell of a big step forward," Pogrund said. "We played a modest role in this," he said in reference to the hundreds of events he organized featuring prominent Israeli, Palestinian and international speakers discussing current events and issues from the peace process to Jewish business ethics.

Pogrund, who is married to artist Anne Sassoon with whom he has four children - one of whom is an Orthodox rabbi and last month took up a post in Johannesburg - prides himself with having stimulated the minds of otherwise politically conservative Jerusalemites. "It's easy enough to organize meetings for the 'converted,' for people who are already sold on what you're going to tell them. We ventured into the unknown in many ways. And we got away with it usually."

He concedes that holding discussions in English at Yakar limits the scope of potential influence, which is why he increased the number of events in Hebrew in recent years. His successors - two of Rosen's sons, Rabbis Shlomo-Dov and Chananel Rosen - intend to continue that trend, he adds.

But Pogrund does express regret for neglecting certain parts of Israeli society as potential speakers. Early on, for example, he invited rabbis from all four Jewish religious streams to debate Israeli conversion laws. "Today I would be too nervous to ask [a Haredi rabbi to debate a Reform rabbi]," he said. "That's probably wrong, because there are some Haredim [open for debate] and society needs this discussion desperately. Perhaps we should have pursued harder over the years; this was probably a failure on my part. Never mind the distance between Jews and Arabs, the [schism] inside the Jewish community is extremely worrying."

Pogrund remains extremely critical of current Israeli policies regarding its Arab citizens and Palestinians in the territories. Last week, at his final event as the center's director - which discussed the Palestinian refugee problem - he started his remarks by saying several Palestinians would have like to attend but were prevented from crossing the border. "This is a dismaying fact of existence here because without being able to talk to each other, it's very difficult indeed to attain an already very difficult peace," he told the 150-strong crowd in Yakar's Old Katamon neighborhood synagogue.

"It's just accepted that we don't go there and they don't come here. It's a problem people need to be very aware of." His critique is tempered by relativism. Israel's Arab citizens do suffer, according to Pogrund, but Israel is not the only society which discriminates against its minorities. "I don't think we're worse than most countries," he said.

Employing his familiarity with the anti-apartheid struggle as well as the local conflict, Pogrund will spend the next few months arguing against the comparison of Israel with apartheid-era South Africa. "There are lessons to be learned from South Africa, just not always the lessons that people draw about apartheid, because that is nonsense," he said.

The moral part was easy

Pogrund is currently touring British universities ahead of Israeli Apartheid Week. The weeklong event is a controversial series of lectures and rallies with the stated goal "to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build boycott, divestment, and sanctions" against Israel. After that he will start writing a book arguing against the claim equating Israel with apartheid.

"Living in South Africa under apartheid, in moral terms, was easy: It was good versus evil," Pogrund explained. "Those who backed apartheid mainly knew that what they were doing was wrong. Israel is much more complex. You have two groups of people who have history, religion, culture, longing on their side." Paraphrasing Amos Oz, he said the dilemma here is that there are two rights.

He added: "We don't do enough but there is a basic acceptance that there is a minority group and they're discriminated against. That's not apartheid. Arabs can vote - that in itself is fundamental [in proving] that it's a different society than South Africa. That comparison is just ridiculous."

The situation in the West Bank is worse, but still does not constitute apartheid, he says. "It's an occupation. We shouldn't be there. Occupation is wrong in every sense, legally and morally. [But] that's not apartheid, that's oppression."

He opposes the security fence, yet there can be no doubt it was constructed with Israel's security in mind, he continued. "In South Africa, there were no drive-by killings on the road. There were no suicide bombers, not one. It's a totally different situation." Israeli intellectuals who call their country an apartheid state are "unthinking, superficial and ignorant," he added.

Despite his work during apartheid-era South Africa, Pogrund hates being called an activist. "It just happened that I reported about it," he insists.

Just like he did as a journalist, in his forthcoming book Pogrund aims to describe the situation as he plainly sees it. "It so happens that I believe totally in Israel's right to exist; I'm an old-fashioned Zionist. At the same time I dislike a great deal of what we're doing here. And that's what I'm going to write about."

While passionate about the topic, he approaches the project with some apprehension, he said. "I dread getting the tone and the balance right, without being an apologist or a propagandist. [I want to tell] an honest story about a country that achieved wonders yet is doing bad things."