We convened a webinar conversation with my close friend Benjamin Pogrund, prominent Israeli-South African journalist. Benjamin was deputy editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg, closed down because of its stand against apartheid. He has lived in Jerusalem since 1997 and was founding director of Yakar's Center for Social Concern. We discussed the nature of Israel’s internal governance, politics and social attitudes, its occupation policies, the looming annexation of large sections of the West Bank, and the potential reality of Israeli Apartheid.
In 2007, I has asked “Benjie” to become an INSPIRE Fellow at the Institute for our EPIIC year on Global Poverty and Inequality, and to advise the New Initiative on Middle East Peace. I encouraged him to write a book on his experiences living in both Israel and in South Africa, where he was a close friend of Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe (he is the author Sobukwe and Apartheid: How Can A Man Die Better). In his time at the Institute, he wrote the original outline and first chapters of what became Drawing Fire: Investigating Accusations of Apartheid in Israel. The book was published in 2014, and now only a few years later, Benjie now warns that if Israel adopts policies such as the Nation State Law, and pushes to annex much the West Bank, it will take the reality of an Israeli-Palestinian Apartheid “right over the edge.”