INTERVIEW – ‘Far worse than apartheid’: Ex-Zionist, pro-Israel campaigner decries brutality against Palestinians

By Hassan Isilow

JOHANNESBURG (AA) – Pamela Ngubane was once a Christian Zionist and fierce supporter of Israel, working in different ways to promote Israel’s narratives, particularly on its historic dispute with Palestine.

By the end of 2022, though, something changed for Ngubane, and today she is a strong advocate of the Palestinian cause.

Her transformation was well before the eruption of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, where a relentless Israeli offensive since Oct. 7 has now killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, injured over 59,000 others, displaced hundreds of thousands, and destroyed large swaths of the besieged Palestinian territory.

In her own words, Ngubane was a pro-Israeli activist because she “believed it was what she was required to do as a Christian.”

Such was her conviction that she was the general manager and spokesperson for the South African Friends of Israel, an organization tasked with building grassroots support for Israel in the country.

In an interview with Anadolu, Ngubane said she eventually realized that what she was supporting was actually completely against the teachings of the Bible.

On Israel’s actions against Palestinians, she said what Palestinians face under Israeli occupation is worse than what Black people in South Africa experienced during the brutal apartheid era.

“Israel does whatever it wants in Palestine, arrests anyone, even children and puts them in solitary confinement,” she said.

“What is happening in Gaza is proof, with the thousands of people already killed.”

Palestinians do not have a state of their own and everything they do is completely controlled by Israel, she said.

That is unlike South Africa’s apartheid rule, where Black people had some aspects of autonomy in some areas, “even though the system was very oppressive, with traditional leaders being under the control of the apartheid government,” she added.

- Turning point

Over time, Ngubane said she came to the realization that her work in favor of Israel was essentially “teaching people a lot of deception on behalf of the Zionists.”

“So, in order to make amends, I became a pro-Palestinian advocate, to undo the evil that basically I had been doing unknowingly,” she said.

A key factor in her shift proved to be the coming to power of a new government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in December 2022.

“It began in December 2022, when the government of Netanyahu, which included the far-right parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, was sworn in,” she said.

“The things they did and advocated, like the Huwara pogrom and the rescinding of the Disengagement Act linked to the Oslo Accords, sealed my conviction that I could no longer continue to support Israel as I did.”

Ngubane said her “research independent of the Zionist perspective” showed her that “Israel was not interested in the two-state solution, or in peace.”

Criticizing Netanyahu’s government as “very right-wing, racist and anti-Christian,” she said it coming to power “was not an isolated anomaly, but a definite trend in Israel’s march toward being a full-fledged apartheid state.”

“That caused me to resign my position as general manager of South African Friends of Israel in April 2023,” she added.

Ngubane said she tried to “redirect the organization” and in the process “found myself inclining to wanting to talk peace with the supporters of Palestine.”

In her interactions and research, Ngubane said she found another perspective and realized that the Zionists had been teaching her a complete lie.

“Unfortunately, media in South Africa is also complicit and as a result when Palestine supporters speak the media doesn’t give a balanced perspective – it’s very pro-Israel,” she said, blaming this on the “strong global Zionist lobby and propaganda network.”

Unlike the apartheid system that abused the Bible to justify what they were doing to Black people, Zionists “use the history of the Jews, of the Holocaust, to make people feel very afraid of criticizing Israel, because they don’t want to be seen as antisemitic.”