The premise of the claim being made in the Wikipedia article is incorrect, and not supported by the source material referenced in the article. Meir Vilner and Rostam Bastuni did not claim that Israel had an "apartheid policy", so in particular they were not the first to make such a claim.
To be clear, Vilner and Bastuni did make claims that were quite critical of Israel's treatment of its Arab population, who were living at the time under martial law. This can be seen from your translated quote, and from reading the more detailed newspaper article linked from the Wikipedia article. (The newspaper article is in Hebrew and too long for me to translate, and not easily transcribable since it's an image of a scanned newspaper article.) However, Vilner and Bastuni did not mention the word "apartheid". They mentioned the treatment of blacks by South Africa and the United States. Saying that they claimed Israel engages in apartheid policies is misleading, in the same way that it would be misleading to characterize what they said by saying "Vilner and Bastuni were the first to claim that Israel had a Jim Crow policy".
Finally, it's worth mentioning that while the Wikipedia article you are citing is a notable source, that article (whose title translates as "Claims of apartheid policies engaged in by Israel") is a controversial one whose accuracy is already in dispute on Wikipedia itself. I am gathering that from reading its talk page, and it's also made pretty clear from the fact that the top of the article bears an editorial note that states (in Hebrew, my translation below):
This article needs to be rewritten. The reason is: the article is written from a non-neutral point of view, giving undue weight to claims from organizations that are biased against Israel, lacking mention of references to apartheid from either the left wing or right wing of Israeli politics, and lacking discussion of relevant Israeli jurisprudence.