Ilan Pappe

The Best Runner in the Class (Part 1)

Ilan Pappe — 2007-05-31T13:20:00Z

Fatima knew in a timeless way, in those days of May 1948, that the Jews were coming. For the last six months shreds from the daily news — traditionally the domain of the men in the village — had reached her. She was aware that the British were leaving and that the Jews were occupying nearby villages at a frightening rate. She also heard the men complaining about the Arab world's betrayal: its leaders made inflammatory speeches, promising to send soldiers to save Palestine, but not matching their rhetoric by any real action. PART 1 - / Electronic Intifada

Looking for alternatives to failure: An answer to Uri Avnery

Ilan Pappe — 2007-05-01T12:14:00Z

The following is Ilan Pappe's response to Uri Avnery's essay "Bed of Sodom," published by Hagada Hasmalit on 22 April 2007:

Uri Avnery accuses the supporters of the one-state solution of forcefully imposing the facts onto the "Bed of Sodom". He seems to regard these people at best as daydreamers who do not understand the political reality around them and are stuck in a perpetual state of wishful thinking. We are all veteran comrades in the Israeli Left and therefore it is quite possible that in our moments of despair we fall into the trap of hallucinating and even fantasizing while ignoring the unpleasant reality around us.

And therefore the metaphor of the Bed of Sodom may even be fitting for lashing out at those who are inspired by the South African model in their search for a solution in Palestine. But in this case it is a small cot of Sodom compared to the king-size bed onto which Gush Shalom and other similar members of the Zionist Left insist on squeezing their two-state solution. The South African model is young — in fact hardly a year has passed since it was seriously considered — while the formula of two states is sixty years old: an abortive and dangerous illusion that enabled Israel to continue its occupation without facing any significant criticism from the international community. (...)

- / Electronic Intifada

Genocide in Gaza

Ilan Pappe — 2006-09-02T12:23:00Z

A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed. The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967. They were relative better period where movement to the West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are gone. - / Electronic Intifada

Why the Israeli debacle will affect the whole region

Ilan Pappe — 2006-08-16T04:54:00Z

Israeli writer Ilan Pappe considers the fallout from Israel's defeat in Lebanon

It is too early to judge how solid is the ceasefire agreed upon in the second Lebanon war. But it is already possible to draw some initial conclusions - the most important of which is the resounding Israeli military failure.

Such a failure can stop for a while the more ambitious US-Israeli plans to extend the military campaign against Iran and Syria, although the danger is not over.

The Israeli debacle however has more complex implications.

The first is in the realm of domestic Israeli politics. The major theme of the developing internal debate is the question of the “lost deterrence”. (...)

[19 August 2006 | issue 2014]

- / Socialist Worker (Britain)

What Does Israel Want?

Ilan Pappe — 2006-07-14T21:16:00Z

I have been teaching in the Israeli universities for 25 years. Several of my students were high ranking officers in the army. I could see their growing frustration since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987. They detested this kind of confrontation, called euphemistically by the gurus of the American discipline of International Relations: ‘low intensity conflict'. It was too low to their taste. Even when the army used tanks and F-16s, it was a far cry from the war games the officers played in the Israeli Matkal - headquarters - and for which they bought, with American tax payer money - the most sophisticated and updated weaponry existing in the market. - / Electronic Intifada

In Court

Ilan Pappe — 2006-07-14T00:00:58Z

Israel's legal system - an important basis of its claim to be a liberal democracy - acts in concert with the government to support and enable the detention without trial of large numbers of Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Territories. As of January this year, according to figures provided by the Israel Defence Forces and the prison service (thanks to Israel's Freedom of Information Law), 794 Palestinians were being held under what is known as ‘administrative detention'. Dictators like holding referendums, and the Israeli legal system prides itself on following due process. It feels virtuous because a court hearing is needed for these ‘administrative arrests' to be extended. The system is so efficiently oiled these days that the hearings are very brief. Any offence - getting a parking ticket in East Jerusalem, mislaying documents or failing to produce them at a checkpoint, being affiliated to a Palestinian group, having relatives who are involved with a banned group, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time - can expose an ordinary Palestinian to arrest. (...)

[Vol. 28 | No. 14 | 20 July 2006]

- / London Review of Books

Ingathering

Ilan Pappe — 2006-04-13T17:06:54Z

7 April

From left to right, the manifestos of all the Zionist parties during the recent Israeli election campaign contained policies which they claimed would counter the ‘demographic problem' posed by the Palestinian presence in Israel. Ariel Sharon proposed the pull-out from Gaza as the best solution to it; the leaders of the Labour Party endorsed the wall because they believed it was the best way of limiting the number of Palestinians inside Israel. Extra-parliamentary groups, too, such as the Geneva Accord movement, Peace Now, the Council for Peace and Security, Ami Ayalon's Census group and the Mizrachi Democratic Rainbow all claim to know how to tackle it.

Apart from the ten members of the Palestinian parties and two eccentric Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox Jews, all the members of the new Knesset (there are 120 in all) arrived promising that their magic formulae would solve the ‘demographic problem'. The means varied from reducing Israeli control over the Occupied Territories - in fact, the plans put forward by Labour, Kadima, Shas (the Sephardic Orthodox party) and Gil (the pensioners' party) would involve Israeli withdrawal from only 50 per cent of these territories - to more drastic action. Right-wing parties such as Yisrael Beytenu, the Russian ethnic party of Avigdor Liberman, and the religious parties argued for a voluntary transfer of Palestinians to the West Bank. In short, the Zionist answer is to reduce the problem either by giving up territory or by shrinking the ‘problematic' population group. (...)

[Vol. 28 | No. 8 | 20 April 2006]

- / London Review of Books

Occupation Hazard

Ilan Pappe — 2006-02-13T16:12:00Z

Why is the history of modern Palestine such a matter of debate? Why is it still regarded as a complex, indeed obscure, chapter in contemporary history that cannot be easily deciphered? Any abecedarian student of its past who comes to it with clean hands would immediately recognize that in fact its story is very simple. For that matter it is not vastly different from other colonialist instances or tales of national liberation. It of course has its distinctive features, but in the grand scheme of things it is the chronicle of a group of people who left their homelands because they were persecuted and went to a new land that they claimed as their own and did everything in their power to drive out the indigenous people who lived there. Like any historical narrative, this skeleton of a story can be, and has been, told in many different ways. However, the naked truth about how outsiders coveted someone else's country is not sui generis, and the means they used to obtain their newfound land have been successfully employed in other cases of colonization and dispossession throughout history.

Generations of Israeli and pro-Israeli scholars, very much like their state's diplomats, have hidden behind the cloak of complexity in order to fend off any criticism of their quite obviously brutal treatment of the Palestinians in 1948 and since. They were aided, and still are, by an impressive array of personalities, especially in the United States. Nobel Prize winners, members of the literati, and high-profile lawyers-not to mention virtually everyone in Hollywood, from filmmakers to actors-have repeated the Israeli message: This is a complicated issue that would be better left to the Israelis to deal with. An Orientalist perception was embedded in this polemical line: Complex matters should be handled by a civilized (namely, Western and progressive) society, which Israel allegedly was and is, and not entrusted to an uncivilized (i.e., Arab and regressive) group like the Palestinians. The advanced state will surely find the right solution for itself and its primitive foe. (...)

[Feb/March 2006]

The Disappointing Trajectory of Amir Peretz

Ilan Pappe — 2005-12-10T04:42:00Z

Peretz, like the other members of the Eight, has become more ‘pragmatic' - as we say in Israel - in an attempt to shift Israel's Zionist politics towards the centre. In the 1990s, he chose the trade union congress, the Histadrut, as his main political arena and route to the top. In 1995 he became its chairman and in that capacity did nothing to limit the organisation's extensive involvement in the occupation: in areas directly or indirectly controlled by Israel, the Histadrut granted the settlers union rights while denying them to Palestinians; as for Palestinian workers in industrial plants within the border zones (areas inside the Palestinian Territories under direct Israeli control), it ignored their situation entirely despite their having no basic human or workers' rights.

[Vol. 27 | No. 24 | 15 December 2005]

- / London Review of Books

Balanced reporting and the Middle East conflict

Ilan Pappe — 2005-11-29T01:02:00Z

The desicion to maintain the disciplinary proceedures against Barbara Platt and even to go as far as to establish a commission of inquiry into the way the BBC covers the Palestine question (BBC bias complaint upheld, November 26) is one of many manifestations of the grotesque phase we have all reached in this troublsome part of the world.

Had it not been for Ms Platt's balanced and informative reports, it would have been difficult to distinguish between the BBC coverage of the occupied territories and that of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority. Ms Platt admirably tried for many months to "balance" a simple imbalanced reality: of Israeli occupation and Palestinian victimisation. The atrocities on the ground - the killing of children and women and the blowing up of houses - warranted an emotional response as it is, and it was only natural that once, and only once, this would show in her reports (as many BBC reporters allowed themselves a show of emotion when reporting the deaths of George Best or Princess Diana). Only outside pressure could have produced such an ill-thought procedure and action.

As for the inquiry commission, one can save taxpayers' money. The cable companies in Israel come now and then under official pressure for allowing free access to international TV news stations. They would like to remove CNN and al-Jazeera. There are no complaints in Israel about Fox news (representing the US neoconservative pointof view) and the BBC. The BBC is indeed a pro-Israeli news agency and is going to remain so if its directors silence the professional reporting of Barabara Platt.

[page 31 | Leaders & Reply]

- / Guardian

A Warning from Israel

Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe, Tamar Yaron — 2005-07-15T07:23:00Z

We feel that it is urgent and necessary to raise the alarm regarding what may come during and after evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip occupied by Israel in 1967, in the event that the evacuation is implemented.

We held back on getting this statement published and circulated, seeking additional feedback from our peers. The publication in Ha'aretz (22 June 2005) quoting statements by General (Reserves) Eival Giladi, the head of the Coordination and Strategy team of the Prime Minister's Office, motivated us not to delay publication and circulation any further. Confirming our worst fears, General (Res.) Eival Giladi went on record in print and on television to the effect that "Israel will act in a very resolute manner in order to prevent terror attacks and [militant] fire while the disengagement is being implemented" and that "If pinpoint response proves insufficient, we may have to use weaponry that causes major collateral damage, including helicopters and planes, with mounting danger to surrounding people."

We believe that one primary, unstated motive for the determination of the government of the State of Israel to get the Jewish settlers of the Qatif (Katif) settlement block out of the Gaza Strip may be to keep them out of harm's way when the Israeli government and military possibly trigger an intensified mass attack on the approximately one and a half million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, of whom about half are 1948 Palestine refugees. (...)

- / CounterPunch

Back the boycott

Ilan Pappe — 2005-05-24T19:31:00Z

Ilan Pappe, whose case was a focus of the lecturers' boycott vote, appeals to UK colleagues not to back down

The Association of University Teachers' decision to reconsider its motions on the academic boycott of Israel seems to confuse procedure and principle. I am not a trade union activist, neither am I a British citizen, but I understand there may - or may not - have been procedural, and even tactical, errors in the way the decision was taken. Either way, these issues cannot be the focus of the debate over sanctions and boycott. Judging by the amount of time spent - especially by the opponents of the new AUT policy - on debating procedural matters and tactics, there is a risk of the wider public losing sight of the main issue, namely the need to apply external pressure on Israel as the best means of ending the worst occupation in recent history.

I believe I am in a better position than many to judge the tactical and moral dimensions of the academic boycott of Israel. My case was singled out by the AUT as the reason for boycotting my own university, Haifa. I felt honoured by this attention to my predicament and, at the same time, hoped that the general context, the need to end the callous occupation, will not be forgotten. In fact, judging from the reactions in Israel, after an initial confusion between the principled issue and private case, there seems to be a better understanding here of the link between the occupation and the silencing of those who oppose it. (...)

- / Guardian

Fortress Israel

Ilan Pappe — 2005-05-18T19:12:00Z

The right of the Palestinian refugees expelled in the 1948 war to return home was acknowledged by the UN General Assembly in December 1948. It is a right anchored in international law and in accordance with notions of universal justice. More surprisingly perhaps, it also makes sense in terms of realpolitik: unless Israel agrees to repatriate the refugees, all attempts to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict are bound to fail, as became clear in 2000 when the Oslo initiative broke down over this issue. Yet only a handful of Jews in Israel are willing to support it, in part because most Israeli Jews deny that ethnic cleansing was carried out in 1948 by Israel.

The aim of the Zionist project has always been to construct and then defend a Western/‘white' fortress in the Arab/‘dark' world. At the heart of the refusal to allow Palestinians the right to return is the fear of Jewish Israelis that they will eventually be outnumbered by Arabs in Israel. This prospect arouses such strong feelings that Israelis seem not to care that their actions are condemned throughout the world; the Jewish propensity to seek atonement has been replaced by pious arrogance and self-righteousness. Their position is not unlike that of the Crusaders when they realised that the Kingdom of Jerusalem they had built in the Holy Land was merely an island in a hostile Islamic world. Or that of the white settlers in Africa, whose enclaves have disappeared more recently, their pretence of being another local tribe shattered. (...)

[Vol. 27 | No. 10 | 19 May 2005]

- / London Review of Books

To boldly go

Ilan Pappe — 2005-04-20T19:00:00Z

Haifa University academic Ilan Pappe is one of the few Israelis supporting the university boycott of Israel. Here he explains why

Mr. Pappe presented this appeal to the British Association of University Teachers in support of a resolution to boycott the Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan.

I appeal to you today to be part of a historical movement and moment that may bring an end to more than a century of colonization, occupation and dispossession of Palestinians. I appeal to you as an Israeli Jew, who for years wished, and looked, for other ways to bring an end to the evil perpetrated against the Palestinians in the occupied territories, inside Israel and in the refugee camps. I devoted all my adult life, with others, creating a substantial peace movement inside Israel, in which, so we hoped, academia will play a leading role. But after 37 years of endless brutal and callous oppression of the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and after 57 years of colonization and dispossession of the Palestinians as a whole, I think this hope is unrealistic and other means have to be looked at to end a conflict that endangers peace in the world at large. (...)

- / History News Network

Mechanisms of Denial

Ilan Pappe, Justin Podur — 2005-02-21T10:33:43Z

Ilan Pappe is a professor of History at Haifa University in Israel. He is an activist for Palestinian rights. He was in Toronto in February to give the keynote speech at ‘Israeli Apartheid Week' at the University of Toronto. He was interviewed by telephone on February 5, 2005.

Podur: In your book, A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2004) you use what you identify as a ‘humanist' approach. You contrast the ‘humanist' version of history with the different ‘nationalist' versions of history that exist. What's the difference and why does it matter?

Pappe: The official histories of Israel and Palestine have been loyal either to the Zionist narrative or to the Palestinian nationalist perspective. This is a view from the top: generals, politicians, elites. This history doesn't deal with the majority, the majority of the people who are not part of this political and military game. But when you try to approach history from the perspective of the majority, the excluded, you see this political game in a different light. You see how manipulative and deliberately deceptive political elites can be. You see the conflict is not the natural result of some collision of peoples, but the result of deliberate human engineering and policy. If you can really understand the past, as I try to, if you can look at it honestly, that's the only solid basis for trying to build a future. (...)

- / ZNet