Former Israeli Professor Ilan Pappe: Enemy Of Israel

Ilan Pappe, an former Israeli political scientist on the faculty of Haifa University, is a frequent speaker for pro-Palestinian groups including ISM, Al-Awda, and Divestment from Israel, and he is an advisory board member for the Council for Palestinian Restitution and Repatriation (CPRR). A “new historian” whose stated goal is to “debunk …myths” in Israel’s heroic nationalist narrative, Pappe almost uncritically embraces the Palestinian narrative of victimization and Israeli atrocities, including rapes and massacres. He contends that Israelis are either in denial or ignorant of this evil because it has been hidden through the Israeli establishment’s “powerful indoctrination machine.”

In his view, Zionists/Israelis always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and did so ruthlessly in 1948, started all the Arab-Israeli wars, committed atrocities during the 1948 War, consistently refused to make peace, established an apartheid regime and still hope to ethnically cleanse the Territories. He advocates divestment and boycotts of Israel, the right of return of Palestinians and a one-state solution.

Pappe has credibility when he speaks because he is an Israeli and on the faculty at Haifa University. But he is a controversial, marginal figure at the farthest end of Israel’s political spectrum. “I am the most hated man in Israel,” he said in an interview in 1999. Nor are his scholarship and conclusions widely accepted. “In my case,” he admitted in the same interview, mainstream historians “dispute everything. They seem to accept Benny Morris more easily than me….” He admits this is partially because Morris tries to rely on documented evidence while he is “more relativist,” and draws conclusions from what he thinks is “implicit” in the documents and because “[my] ideology influences my historical writing." Consider some of Pappe’s positions:

1. Quotes clearly showing historical bias:

“If you look at Israeli textbooks, curricula, media, and political discourse you see how this chapter in Jewish history - the chapter of expulsion, colonization, massacres, rape, and the burning of villages - is totally absent. It is not there. It is replaced by a chapter of heroism, glorious campaigns and amazing stories of moral courage and superiority unheard of in any other histories of people's liberation in the 20th century.”

“Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers.”

“…my [pro-Palestinian] bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the 'truth' when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.... Mine is a subjective approach....”(A History of Modern Palestine)

“I use Palestinian sources for the Intifada: they seem to me to be more reliable, I admit." March 30, 2004

2. Quotes clearly stating historical mistruths:

‘[T]he Jewish state was built on the ruins of the indigenous people of Palestine, whose livelihood, houses, culture and land had been systematically destroyed.”

“[T]here is what I call the 'Nakba Denial….I think there is a similar ‘Holocaust Denial’ on the Palestinian side…..”

“I condemned the uprooting of the Palestinians and the violence inflicted on them, as well as the de—Arabization of Jews who came from Arab countries to Israel, the imposition of military rule on Palestinians in Israel before 1967 and the de—facto Apartheid policies put in place after 1967. I also cry out against the callous Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I do it not only as human being, but also as Jew, who feels appalled that such crimes can be committed by Jews after the holocaust. I studied history to find out why it happened and gave answers through analyzing Zionist ideology, the historical colonialist context in which Zionism emerged and so on. . .” March 30, 2004.

“One utopia envisaged by an Austro-Hungarian Jew, Theodore Herzel, ruined Palestine and its people.” September 27, 2004

Pappe believes that Israel must “bring an end to more than a century of colonization, occupation and dispossession of Palestinians . . . 37 years of endless brutal and callous oppression of the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and . . 57 years of colonization and dispossession of the Palestinians as a whole. . .” April 20, 2005

After the failure of the Camp David meeting in 2000, "Israel was given a free hand" by the US to take any action it wanted in the West Bank and Gaza, which is why there have been "the worst atrocities committed against the Palestinian people" October, 30, 2005 Speech at the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco

3. Quotes showing support for terrorism:

“I fully support it (the second intifada) and regard it as a popular movement determined to stop a peace process which would have destroyed Palestine once and for all.”

4. Quotes advocating the "one-state solution":

“[T]he two-state solution nowadays is not the end of the occupation but continuing it in a different way.” Sept 16 2002.

On January 31, 2005 Pappe spoke at Columbia Universitie’s panel entitled “One State or Two: Alternative Proposals for Middle East Peace.” When it came to the Two-State solution Pappe said, “As a salesman, I would be hesitant to offer it.”

5. Quotes showing support for boycotting Israel, Israeli institutions, and Israeli academia:

When it comes to “Military and financial support to Israel” Ilan Pappe asserts that “any possible measure of decreasing such aid is most welcome.”

“Shielded by this particular support for academia, and other cultural media, the Israeli army and security services can go on, and will go on, demolishing houses, expelling families, abusing citizens and killing, almost every day, children and women without being accountable regionally and globally for their crimes. . .Calling for a boycott of your own state and academia is not an easy decision for a member of that academia.”

Pappe supports the boycott imposed on Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) for "symbolizing aspects of the occupation." Haaretz, Haifa U. academic remains steadfast in support of boycott, April 27, 2005.

“I believe that unless external pressure is brought to bear on Israeli institutions involved in the occupation, including universities, the barbaric occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip will continue."
6. Quotes on the Gaza disengagement:

“We [Ilan Pappe, Uri Davis, Tamar Yaron] believe Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz are considering to utilize provocation for vicious attacks in the near future on the approximately one and a half million Palestinian inhabitants of the Gaza Strip: a possible combination of intensified state terror and mass killing.” July 15, 2005.

7. Quotes comparing Israel to Nazis:

“They [my two sons] will do all they can to prevent the Nazi venom from slipping through the veins of its own and ultimate victims who came and colonized Palestine, uprooted its population and occupied and brutalized many of them.” March 30, 2004. Tweet