Ilan Pappe on the Israel-Palestine conflict : Utah IMC

My name is Ilan Pappe, I am a lecturer at Haifa University, in Israel. I am a long time activist, for peace, human rights, civil rights; basically, an historian who wrote several books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, focusing particularly on the 1948 events and their impact on the current situation.

Q: So why did you decide to become an expert, or study the question of the Palestinians and the formation of Israel?

please more Like this

Q: The US government has had large numbers of neo-cons, Zionists, Wolfowitz…First of all, what do you think about that role of these people inside the US government, and the whole situation as far as the US expansion of war in the Middle East?

Zionists love to sign other people's names. That's the kind of people they are, fundamentally dishonest. False flag ops are their specialty. We cannot help but wonder how many atrocities they have signed Osama bin Laden's name to, or Hamas' or the PLO's.

For more about "black propaganda," see:

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1711536

Zionists love to sign other people's names. That's the kind of people they are, fundamentally dishonest.

Once again they demonstrate what fundamentally dishonest people they are:

http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1692248

(snip)

Sometimes they take something that an anti-Zionist has written, subtly alter its meaning by changing a few words, and post it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

click here:

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=19458

Sometimes they take something that an anti-Zionist has written, subtly alter its meaning by changing a few words, and post it under the name of the original author.

You say that as if it's a bad thing or something. But anyway, not one word was changed, no more than your steaming pile "Die like a Dog" was changed.

amplifiering happiness reflectors still has to be some of the most idiotic grade school level tripe ever posted anywhere. Take a bow, fagboi.

Q: What is your background and how do you see your own development as a historian?

Pappe: I was born in 1954 to a German Jewish family in Haifa where I lived in blissful ignorance about the world beyond the comfortable and safe mount Carmel until I reached the age of 18. At that age I began my military service which introduced me to other groups and to the host of social problems facing Israeli society. But it was only in the 1970s, at Hebrew University, that I was exposed to the plight of the Palestinians in Israel as an undergraduate in the department of Middle Eastern History. It was then and there that I found my love for history and developed my belief that the present cannot be understood and the future changed without first trying to decipher its historical dimensions.

It was clear that this could not be done freely inside Israel-especially if its own history was to be my subject matter. This is how I found myself at Oxford in 1984 as a D. Phil student under the supervision of two great supervisors, the late Albert Hourani and Roger Owen. The thesis was on the 1948 war in Palestine, a subject that has engaged me ever since my career as a professional historian began. This is still a subject that haunts me and I regard the events of that year as the key to understanding the present conflict in Palestine as well as the gate through which peace has to pass on the way to a comprehensive and lasting settlement in Palestine and Israel. Intimate and strong friendships with Palestinians and the newly declassified material in the archives produced my new look at the 1948 war. I challenged many of the foundational Israeli myths associated with the war and I described what happened in Palestine in that year essentially as a Jewish ethnic cleansing operation against the indigenous population. This conviction informed not only my work as a historian but also affected significantly my political views and activity.

I also ventured, in between my forays in the1948 story, into the exciting-but always productive for me-world of historiosophy and hermeneutics. I do think, in retrospect, that much of what I had read and discussed influenced my attitude to historiography in general. I treat history from a much more relativist point of view than many of my colleagues and I was also highly impressed by the need-which informs my work in the last few years-to write more a history of the people and less a history of the politicians, and more a history of the society and less of its ideology and elite politics.

Q: You have often been associated with revisionist history and the emergence of a post-zionist discourse: what do these terms mean and how have they affected the political climate in Israel?

Pappe: Revisionist history means those books written by Israeli historians about the 1948 war that question the essential foundational Israeli myths about that war. First among them is that it was a war between a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. The new historians described an advantage for the Jewish military side in most stages of the war. They also pointed to the prior agreement between the Jewish state and the strongest Arab army-the Arab Legion of Transjordan-that neutralized the Palestinian force and limited its activity to the Greater Jerusalem area. This prior understanding divided post-Mandatory Palestine between the Jews and the Hashemites of Jordan at the expense of the Palestinians.

As for post-Zionism, this adjective is usually associated with critical research in Israel on various chapters in the history of Zionism and Israel. It includes sociologists who view Zionism as colonialism, historians who doubt the sincerity of the Zionist effort during the Holocaust, and it also criticizes the manipulation of Holocaust memory within Israel. Among them you can find scholars identifying with the fate of the Mizrachi Jews in Israel and who deconstruct the attitude of the state, especially in the 1950s, toward these groups employing paradigms of research offered by Edward Said and others in postcolonial studies. Palestinian Israelis have done the same in looking at the attitude of the Jewish state toward the Palestinian minority and feminists have critically analyzed the status of women and gender relations as they developed through time in the Jewish State.

In the 1990s, when most the works of the revisionist and post-Zionist historians and scholars appeared, there seemed to be some impact on the general public. You could see it in documentary films on television, in op-eds in the printed press and in some textbooks and curricula in the educational system.

But after the outbreak of the second intifada in October 2000, not much was left of the previous readiness of Israeli society to hear critical voices on the past. The electronic media loyally towed the official line; the printed press silenced critique in general; and revisionist textbooks were taken out of the school system.

One could probably say that it never affected the political system, but it seems to have taken root in Israeli civil society and its impact will, I think, be felt in years to come.

Q: Your last book dealt with 1948 and you suggest that Israel is still living with the consequences of choices made then. Could you elaborate on this?

Pappe: This was not my last book. My last book was A History of Modern Palestine, published by Cambridge University Press. My last book on 1948 is The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 published by I. B. Tauris.

Indeed, I think that the ethnic cleansing in 1948 will never allow Israel to reconcile with the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East, nor to live in peace with its own Palestinian minority unless Israel boldly faces the past. The ethnic cleansing included the destruction of more than 400 villages, 11 towns and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians.

The Israeli state, as a political entity, has to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing. Until today it had failed to do so and it should be made accountable for its deeds and offer compensation for the people it wronged. This should be done on the basis of UN Resolution 194 that allowed the refugees to choose between compensation and return.

Q: The plight of the Israeli Arabs and those Arabs living in the occupied territories is often underestimated: they are seen as poor and exploited but, if I can put the matter this way, not particularly more than any number of other peoples. Is there something systematic here that is reminiscent of apartheid or even ethnic cleansing?

Pappe: There are of course differences in the way Israel treats the Palestinians living under occupation and those whom it regards as citizens. But there are also common features of that policy. Let us begin by charting the common ground. It is beyond the scope of this interview to present the emergence of Zionist attitudes and perceptions about the indigenous population of Palestine. What suffices in this context is to point to the final formulations of this process: a dehumanization of the Palestinians, their exclusive depiction as a security problem and the wish to have a pure Jewish state, empty of any Arabs or Arabism.

The wish to retain the faade of a democracy complicated the translation of these attitudes into actual policy toward Palestinians inside Israel, those who are officially regarded as citizens. Until 1966, in the name of security, the rights of these Palestinians were removed and they were subjected to cruel military rule. But when, after 1967, the U.S.-Israeli alliance became the central source for the Jewish States existence, one of the more democratic features developed among them was the abolition of that military rule. Racism and apartheid-which were official policy under military rule-now became illicit and in a way more dangerous because it was more difficult for human and civil rights organizations to expose them. In the years since 1967, as a Palestinian citizen you could never know where the racism and discrimination would hit you. It meant that at any given minute, without prior knowledge, you were likely to encounter de facto segregation, discrimination, abuse of basic rights and even death. This is still the state of affairs today, and in many ways it has worsened since the outbreak of the second intifada.

On top of all of this, Palestinian citizens in Israel suffer from a de jure discrimination as well. There are three laws in the country that define most of the cultivated land as belonging exclusively to the Jewish people and hence cannot be sold to, or transacted with, non-Jews, namely Arabs. Other qua apartheid laws are the law of citizenship that demands naturalization processes for the indigenous population while the law of return grants it unconditionally to unborn yet Jewish children everywhere in the world.

There are clear policies of discrimination in the welfare system, in the budgeting of public services and in the job opportunities, especially in industry, of which 70 percent is termed Arab Free as it is strongly connected to the military and security sector. But I think it is the daily experience-as I described it above-of the license for everyone who represents the state to abuse you at will that is the worst aspect of living as a Palestinian in the Jewish state. To this has lately been added the fear of ethnic cleansing and expulsion.

The situation in the occupied territories is far worse. House demolitions, expulsions, killings, torturing, land confiscation and daily harassment at will of the population has been going on from the first day of occupation in 1967: it did not start because of the suicide bombs which appeared for the first time in 1995 as a very belated Palestinian response for more than 25 years of occupation. The situation has only become worse in the last four years. There are several spheres of brutality that should be mentioned: the collective punishment, the abuse of thousands of detainees and political prisoners, the transfer of people, the economic devastation, the slaying of innocent citizens and the daily harassment at checkpoints. Lately to this was added the fence that is ghettoizing thousands of people, separating them from their land and their kin and/or destroying their source of living and their houses.

Q: This wall is being termed a wall of separation. Perhaps you can offer some reflections on this symbol of oppression and its implications.

Pappe: I think the wall fits well into older Zionist notions of how to solve the problem of Palestine while taking into account realpolitik such as the need to maintain Israels external image and keep a cordial relationship with the West and the United States in particular. The aim has always been, and it still remains, to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. Only very unique historical circumstances, such as those that existed in 1948, allowed for mass expulsions of the Palestinians on the way to realize the vision of a totally de-Arabized Palestine. In the absence of, or while waiting for such circumstances, more gradual means have been employed. The first is an internal Israeli decision on how much of historical Palestine is needed for sustaining the Jewish State. The consensus between Labor and Likkud today is that the Gaza strip is not needed and that half of the West Bank as well can be given up. The half of the West Bank that is left to the Palestinians, however, is not a contiguous territory: it is bisected by areas in the West Bank deemed necessary for Israels survival, because they include water resources, historical sites, strategic positions and large post-1967 Jewish settlements. The drawing of this new map can either be done with the consent of a Palestinian leadership or without it.

The second device is a set of operations meant to cleanse the indigenous population of those areas that were annexed to Israel from the West Bank. Today there are about a quarter of a million people inhabiting these regions. As in 1948, the issue is not just expulsion, but also anti-repatriation. So the wall that is being built demarcates the eastern border of Israel (so that the Jewish State will consist of 85 percent of original Palestine) and is meant to draw a clear demographic line between the Jewish and Palestinian populations. People who have already been chased out of their houses while the wall and security zone around it was constructed, and those who are in danger of being evicted in the future, will be blocked from coming back by the wall.

The third step is an Israeli willingness to define the Gaza strip and what would be left of the West Bank as a Palestinian state. Such a state cannot be a viable political entity and would be akin to two huge prison camps-one in the Gaza Strip the other in the West Bank-in which many people would find it difficult to find employment and proper housing. This may lead to immigration and de-population that may raise the appetite of Israel for more land.

Two final points: the wall would leave the Palestinians citizens of Israel, as a demographic problem inside the wall. Zionist policies in the past and present Sharonite plans raise severe concerns for the fate of these people, presently still citizens of Israel who number more the one and a quarter million today. The second point is that the wall will also turn Israel into a prison hall-wardens and inmates are quite often both prisoners-which means that the siege mentality that lies behind some of the most cruel and aggressive Israeli policies inside and outside the country will continue.

Q: The Geneva Accords have raised the hopes of many: critics have attacked their advocates, however, and emphasized the need for a bi-national state rather than a two-state solution to the current crisis. Where do you stand?

Pappe: First, I do support a bi-national state and find it a far better solution than the two-states solution offered by the Accords. In fact, I will even go further than that and claim that only a secular democratic single state will, at the end of the day, bring peace and reconciliation to Palestine. It is the only political structure that allies with the demographic composition on the ground-the absence of any clear homogenous territorial communities, the need to repatriate the refugees, and the danger of the politics of identity on both sides if they are to become state identities and the need to cater to crucial and urgent agendas such as poverty and ecological problems that cannot be dealt with by a national structure in either Israel or Palestine alone.

The Geneva initiative is, like so many other peace plans in the past, an Israeli dictate that seeks, and quite often finds, Palestinian partners. This present peace plan, like the previous one, has three assumptions that have to be deconstructed. The first is that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 is irrelevant to the making of peace. The second is that peace excludes any solution for the refugee question based on the right of return and Israeli accountability for the catastrophe of 1948. The third, is that the Palestinians are not entitled to a state, but a dependency over roughly 15 percent of historical Palestine and for that they should declare the end of the conflict.

My point is that indeed everything possible should be done to end the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip and liberate it from Israeli control and pass it to Palestinian hands. But this can only be a first step, because such a withdrawal does not solve the predicament of most of the Palestinian people, who live in refugee camps or are citizens of Israel. The end of the occupation is not equivalent to the end of the conflict, as is stated in the Geneva document, it is a precondition for peace.

Israel has first to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and make itself accountable by implementing UN resolution 194. In the meantime, given the realities surrounding the return of refugees and the presence of so many Jews in Palestinian areas, there will be a need to look for the appropriate political structure that can carry this reconciliation. For me, the best is the one state structure.

Q: What would you say to those who claim that the current policies of the Sharon regime are in reality necessary in order to assure the security of Israel from terrorist fanatics?

Pappe: There are two answers. The first is that these policies were in tact from 1967, long before the first suicide bomber was even born. The second is that we should say to them what we say to those who claim that the neocons in Washington planned the occupation of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Iran because of 9/11. I think we all know that 9/11 was a pretext for a strategy born in a certain American school of thought of what America is all about and how it should control the world politically, militarily and economically. The suicide bombers are a pretext for implementing a harsher version of policies of collective punishment meant to enable the territorial enlargement of Israel and the de-population of further parts of Palestine.

Q: Israel is often depicted as the lone outpost of democracy in the Middle East. How legitimate is this claim? Or, further, is a redefinition of democracy taking place in your country?

Pappe: I think that one of the major tests for a democracy is the treatment of minorities. If this is accepted as a principal test case than it is ludicrous to define Israel as a democracy, let alone as an outpost of democracy. There are official and formal characteristics which justify the definition of Israel as a democracy, but it is so flawed in the field of maintaining basic civil and human rights, that notwithstanding these attributes, one can still cast severe doubts about the definition of the state as a democracy.

As I have tried to show in the analysis of the Israeli attitude to Palestinians as citizens or under occupation, the basic Israeli policy is a mixture of apartheid practices and colonialist attitudes. But also the role of religion in the state and the consequent violation of basic rights as a result are additional reasons to look for a different definition for Israel, rather than search a new definition for democracy.

Pappe: I do not think there is a new anti-Semitism. There is anti-Semitism, rooted in the extreme right in Europe and the United States. It has been silenced to a great extent since 1945 and it is still a marginal phenomenon. There are strong sentiments against Israel and Zionism both on the Left and among the communities of Muslim immigrants. Some of the actions taken are reminiscent in form and tone of the old anti-Semitism, but for the most part, these actions have been taken against Jews who chose to represent Israel in their own countries and thus became targets for legitimate and illegitimate actions against them. Particularly appalling is the use by the Israeli government and its supporters of the anti-Semitism card in order to silence any criticism on its policies in Palestine.

Pappe: Alas, not in the near future, but I am quite hopeful about the long term. I think there are signs that elements of civil society both in Israel and in Palestine are willing to take the issue of resolving the conflict away from the politicians who hijacked it for their own personal and narrow interests. Such actions on the part of civil society, however, will unfortunately not prove effective or assume a mass character unless there is strong external pressure on, and condemnation of, the Israeli state and its policies. A more hopeful scenario cannot materialize unless that occurs and more blood will be shed in another round or two of violence.

Q: Arab critics have described Zionism as a form of racism: how would you deal with that assessment?

Pappe: Zionism is both a national movement and a colonialist project. Most national movements have an inherent racist element in them. They differ in how significant this element in the national discourse and practice actually is. In Zionism, it is a particularly meaningful signifier of self-identity.

Colonialism is also very closely associated with racism and there are many features of Zionism in the past and the present that are purely colonialist in character. The only thing I would object to in identifying Zionism and racism is the tendency to neglect other vital aspects of Zionism such as its importance for creating a Hebrew culture, a new nation state, and a safe haven for some Jews.

Ilan Pappe is senior lecutrer, department of political science, Haifa University and Chair of the Emil Touma institute for Palestinian studies, Haifa. Pappe's recent books include, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1992), The Israel\Palestine Question (1999) and A History of Modern Palestine (2003).

Die Like a Dog
by nessie Sunday July 18, 2004 at 05:19 PM

When Tip was murdered, one of his human companions became quite understandably hysterical. Her name is Janet. She wasn't trying to hurt anybody. She was just screaming. She couldn't have hurt anybody if she wanted to. She was recovering from hip surgery, and was only able to walk with a cane and great difficulty. The cops wrestled her to the ground and restrained her. In the process, one of them broke his own sunglasses. So Janet was charged with assaulting an officer.

When I heard about this, I made it my business to be at the so-called “Hall of Justice” at 850 Bryant St. when Janet showed up for her first hearing. I interviewed her and two other witnesses. I have refrained from publishing it until now because I didn't want to jinx her case. Eventually, a judge threw the case out, but not before the ordeal had extracted time from Janet's life, and caused her a great deal of worry. As the SFPD take such joy in reminding the people they bust on bunk charges, you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.

Some people would consider Chuck, Janet, and Dusty to be homeless people. Actually, they are vehicle dwellers. Their home is on wheels. The day Tip was shot, they were parked close to a dog park, along with a number of other similar vehicles. It is technically illegal to live in a vehicle on the street in SF. The loophole is you only have to move every 72 hours. There are several communities of vehicle dwellers in SF. They comprise a couple hundred individuals. They tend to look out for each other. They have to. The police push them around. All too often, the police murder their dogs, just because they can. All too often, the police also murder dogs who are companions of the truly homeless people, the ones who live on the sidewalk and under the bridges. While this happens fairly often, it is seldom if ever reported in the media. On the rare occasions that a middle class dog and the police tangle, it's news for days. Ask Max Castro, of San Francisco's Sunset District, or the Smoak family of North Carolina.

There are said to be ten to twenty thousand homeless people in SF. My guess is there are a lot more, and they just hide. There are a great many other people who are technically not homeless because they couch surf. My guess is based on personal experience. Giving away 1600 pounds of food every Thursday morning for six years in the eighties brought me into contact with a lot of hungry people. They included homeless people, couch surfers, vehicle dwellers and just plain poor people who have somehow managed to still hold onto their rooms and apartments. There are many of different kinds of poor people. They have little in common but poverty. But that's enough. Poverty is a full time job. Among the homeless, women are in the majority, a lot of them with children. You don't see them because they hide.

Back in the day, many vehicle dwellers drew a class distinction between themselves and the people who sleep in the bushes. Consistent and uniform persecution by the police has eroded this attitude by blurring the line between them. So has the increasing number of people who can’t afford to pay rent. Real estate speculation and Bush’s recession have made rent an unaffordable luxury for even many working poor. Then there’s the cops. If they tow your vehicle, it’s gone, and everything you own with it. you’re “kicked to the curb,” as the saying goes, and have to start over from nothing. None of Tip’s friends draw the distinction between those who live on wheels and those who live on their feet. Poor is poor. All poor people are in ever so slight variations of the same predicament. All are persecuted by the police. So are their dogs.

When you think of homeless people, you tend to think of disheveled winos, begging on the street. They are the ones you see, because they are the ones who don't hide. They are the tip of the iceberg. Far more common are people like Chuck and Janet, who are neither disheveled nor substance abusers, and their friend Dusty, who despite the moniker is clean and well dressed, and who is in recovery.

Tip was Chuck's dog, or rather, Chuck was Tip’s person. Chuck is Janet's significant other. Dusty is often their neighbor. Chuck, Janet and Tip were a family of three. Now they are just a grieving couple. For a living, they scavenge scrap metal. It pays only slightly better than welfare, and takes up a lot of time. But you don't have to punch a clock, or take orders from a boss. To some people, that's worth more than money. Scavenging is good exercise, too. It keeps Chuck in shape. I wish I looked as healthy as he does. The guy is built like a line backer. His size alone made the point in the narrative where he breaks down be a particularly heart rending moment. I gave him a big hug when it was over.

My connection with Tip is my friend Jane. Chuck saved Jane's life once. She made friends with him and Janet. Tip made friends with her. He was a very friendly dog. He made many, many friends. Most were poor. That's why he died the way he did. Rich people's dogs don't die this way.

Jane can't keep a dog where she lives, and she can't afford to move. She has a real deal on housing, and in this town, that's not something one walks away from. Rent is very expensive here. When you have a deal, you stick with it, or you have to leave town. New rentals are through the roof.

When Tip was alive, and Jane was feeling depressed, she would borrow Tip and they would go walking. He always cheered her up. Sometimes she borrows my dog for the same reason. Dogs are good for this sort of thing. Mammalian emotions are contagious, and it is very easy to make a dog happy. A dog can feel much greater happiness than its little brain can hold. The rest spills out, and gets all over whoever is nearby and has feelings. They act as a sort of amplifiering happiness reflectors. If you are so devoid of feelings as to be unable to share a dog's happiness, you're a psychic cripple. Get help. If that doesn't work out, you can always get a job with the SFPD. They hire people like you. You'd fit right into their culture.

For years, Jane tried to introduce me to Tip, whom she assured me I would like a great deal. She told me all about his personality, and how smart he was, and all the tricks he did, and how many friends he had, and how friendly he was, and how much people liked him, and how much I would like him, and when would I come and meet him? But I always kept putting it off, and now it's too late.

I'll never get to see him catch a tennis ball on the fly and drop it into the wire panniers of a moving bicycle. I'll never get to see him run along side and untie the cyclist's shoelace as he ran. I'll never get to see him lift from Jane's shoulders the crushing weight of depression that medication could never touch. I'll never get to shake his paw or rub his belly or feel his soft, warm tongue on my cheek. He's dead and gone, murdered in cold blood by a cruel and heartless man.

But he's not forgotten. He lives in the hearts of those he left behind, and in the hearts of all who love dogs and justice more than they love the cops.

doesn't want you to read Ilan Pappe. How utterly unsurprising.

Oh, well, too bad for them.

Here's some more:

http://www.labournet.net/world/0209/pappe1.html

Ilan Pappe: Israeli Jewish myths and the prospect of American war

Interview by Greg Dropkin
Published: 13/09/02

nessie is labeled a troll by his own kind, and is recognized for his fake whining.

http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2006/06/23928_comment.php

The following post has status hidden:
"all editors are volunteers"
by unbelievable • Tuesday, Jun. 06, 2006 at 7:22 PM

This is not a plausible explanation for the the editors fostering all the nessie/smashy spam

They have enough time to hide this:

http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2006/06/23922_comment.php

but they don't have time to hide the actual spam that it talks about!?!

I don't believe it. I think they host this crap on purpose.

add your comments

This is inexcusably bad politics
by for shame, Pgh IMC, for shame Tuesday, Jun. 06, 2006 at 7:24 PM

It's even worse journalism.

add your comments

wrong
by editor Tuesday, Jun. 06, 2006 at 8:09 PM

the above story was hidden, which is clearly displayed at the top of that page.

if you were serious about lodging a complaint about editorial policy, you would email the address and reach the right people. continuing to post disruptive inappropriate content just shows how disingenuous these faux-shocked requests for "moderation" are.

your attempts at disruption are not working. *yawn*

we aren't paying much attention to trolls while advancing our mission of "community based, non-corporate participatory media"

It's a way to change the subject.

The subject is Ilan Pappe. That they are trying so hard to drown him out, is just more proof that he is telling the truth:

http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/pappecase.cfm

What Does Israel Want?
Ilan Pappe, The Electronic Intifada, 14 July 2006

Imagine a group of high ranking generals who simulated for years Third World War scenarios in which they can move huge armies around, employ the most sophisticated weapons in their disposal and enjoy the immunity of a computerized headquarters from which they can direct their war games. Now imagine that they are informed that in fact there is no Third World War and their expertise is needed to calm down some of the nearby slums or deal with soaring crime in deprived townships and impoverished neighborhoods. And then imagine - in the final episode in my chimerical crisis - what happens when they find out how irrelevant have their plans been and how useless are their weapons in the struggle against the street violence produced by social inequality, poverty and years of discrimination in their society. They can either admit failure or decide none the less to use the massive and destructive arsenal at their disposal. We are witnessing today the havoc wreaked by Israeli generals who opted for latter course of action.

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. They were faced with stones, molotov bottles and primitive arms which required a very limited use of the huge arsenal the army has amassed throughout the years and did not test at all their ability to perform in a battlefield or a war zone. 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.

The first Intifada was crushed, but the Palestinians continued to seek ways of ending the occupation. They rose again in 2000, inspired this time by a more religious group of national leaders and activists. But it was still a ‘low intensity conflict’; no more than that. But this is not what the army expected, it was yearning for a ‘real’ war. As Raviv Druker and Offer Shelah, two Israeli journalists with close ties to the IDF, show in a recent book, Boomerang (p. 50), major military exercises before the second Intifada were based on a scenario that envisaged a full-scale war. It was predicted that in the case of another Palestinian uprising, there would be three days of ‘riots’ in the occupied territories that would turn into a head-on confrontation with neighboring Arab states, especially Syria. Such a confrontation, it was argued, was needed to maintain Israel’s power of deterrence and reinforce the generals confidence in their army’s ability to conduct a conventional war.

The frustration was unbearable as the three days in the exercise turned into six years. And yet, the Israeli army’s main vision for the battlefield is today still that of ‘shock and awe’ rather than chasing snipers, suicide bombers and political activists. The ‘low intensity’ war questions the invincibility of the army and erodes its capability to engage in a ‘real’ war. More important than anything else, it does not allow Israel to impose unilaterally its vision over the land of Palestine – a de-Arabized land mostly in Jewish hands. Most of the Arab regimes have been complacent and weak enough to allow the Israelis to pursue their policies, apart from Syria and Hizballah in Lebanon. They have to be neutralized if Israeli unileteralism is to succeed.

After the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000, some of the frustration was allowed to evaporate with the use of 1,000 kilo bombs on a Gaza house or during operation Defense Shield in 2002 when the army bulldozered the refugee camp in Jenin. But this too was a far cry from what the strongest army in the Middle East could do. And despite the demonization of the mode of resistance chosen by the Palestinians in the second Intifada – the suicide bomb – you needed only two or three F-16 and a small number of tanks to punish collectively the Palestinians by totally destroying their human, economic and social infrastructure.

I know these generals as well as one could know them. In the last week, they have had a field day. No more random use of one-kilo bombs, battleships, choppers and heavy artillery. The weak and insignificant new minister of defense, Amir Perez, accepted without hesitation the army demand for crushing the Gaza strip and grinding Lebanon to dust. But it may not be enough. It can still deteriorate into a full scale war with the hapless army of Syria and my ex-students may even push by provocative actions towards such an eventuality. And, if you believe what you read in the local press here, it may even escalate into a long distance war with Iran, backed by a supreme American umbrella.

Even the most partial reports in the Israeli press of what was proposed by the army to Ehud Olmert’s government as possible operations in the coming days, indicate clearly what enthuses the Israeli generals these days. Nothing less that a total destruction of Lebanon, Syria and Tehran.

The politicians at the top are more tamed, to a point. They have only partially satisfied the army’s hunger for a ‘high intensity conflict’. But their politics of the day are already donned by military propaganda and rational. This why Zipi Livni, Israeli foreign minister, an otherwise intelligent person, could say genuinely on Israeli TV tonight (13 July 2006) that the best way to retrieve the two captured soldiers ‘is to destroy totally the international airport of Beirut’. Abductors or armies that have two POWs of course immediately go and buy commercial tickets on the next flight from an international airport for the captors and the two soldiers. ‘But they can sneak them with a car’, insisted the interviewers. ‘Oh indeed’ said the Israeli Foreign Minister, ‘This is why we will also destroy all the roads in Lebanon leading outside the country’. This is good news for the army, to destroy airports, set fire to petrol tanks, blow up bridges, damage roads and inflict collateral damage on a civilian population. At least the airforce can show its ‘real’ might and compensate for the frustrating years of the ‘low intensity conflict’ that had sent Israel’s best and fiercest to run after boys and girls in the alleys of Nablus or Hebron. In Gaza the airforce has already dropped five such bombs, where in the last six years it dropped only one.

This may be not enough, though, for the army generals. They already say clearly on TV that ‘we here in Israel should not forget Damascus and Teheran’. Past experiences tell us what they mean by this appeal against our collective amnesia.

The captive soldiers in Gaza and Lebanon have already been deleted from the public agenda here. This is about destroying the Hizballah and Hamas once and for all, not about bringing home the soldiers. In a similar way in the summer of 1982, the Israeli public have totally forgotten the victim that provided the government of Menachem Begin with the excuse of invading Lebanon. He was Shlomo Aragov, Israel’s ambassador to London on whose life an attempt was made by a splinter Palestinian group. The attack on him served Ariel Sharon with the pretext of invading Lebanon and staying there for 18 years.

Alternative routes for the conflict are not even raised in Israel, not even by the Zionist left. No one mentions commonsensical ideas such as an exchange of prisoners or a commencement of a dialogue with the Hamas and other Palestinian groups at least over a long ceasefire to prepare the ground for more meaningful political negotiations in the future. This alternative way forward is already backed by all the Arab countries, but alas only by them. In Washington, Donald Ramsfeld may have lost some of his deputies in the Defense Department, but he is still the Secretary. For him, the total destruction of the Hamas and Hizballah – whatever the price and if it is without loss of American life – will ‘vindicate’ the raison d’être for the Third World Theory he propagated early on in 2001. The current crisis for him is a righteous battle against a small axis of evil – away from the quagmire of Iraq and a precursor for the so far unattained goals in the ‘war against terror’ – Syria and Iran. If indeed to a certain extent the Empire was serving the proxy in Iraq, the full fledged support President Bush gave to the recent Israeli aggression in Gaza and Lebanon, shows that may be pay off time has come: now the proxy should salvage the entangled Empire.

Hizballah wants back the piece of southern Lebanon Israel still retains. It also wishes to play a major role in Lebanese politics and shows ideological solidarity with both Iran and the Palestinian struggle in general, and the Islamist one, in particular. The three goals do not always complement each other and resulted in a very limited war effort against Israel in the last six years. The total resurrection of tourism on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon testifies that, unlike the Israeli generals, for its own reasons the Hizballah is very happy with a very low intensity conflict. If and when a comprehensive solution for the Palestine question will be achieved even that impulse would die out. Crossing 100 yards into Israel proper is such an action. Retaliating to such a low key operation with a total war and destruction indicates clearly that what matters is the grand design not the pretext.

There is nothing new in this. In 1948, the Palestinians opted for a very low intensity conflict when the UN imposed on them a deal which wrested from their hand half of their homeland and gave it to a community of newcomers and settlers, most of whom arrived after 1945. The Zionist leaders waited for long time for that opportunity and launched an ethnic cleansing operation that expelled half of the land’s native population, destroyed half of its villages and dragged the Arab world into unnecessary conflict with the West, whose powers were already on the way out with the demise of colonialism. The two designs are interconnected: the wider Israel’s military might expands, the easier it is to complete the unfinished business of the 1948: the total de-Arabization of Palestine.

It is not too late to stop the Israeli designs from creating a new and terrible reality on the ground. But the window of opportunity is very narrow and the world needs to take action before it is too late.

You mean, as when mental cripples from SF call someone irrational and illogical because they rightfully find the "work" of a particular "writer" shitty?

Keep coming back for your bitchslapping, NAMBLA boy.

There they go again. It's fundamentally dishonest people they are, and they just can't resist demonstrating it. They'll even sign other people's names to their lies. That's how dishonest they are. Watch, they'll do it again.

My name is whatever I say it is. And those are NAMBLA boy's words, verbatim.

See what I mean?

And now back to the subject:

http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/en/021020_pappe.html

The '48 Nakba & The Zionist Quest for its Completion
Writer:

Ilan Pappe
Source:

Between The Lines
Date:

October 2002 Issue

Ilan Pappe

Dr. Ilan Pappe is a Profesor of History at Haifa University. This article is based upon the transcript of a lecture presented by Dr. Pappe to the Right To Return Coalition - Al Awda UK, held at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London Monday 16th September 2002. It is hereby published after receiving Dr. Pappe's consent and editorial remarks. [BTL]

* * * * *

I have come here to present the comprehensive story of the history of the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and its relevance to the present and future agenda to peace in Palestine.

For Israelis, 1948 is a year in which two things happened which contradict each other: On the one hand, it was the climax of Jewish aspirations to have a state or to fulfill a long dream of returning to a homeland after what they regarded as 2000 years of exile. In other words, it was considered a miraculous event that only positive adjectives could be attached to, and that you could only talk about and remember as a very elated kind of event. On the other hand, it was the worst chapter in Jewish history. Jews did in 1948 in Palestine what Jews had not done anywhere for 2000 years prior. The most evil and most glorious moment converged into one. What Israeli collective memory did was to erase one side of the story in order to co-exist or to live with only the glorious chapter. It was a mechanism for solving an impossible tension between two collective memories.

Because so many of the people who live in Israel lived through 1948, this is not a distant memory. It is not the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. People know exactly what they did, and they know what others did. Yet they still succeed in erasing it totally from their own memory while struggling rigorously against anyone trying to present the other, unpleasant, story of 1948, in and outside Israel. 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. So whenever I speak of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, we must remember that not just the very terms of "ethnic cleansing" and "expulsion" are totally alien to the community and society from which I come and from where I grew up; the very history of that chapter is either distorted in the recollection of people, or totally absent.

Zionist Leaders' Strategy:
Settlement and Expulsion

Now, when you start reading the diaries of the leaders of Zionism, and researching their ideologies and ideological trends since the movement's conception in the late 19th century, you see that from the very beginning there had been the realization that the aspiration for a Jewish state in Palestine contradicts the fact that an indigenous people had been living on the land of Palestine for centuries and that their aspirations contradicted the Zionist schema for the country and its people. The presence of a local society and culture had been known to the founding fathers of Zionism even before the first settlers set foot on the land.

Two means were used in order to change the reality in Palestine, and impose the Zionist interpretation on the local reality: the dispossession of the indigenous population from the land and its re-populating with newcomers - i.e. settlement and expulsion. The colonization effort was pushed forward by a movement that had not yet won regional or international legitimacy and therefore had to buy land, and create enclaves within the indigenous population. The British Empire was very helpful in bringing this scheme into reality. Yet from the very beginning of Zionist strategy, the leaders of Zionism knew that settlement is a very long and measured process, which may not be sufficient if you want to revolutionize the reality on the ground and impose your own interpretation. For that, you needed something more powerful. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in the 1930s and later the first Prime Minister of Israel, mentioned more than once, that for that [imposing your interpretation on the ground] you need what he called "revolutionary conditions". He meant a situation of war - a situation of change of government, a twilight zone between an old era and the beginning of a new one. It is not surprising to read in the Israeli press today that Ariel Sharon thinks that he is the new Ben Gurion who is about to lead his people into yet another revolutionary moment - the war with Iraq - in which expulsion, and not a political settlement, can be used to further, indeed, to complete the process of de-Arabizing Palestine and Judaizing it, which had begun in 1882.

Towards the end of the British Mandate, there was a need to make these more theoretical and abstract ideas about expulsion into a concrete plan. I have been writing about 1948 since 1980, and for much of that time have been concerned with the question of whether there had or hadn't been a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians in 1948. Then I realized, (largely as a result of what I have learned in the last two years), that this was not the right track: neither for academic research nor from more popular ideological research of what has happened in the past. Far more important for ethnic cleansing is the formulation of an ideological community, in which every member, whether a newcomer or a veteran, knows only too well that they have to contribute to a recognized formula: the only way to fulfill the dream of Zionism is to empty the land of its indigenous population.

Mass Ideological Indoctrination
Behind '48 Nakba

Master plans are not the most important component in preparing yourself for that time of a revolutionary juncture or for the contingency plans of how to practically make the idea of expulsion a reality. You need something else: you need an atmosphere, you need people who are indoctrinated, you need commanders in every link of the chain of command who would know what to do even if they don't have explicit orders when the time comes. Most of the preparations before the '48 War were less about a master plan (although I do think there was one). The commanders were busy compiling intelligence files for each Palestinian village for the use of Jewish commanders on all levels, so they would know how wealthy and how important each particular village was as a military unit etc. Armed with such intelligence, they were also aware of what was expected from them by the man who stood at the top of the Jewish pyramid in Palestine, David Ben Gurion and his colleagues. These leaders wanted only to know how each operation contributed to the Judaization of Palestine, and they made it perfectly clear that they did not care how it was done. The expulsion plan worked very smoothly exactly because there was no need for a systematic chain of command that had to check whether a master plan was fully implemented. Anyone who has done any research on ethnic cleansing operations in the second half of the 20th century knows that this is exactly how ethnic cleansing is achieved: by creating the kind of education and indoctrination systems that ensures that every soldier and every commander, and everyone with his individual responsibility, knows exactly what to do when they enter a village, even if they haven't received any specific orders to expel its inhabitants.

Just recently, as a result of reading testimonies not only of Palestinians but also of Israeli soldiers, it became clear to me that the master plan, although significant in itself, pales in comparison to the whole machinery of indoctrination of a community. In 1948, the Yishuv's [the pre-'48 Zionist community] population was a little more than half a million, and before 1948 was even less. Those who had an active role in the military aspects of their community knew precisely what to do when the moment came and not one moment too soon.

But it should be remembered that the plan was successful not only because of the ideological indoctrination. It was done under the eyes of the UN, which had been committed ever since its General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 to the safety and welfare of those 'cleansed'. The UN was obliged to protect the life of the Palestinian people who were supposed to live in the areas allocated to the Jewish State (they were meant to make up almost half of the population of the prospective state). Out of 900,000 Palestinians living both in these areas and additional areas occupied by Israel from the designated Arab states, only 100,000 remained. Within a very short period during the time in which the UN was already responsible for Palestine, a massive expulsion operation took place within a very short period of time.

We have yet to be told the most horrific stories of 1948, although so many of us have been working as professional historians on that. We haven't talked about the rape. We haven't talked about the more than 30 or 40 massacres which popular historiography mentions. We haven't yet decided how to define the systematic killing of several individuals that took place in each and every village in order to create the panic that should produce the exodus. Is this a massacre or not when it is systematically repeated in every village? It is quite possible that some chapters will never be revealed, and many of them do not depend on archives, but rather on the memory of people whom we are loosing each day as vital witnesses. There were not specific orders written, only an atmosphere that has to be reconstructed. A glimpse into that atmosphere can be found on the bookshelves of almost every house in Israel - in the official books that glorify the Israeli army in its activity in 1948. If you know how to read them, you can see how the Palestinians were de-humanized to such a degree that you could rely on the troops, and that they would know what to do.

Israeli and Palestinian Leaders
Accept the American Game:
Shrinking Palestine Physically & Morally

Noam Chomsky was correct in his analysis that we in Palestine/ Israel and the Middle East as a whole were eagerly playing the American game ever since they decided to take an active role in the peace process, beginning in 1969 with the Rogers Plan, and then with the Kissinger initiatives. Ever since then, the peace agenda has been an American game. The Americans invented the concept of the peace process, whereby the process is far more important than peace. America has contradictory interests in the Middle East, which include protecting certain regimes in the area that preserve American interests (therefore entailing paying lip service to the Palestinian cause) while also has a commitment to Israel. In order not to find itself facing these two contradictory agendas, it is best to have an ongoing process which is not war and not peace but something which you can describe as a genuine American effort to reconcile between the two sides - and God forbid if this reconciliation works.

We were playing this game not only because the Americans invented it, but also because the replacement of peace with a "peace process" became the main strategy of the Israeli peace camp. When the peace camp of the stronger party in the local balance of power accepts this interpretation then the world at large follows suit.

Such a process, which can and should go on forever, coached by the only superpower and supported by the peace camp of the stronger party in the conflict, is presented as peace. One of the best ways of safeguarding the process from being successful is to evade all the outstanding issues at the heart of the problem. In such a way it was possible to erase the events of 1948 from the peace agenda and focus on what happened in 1967. The outstanding issue became the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war. The concept of "territories for peace" was invented simultaneously in Tel Aviv, London, Paris and New York for United Nations Resolution 242. It presents a very concrete variable, in fact about 20% of Palestine, while wiping out the remainder 80% from the formula and juxtaposes it against "peace", which is in fact the never-ending peace process. A process that was not meant to bring a solution, let alone reconciliation. In return for a peace process, the Palestinians would be allowed to talk about and maybe gradually build something of a political entity on 20% of Palestine.

In 1988 [after the PNC accepted UN 242 in Algiers] and 1993 [at the Oslo Accords] even the Palestinian leadership joined this game. No wonder then that after Oslo, the American policy makers felt that they could round up the whole story. They had Palestinian and Israeli leaderships that accepted the name of the American game. This was the beginning of the process, which culminated with the "the most generous Israeli offer ever made about peace" in the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000. Had this process been successful, history would have witnessed not only the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 but the eradication of the refugees, as well as of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and maybe even Palestine, from our collective memory.

It was a process of elimination that succeeded to a certain extent, were it not for the second uprising. I wonder what would have happened had the second Intifada not broken out. If the Palestinian leadership continued to partake in the ploy to shrink Palestine, physically and morally, it would have succeeded. The second Intifada was trying to stop this. Whether or not it will succeed, we do not know.

Agenda for Peace Activists
in the Shadow of Transfer Scheme

The problem for us as peace activists, is that any coordinated pressure on Israel to stop its plans, can in an absurd way lead the Israelis to accelerate their plans for wiping out Palestine, namely to feel that the revolutionary circumstances have arrived. This is my greatest fear for the second Intifada. I fully support it and regard it as a popular movement determined to stop a peace process which would have destroyed Palestine once and for all. The uprising, and certainly on top of it the coming war against Iraq, have produced in the minds of Israelis - of all walks of life not only within the circles of the Right-wing camp - the idea that "we have reached yet another fortuitous juncture in history where revolutionary conditions have developed for solving the Palestine question once and for all." You can see this new assertion talked about in Israel: the discourse of transfer and expulsion which had been employed by the extreme Right, is now the bon ton of the center. Established academics talk and write about it, politicians in the center preach it, and army officers are only too happy to hint in interviews that indeed should a war against Iraq begin, transfer should be on the agenda.

This brings me to chart what I think are three agendas of peace, for anyone involved in supporting peacemaking in Israel and Palestine, otherwise we may miss the train, so to speak.

The first agenda is the most urgent one: we must all take the danger of a recurrence of the 1948 ethnic cleansing very seriously. This is not just paranoia when I directly - not indirectly - link the war against Iraq with the possibility of another Nakba.

Take it seriously, believe me. There is a serious Israeli conceptualization of the situation in which Israeli leaders say to themselves, "we have a carte blanche from the Americans. The Americans will not only allow us to cleanse Palestine once and for all, they even will help create the window of opportunity for implementing our scheme. We will be condemned by the world, but this will be short-lived and eventually forgotten. This is a rare opportunity to 'solve' the problem."

The second agenda is the immediate one, and that is ending the occupation. We should be very careful in adopting the American, the Israeli Peace Now, and I'm sorry to say, the Palestinian Authority discourse about a two-state solution. Because the two-state solution nowadays is not the end of the occupation but continuing it in a different way. It is meant to be the end of the conflict with no solution to the refugee problem and the complete abandonment of the Palestinian minority in Israel. Anybody who has not learned this after the Oslo Accords has a problem of understanding and interpreting reality. We have to make sure that the idea of peace is not hijacked by people who are seeking indirect ways of continuing the present situation in Palestine. This is not easy because the western media has already adopted within its main vocabulary that anyone who wants to present himself as a peacemaker or as a supporter of peace, must talk about a two-state solution.

Only after the occupation ends can we talk about what it entails. Then it is possible to discuss the political structure best needed to prevent a reoccupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But it should be clear that the political structure needed to end the conflict is a different one. It has to be one that enables us to end refugeehood and the apartheid policies against the Palestinians inside Israel. We have to be sure not to get caught in the same cul de sac that Yassir Arafat found himself in Camp David when he was asked to equate the end of occupation (when it wasn't even the end of occupation) with the end of the conflict.

Finally, and this is our third agenda, we have to keep on thinking about how to devise concrete plans for making the Right of Return feasible and for making possible the end of discrimination against Palestinians in Israel. These are the two pillars of a comprehensive settlement and they have to be specified. I think it is quite clear that we haven't done that job yet: we are still stuck with slogans of the 1960's, of a secular democratic state. These slogans have to be updated according to the reality of 2002. What was meant in the 1960's by a secular democratic state is a possible vision for the distant future. Our focus on the urgent and immediate agenda should not absolve us from long-term strategies. What people need to hear from us are concrete plans, even if they sound utopian given the situation on the ground. This is a delicate enterprise which entails not only creating a political culture and structure that would rectify past evils, and prevent another catastrophe, but also one which would not inflict another evil, or replace the past evil with a new one. We are not calling for the expulsion of the Jews. We do want the Right of Return. We do want equal rights for the Palestinian citizens.

I think many of us who think in such a long-term span would like to see one state or a political structure which has one state in it. But you cannot disseminate these ideas by just giving highlights, nuggets or slogans. There needs to be a very serious and detailed presentation of such a solution, to convince people of its feasibility.

Finally I want to come back to where I started. In the collective Israeli memory there are two 1948s: one is totally erased, and one is totally glorified. But there is a young generation in Israel - and I have ample opportunities to meet with young audiences - who may prove to have a potential to look differently at the reality in the future. The fact that you have generations of young people who are basically willing to listen to universal principles, provides the opportunity to break the mirror and show them what really happened in 1948, and what is going on in 2002. I think we shall eventually find partners, even to our wildest dreams, on how a solution should look like.

The problem is of course, that while we do this - educate, disseminate information etc. - the government of Israel is preparing a very swift and bloody operation. If it succeeds, even our best dreams and energies would be wasted.

We Zionists defend nessie against that little turd "Smashy". nessie is one of us! nessie did not write amplifiering happiness reflectors! Get a life, "Smashy".

Mechanisms of Denial
Justin Podur interviews Ilan Pappe
by Ilan Pappe and Justin Podur; February 20, 2005

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.

Podur: You say that you take a humanist approach, but you also admit that you end up telling a story much closer to the Palestinian version of events.

Pappe: As a humanist my sympathy is with the victims. If I had written about Jews in Europe, or African Americans under slavery or Jim Crow, I would be accused of being pro-Jewish or pro-African. Since I am writing about modern Palestine, I am accused of being pro-Palestinian. What amazes me is that people who claim to be humanists that don’t come to the same conclusions as I do, people who don’t conclude that Palestinians have been victims of colonization and expulsion, people who don’t have sympathy with them.

Podur: You explained how this can happen last night in your talk. You talked about what you called ‘Mechanisms of Denial’. Can you explain this?

Pappe: The Palestinian case is paradoxical. The people who live there can see the results of 56 years of continuous ethnic cleansing, discrimination, a whole legal and practical apparatus that is the definition of apartheid. And yet within the media, the academy, and even the public consciousness, Israel is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Nothing of this reality seems to reach journalists, academics, and therefore the public. The reason is that our society is very well protected by these mechanisms of denial. Even very good-hearted Israelis who consider themselves to be part of the peace camp live in denial. There are various mechanisms, going back historically.

One of them is physical and has to do with place names. In the original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that took place in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled, the names of towns were changed. Towns were physically wiped out and reduced to rubble, and then planted over with European pine trees. The idea was at once to wipe out the past, to make it like it never existed, and simultaneously to change a Mediterrenean, Arab village into a European forest.

Israeli archaeologists were consulted to select names from the Bible that would correspond to the sites. But the names were selected even more deliberately, and even more vindictively, than that. So the Palestinian village of Lubia became the Israeli village of Levi. The names are similar, and they were made that way on purpose. So that children growing up would think only of Levi, but the Palestinians who were expelled would know. They would know, and the name would be close enough to the old name that it would be a reminder.

It was the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that planted these pine trees, to wipe out the memory of the place and Europeanize it. I was bewildered in Toronto, seeing signs for the JNF, asking for support for the JNF as if it was some kind of ecological organization dedicated to protecting whales. It is not. It is a colonialist agency of ethnic cleansing.

And the mechanisms of denial are not only about 1948. They were and are used and re-used to prevent seeing Palestinians. There were Palestinians living in Israel under military rule until 1967. These were the people who experienced the arbitrary rule of the whim of a military officer, whose lives were in the hands of someone who knew or cared nothing about them, long before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. After that, the denial simply extended to the occupied territories.

An even greater paradox is the denial that has gone alongside the exposure of crimes in the past four years. For the past four years things have gotten ever more horrendous. Daily killings of children, demolition of houses, confiscation of land, the denial of the most basic rights and freedoms. How is it possible that Israel succeeded in concealing that from its own society and from the rest of the world?

Podur: It hasn’t been concealed, but even when it is presented there is no impact.

Pappe: There are incredible examples. Here is one. There is a music show that is on Israeli television, called ‘Taverna’. It is Israeli music, which means it is Greek music with Hebrew lyrics. After the Israeli Army committed the massacre in Jenin in April 2002, the producer – another ‘leftist’ from the ‘peace camp’ – wanted to do a music show in order to give some comfort to the troops in this trying time. So the producers set up a stage in the zone of total destruction in Jenin. If you have been to Jenin or seen films about it, you know there was a hole in the middle of the camp – everything had been destroyed and reduced to rubble, people had been killed, people were buried in the rubble. They set up a stage in the midst of that rubble and had their music show. I talked to the producer afterwards, I asked him – ‘don’t you see a problem with having the stage in the middle of the hole’? He said: ‘no, the stage worked fine’ – as if my question had been about the technical aspects of the stage rather than the macabre scene.

A second example: every so often there is a bold crew of Israeli journalists who will film something. One such crew had heard that some of the Israeli soldiers at the Erez checkpoint (Erez is the highly militarized checkpoint which is the sole entry and exit point to the Gaza strip) were playing a game of roulette with the lives of Palestinians. This was a time when a very small number of Palestinians were being allowed to enter Israel through the checkpoint in order to go to work. The gate at the Erez checkpoint is an electric fence, with interlocking ‘teeth’ that make a complete seal, controlled by remote control. The soldiers would play a game to see if they could catch a Palestinian worker in the gate. One worker had died this way. The film crew investigated and filmed the game being played in secret. When the film was broadcast, the studio got hundreds of letters – protesting that the crew should not have filmed this, that it was helping the enemy and sapping the morale of our soldiers when they need support! This is another way of denial, of not facing the barbarization of society. This is very similar to the American public reaction to what happened in Abu Ghraib.

Podur: You use these examples of denial to argue that there is no basis for trying to make a moral case, no basis for dialogue, because denial is so pervasive and the culture in Israel is so far gone, and hence boycotts and sanctions against Israel are necessary. This is something that many, even those who would agree with much of your analysis, would not accept. Can you explain it further?

Pappe: As in South Africa under apartheid, denial and indoctrination is so powerful that it is not natural to expect that a movement within the society (in South Africa’s case the white society, in Israel’s case Jewish society) will arise that is strong enough to stop it. The consequences go beyond even the atrocities suffered by the Palestinians. I believe what Israel is doing will destroy the Jewish people in the near or distant future as well. Even with 250 nuclear weapons and the support of the world’s only superpower. For the sake of Jews and Arabs, the world has to play a role in dismantling apartheid. The world has to help. And the only way short of violence, which I am against, is pressure. To send a message that there is a price tag attached to apartheid. This is important because self-image is important to Israeli culture. It is very true that sanctions are problematic: they make the poorest and the workers suffer disproportionately, while the wealthy and powerful can escape their effects. But any message that Israelis are not part of the ‘civilized world’, that Israel is a pariah because of its behaviour, can be effective, because it will attach a price tag to apartheid and racism. It is very true that this might not be enough, since it has not been tried. But it must be better than suicide bombings. I can say after 35 years that we have tried the option from within and it has failed, and in many ways the ‘peace camps’ are the worst: they believe in this ‘dialogue’, that they are so generous because they are offering Palestinians a fraction of 20% of their homeland, but cannot go further and hate Palestinians for not giving up more.

Podur: How would you answer the counter-argument, made by some very effective and tireless proponents of Palestinian rights, that a boycott is not tactical because it will unify Israeli and Jewish opinion behind the most reactionary forces, who will be able to argue that Palestinians and their friends are out to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea? The argument is that the boycott tactic, like advocacy of the right of return, will actually be counterproductive, a gift to reactionaries, that will ultimately hurt Palestinians.

Pappe: Arguing for a boycott or sanctions is heavy and it is particularly difficult for me because I am asking people to boycott me. But I would answer that argument this way: it doesn’t seem to me that the unity of reactionaries depends on what we are doing – they are really quite unified right now and I can’t imagine how much more a change of tactics on our part would unify them. In fact, they are so unified right now that, unlike the 1990s, there is very little hope for change from within. People who think that there is a better way should go ahead and work on it: they should be able to prove it to us. I’m not against two states, or ‘dialogue’. I just think they have failed, and that more failure is increasingly dangerous. We are running out of time, and each day brings more ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and destruction.

Podur: You present some interesting thoughts also on the costs of these mechanisms of denial to Jews.

Pappe: There is a tragic history here of Jewish communities who were living all over the Arab world in relative safety and prosperity who were trapped between Arab Nationalism and Zionism and could not find a way between them. They had a particular way of existing and thriving under the Ottoman Empire. Some were able to solve the problem by going to Latin America or Canada, where they remained Arabs. You know in immigrant communities, there is this balance between what you wear and what you are. But for those who went to Israel, the only thing that unites Jews in an apartheid society is that they are *Not Arabs*. So the Arab Jews had to shed their Arab accents, and much worse and more painful, they had to accept that Arab culture is inferior to all other cultures. This is not good for a human being, to have to hate and fear your own culture for the sake of your own self-estimation. They had to prove themselves, to prove they weren’t secretly Arabs. Now things were much better for them than the Palestinian minority in Israel or the Ethiopian Jews. But it is still a missed opportunity and a tragedy.

Podur: About two years ago, a piece was published in Ha’aretz in which two lifelong Zionists came to the conclusion that a two-state solution was impossible. Jeff Halper has made the same argument. Did you come to your own positions, and the same conclusions, the same way? I ask because I wonder how many different ways there are to come to these conclusions, and I hope there are many.

Pappe: Hanegbi and Benvenisti were featured in that article, and they came to their conclusions reluctantly as a result of the facts on the ground Israel had built. My own group has been arguing for years that a secular democratic state is the solution. I am a historian of Palestine, and since the 1980s, I have considered myself anti-Zionist. I see the world through universals, as a humanist, not as a nationalist. I had been a part of the Communist party, and this affected my gut reactions to things. I spent four years in England. I have a lot of close Palestinian friends, and they’ve helped me see the world with different glasses. I live in a community that is almost evenly split between Jews and Arabs. I speak and write increasingly in Arabic. I think in some ways the only way to overcome so much indoctrination is to make a connection to people who belie the stereotypes. Once you have a connection like that, it doesn’t mean that you accept everything they say, but you can formulate ideas and make up your own mind. I have had a lot of important friends and guides, like Chomsky and Said, who have been really important to my formation.

Podur: Your position isn’t the majority position in Israel. But how small of a minority is it?

Pappe: It is small, but growing. Here is a litmus test. I convened the first Israeli conference on the Palestinian Right of Return last year, March 2004. Three hundred Jews came to the conference. To do that, they did that knowing that to come to this conference was to show active support for the right of return in principle. The second conference will happen in May 2005, and feature Mizrahi Jews and feminist perspectives. The idea is to highlight different themes at each conference.

Podur: You spoke at the University of Toronto and at York University in Toronto, where the administration brought police to repress, with gratuitous brutality, a demonstration during Bush’s inauguration. You are no doubt aware of what is happening to Ward Churchill at Colorado University in the United States. You have your own experience with academic freedom and the lack thereof at your school, Haifa University. Can you tell the story?

Pappe: I started voicing a strong critique of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians through my academic work in 2000. After the Second Intifada began in September 2000, people doing so started to be treated like traitors. After 2002, with the Jenin massacre, I felt I had to do even more. My own increase in activity coincided with a case of a student, Teddy Katz, who was doing his MA thesis at Haifa University in December 2000. He exposed a hitherto unknown massacre in 1948 at Tantura. His dissertation got the highest possible grade. The veterans of the military unit involved in the massacre actually sued Katz for the content of his thesis. The trial did not materialize. The Israeli courts did not want to go down that road. If they didn’t want to decide whether a massacre had happened in 2002 with Jenin, they surely were not going to want to make that decision about 1948 Tantura. And I do not have too many complaints about the way the court handled the case. But the University found a pretext to disqualify him. They found that his transcription of some of the interviews he conducted as part of the thesis were inaccurate. In no way did this impact the conclusions, but it was a small error, and he was made to rewrite the thesis and resubmit it. He did so. Then the University flunked him. I started a campaign to try to get him reinstated. He hasn’t been reinstated. The other thing I did was to start teaching a course in 2001 called ‘the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948’. It was a 2nd and 3rd year, ‘Advanced BA’ course, an optional course. The administration told me I couldn’t offer the course, but according to the University’s own procedures I could, and I was ultimately allowed to based on that codex.

I was surprised then to get a letter in May 2002 to learn that for the first time in Israeli academic history, a special disciplinary court was being convened to try me. The reason for this court was that I have tenure. Many academics have been fired, but no one with tenure has been fired. The trial was scheduled for June 2002. There was an international uproar and it exposed the University. The University then decided to ‘suspend’ the trial. It has been two and a half years, and the University has been clear that they could re-start the trial at any time.

In the meantime they have been recommending that I not be included in public seminars, that I not be invited to conferences, and so on.

Podur: That sounds almost like… a boycott!

Pappe: Yes, and I can testify that it works. I can also testify that, contrary to what they say, academics not only like to, but are very comfortable with boycotting other academics. And also, that if this is the price that has to be paid to be boycotted, that I am willing to pay it. It is a very small price to pay. But what has been disappointing is that the majority of faculty in Israel did not say a word of support for me publicly. I got some private letters of support. But I told people – I don’t need private letters, I need public letters. I traveled here from New York City, where Joseph Massad, who does not have tenure, is being attacked at Columbia University. The right to interpret reality is in danger, even in countries that cherish free speech. Perhaps particularly so in those countries.

Justin Podur’s blog is http://www.killingtrain.com

Aren't I something, posting pap from z-mag?

Oh, and enjoy my little example of why Muslims are absolutely useless.

Notice how they attack "nessie," but do not refute Ilan Pappe, which they would if they could, but they can't, so they don't; they attack a straw man instead. You know, sort of like when Dan Quale campaigned against Murphy Brown, only lamer.

Pappe is a pussy. He's a collaborator. He's a cowardly steaming pile. He's a sellout. He's an appeaser.

He's a traitor to his own kind, same as you, which is why you're here posting, akin to a gushing schoolgirl who started a fan club for Davy Jones of the Monkees.

For someone your age you really have a problem with crushes, nessie. Harry Hay and turncoat Jews.... what's next, fagboi?

Yet more logical fallacies. Still no rebuttal. How utterly unsurprising.

Now back to the topic:

http://www.counterpunch.org/jenin05032003.html

May 3, 2003

Searching Jenin

The Most Authoritative Report on the War Crimes We Will Ever Get

By ILAN PAPPE

Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion
Edited by Ramzy Baroud
Introduction by Noam Chomsky

Over a year has passed now, since the Israeli army invaded the refugee camp in Jenin, destroyed its houses, killed many of its inhabitants and committed one of the worst war crimes in this present Intifada, Intifada al-Aqsa. With a successful campaign of distortion and manipulation of evidence, the Israeli foreign ministry, with the help of the United States, succeeded in hiding from the world the horrors of Jenin, and even worse, in intimidating anyone daring to tell the truth about what had happened there.

This is the great significance and enormous importance of this book. "Searching Jenin" is the first systematic account, through eyewitness reports, on the events in April 2002. Two other books appeared in Arabic, but this is the first one in English. It puts the events in context and it highlights the true nature of the crime, while not falling into the pitfall laid by the Israelis who succeeded in drawing the UN inquiry commission into supposedly academic discussion of how to describe a massacre. As comes out vividly from this book, Jenin was not just a massacre, it was an inhuman act of unimaginable barbarism.

Noam Chomsky, in his introduction to the book, puts it in the context of crimes sponsored by America and he is someone who recorded meticulously these crimes in the past. Ramzy Baroud, in his preface, notes rightly that the book will not answer the question of how many people were killed, nor will it cover every aspect of the crime. But it does convey the message, as one of the witnesses put it that, 'what I have seen are crimes; sometimes greater than an earthquake'. And this is not just an impression, as this book makes it all too clear: every aspect of the Israeli actions in Jenin can easily be identified as war crimes, according to the Hague convention.

Testimonies like the ones presented do not only help to shed light on many of the chapters hidden by the Israeli screening and news' manipulation, it also brings forcefully the emotions, sounds and smells of the catastrophe. The pain is still there in those telling the stories. The book conveys the lingering agony through the italic interventions of the editors. Through them, we learn that while witnesses recall the horror of April 2002, like Hussein Hammad, they have to stop several times - sometimes to repose and occasionally to weep, before able to resume, like Hammad does, their stories.

Sometimes the testimonies, at first glance, seem not to tell enough - as if the survivors wish to repress the horror rather then tell it in full. But the economy of words reveals quite often, even more about what had happened. Rafidia al-Jamal is very laconic in a way, in her testimony, but the full extent of the atrocity comes out in a very short sentence she utters. This is the case when she describes how she prevented desperately her husband - who had saved her life a moment earlier - from searching after his sister. "Don't go" I told him, "She is Dead". And then she reports dryly: 'my children have nightmares'.

Other witnesses, especially mothers, feel the need to expand when it comes to their children's nightmares. Each with her own way of coping with the persisting torment of their children. Mothers all over the West Bank, and not only in Jenin a year after the massacre, spent sleepless nights with terrified children who witnessed the brutality at first hand. In Jenin, Farid and Ali Hawashin are such typical victims of continued nightmares of fear, that according to their mother, haunt them even during daylight. For them it is mainly the noise the disturbs their peace of mind: that of the loudspeaker that arrived near midnight at their home, that of the brutal burst into the house, that of the men pleading with the soldiers before being thrown out to the street, and then, worst of all, that of shots, the groaning of wounded and the silence of the dead. Noise and death repeat themselves in the memories of everyone in this book.

With these memories of sound and vision, the search for Jenin continues throughout this powerful document. It is a search for truth, but for other things as well. It is a search for loved ones unaccounted for, long after the massacre ended, and then there is a search for a remedy to the pain of the nightmare, and these searches were far more important than the question of how many exactly died in Jenin. Even without this question being answered, there is a sense that this is the most authoritative report we will ever get.

Each reader will take something different from this book. For me as an Israeli, I find the description of the soldiers' conduct the most disturbing and most convincing part of the evidence. It is a story of the dehumanization that raged in Jenin. This is so well epitomized in the chronicles of Nidal Abu al-Hayjah as reported by Ihab Ayadi. After Nidal was wounded and lay crying for help, anyone who tried to come to his rescue was shot by Israeli snipers. He bled to death as so many others. Technically, he was not massacred, he was tortured to death. The deadly precision of the snipers as a means of deterring rescue operations is being reported in other testimonies in this book, such as that of Taha Zbyde, who was killed eventually by a sniper. This mode of action was and still is enacted wherever there is an Israeli operation in the occupied territories. It is part of the vicious repertoire of the inhuman occupation - the daily physical harassment and mental abuse at checkpoints, the prevention from pregnant mothers or the wounded to get to hospitals, the starvation and the confiscation of water. No wonder some Israelis felt this brings back memories from the darker days of the Second World War. I remembered Anna Frank's diary when I read Um Sirri's horrorific recollection of how women tried to swallow a cough that irritated the Israeli soldiers standing above them, pointing their loaded guns at them.

But there are ways of opposing the inhumanity of the occupier. This is why mothers in this collection talk proudly of babies born after the massacre. The expectant young Sana al-Sani decided to call her baby, if it is a girl, 'Zuhur', which means 'flowers'. This wish is expressed in the book after Sana recalls one of the most horrid memories brought in this collection. Her husband was slaughtered on his house's doorsteps, and yet it is not revenge or retribution that guides Sana, but a dream of having a different kind of life.

But can flowers such as Sana's daughter flourish once more in the 'camp of martyrs' as the survivors called what was once their home? The flowers will have to overcome the desolation and bareness. Most of the houses were destroyed during the invasion. The Israeli army, after it expelled the resistance forces, located its artillery near the mosque and shelled the camp indiscriminately. Moreover, for blooming to take place where death once reigned, the smell would have to evaporate first. An American volunteer, Jennifer Lowenstein, until today can not sleep as the odor of death still troubles her nights and the nights of those few westerners, who gave evidence in this book, and who were fortunate enough not to be killed. They helped to tell the world the truth of what had happened. One of them is Tevor Baumgartner, who is the one who revealed the existence of mass graves, an allegation that was refuted early on in the Israeli denial, a denial that was so eagerly accepted by the United States.

This is a must, albeit a very difficult, reading. The campaign against the continued dehumanization of the Palestinians in the occupied territories can not be based on slogans and general accusations. There is a need for indictments such as one provided here, which will hopefully very soon arise enough public indignation so as to vie governments around the world to take acting to save the Palestinian people before it is too late.

* * *

Ilan Pappe is a prominent Israeli academic and the Director of International Relations Division, Haifa University.

If nessie's promoting him, he can't possibly be anything of substance.

"no rebuttal"
by Pappe is a collaborator Tuesday August 29, 2006 at 09:56 AM

There are others who can describe the Marxist turds nessie embraces far better than I.

"The most hated Israeli in Israel" - an ignoble moniker to be sure - has not eroded Ilan Pappe's star power on U.S. college campuses, where he is more often than not warmly greeted. The usual contingent of Said acolytes, Chomsky groupies and a panoply of pro-Palestinian student organizations are invariably well-represented in his audiences. The prominence of resolutely anti-Israel partisans is unsurprising, given Pappe's role as one of Israel's most prominent die-hard Marxists. Pappe was invited to UCLA by history professor and fellow Edward Said disciple, Gabriel Piterberg. A call to the university revealed that history department professors may invite speakers at their own discretion using departmental funding to cover expenses for colloquia without any oversight. This practice enables faculty to freely promulgate their political agendas and control the degree to which students are presented with alternative views and critiques. Piterberg has been labeled "an avant-garde radical who harrangues campus demonstrations, endorses petitions and teaches a course in post-and anti-Zionism. "

Last spring, as Operation Desert Storm began, he cancelled class to attend an anti-war demonstration. Pappe doesn't seem like someone who would be hated. He comes across as soft-spoken and personable and gives the impression of being an earnest humanist dedicated to a noble cause. Piterberg introduced Pappe with warm praise for his scholarship. But Pappe is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Once he began speaking, it was clear why he's so hated at home. Pappe credits Edward Said with disabusing him of the "addictive" Zionistic leanings of his youth, and for initiating "a painful awakening to…the essence of Zionism." Absent from Pappe’s discourse is the recognition of Zionism as an authentic movement of national liberation. Pappe refuses to acknowledge the meaning and purposes the modern political phenomenon of Zionism was created to address. These included support for the right of all Jews to live in their ancient homeland; and the Jewish people's national right to self-determination and freedom from oppression.

To this incorrigible anti-Zionist, Palestinian Arabs have been the helpless victims not only of Israel’s atrocities but of Israel's very existence as a Jewish state. He asserts that Israel silences those who attack the Zionist mythic narrative, notwithstanding his own somewhat ironic status as a tenured professor at an Israeli university. Not only is Pappe far from silent, he exists in an academic milieu as uninhibited and protective of academic freedom as any in the world. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority imposes strict censorship and ideological conformity on its subservient intellectuals, virtually none of whom support Israel’s legitimacy.

For Pappe, Zionism is indistinguishable in practice from "ethnic cleansing." This blanket assertion applies to all aspects of the movement's history, from perfectly legal, mutually agreed upon transfers of land title from Arabs to Jews, to a purportedly long-term Israeli strategy, from the moment the State was born, to expel Palestinian Arabs from Israel.

Pappe fails to note that between 1948 and 1967, no Palestinian national movement wished to establish a state in Judea, Samaria, or Gaza. This fact alone belies the notion that "occupation" is responsible for stimulating Palestinian terror. Arab refusal to accept the Jewish state’s right to exist is given no significance in Pappe's selective conclusions.

Pappe recirculates the ludicrous postulate that Israel's offer at Camp David constituted an effort to ethnically cleanse the so-called Occupied Territories by creating "two Bantustans – or prison camps." In fact, as confirmed as recently as a few weeks ago by Ambassador Dennis Ross, the proposed Palestinian state was to include nearly the entire West Bank, all of Gaza, and portions of East Jerusalem, which was to have become the Palestinian Arab capital. The consistent testimony of all parties privy to the Camp David negotiations, is that this Palestinian Arab state would have enjoyed territorial contiguity, and would have had a viable and substantial land mass in which to achieve the expression of its sovereignty. Yet Pappe continues to cast darkness on what is an unshadowed field of clarity and light.

Such baseless charges are Pappe's stock in trade. Before the Coalition imposed regime change in Iraq, Pappe circulated a tendentious, inflammatory petition, warning that Israel intended to use the "fog of war" to commit further atrocities against Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories. Following the advent of the second Intifada, Pappe refused to condemn terrorism and explained it as a legitimate response to "occupation." "Terrorism is not the essential question," Pappe said. "Israel expelled the Palestinians and colonized the area," acts "far worse than suicide bombing and armed struggle."

It bears repeating in this context that the Palestinian Liberation Movement was founded in 1964, years before the "occupation." The following year, an Egyptian, Yassir Arafat, launched al-Fatah, which soon became the leading operational and controlling faction of the PLO. The goal of this organization, as of the entire Palestinian national movement, was never the establishment of a new Arab state, but the destruction of the established Jewish state.

Pappe’s scholarship is questionable and subject to much criticism by respected historians. He dismisses the legitimacy of historical facts and rewrites history to support his ideologically determined agenda. He has admitted to the predominance of the Marxist worldview in defining conclusions and outcomes, by asserting that "we do [historiography] because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth seekers."

Pappe routinely and purposefully discredits or ignores sources that contradict his anti-Zionist views, and when challenged by students who cite accepted historical narratives, criticizes them for reading "the wrong books." When confronted by the actual, benign text of an Israeli military doctrine, which contradicted Pappe's thesis that such documents called for the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, he admitted that no such doctrinal statement actually existed, but was implied simply by the existence and concomitant predispositions of Zionism.

Notwithstanding a negative court finding, and a scholarly review debunking the veracity of a master’s thesis of one of Pappe's students, claiming an IDF massacre at Tantura, Pappe continued to support the claim. Upon reviewing Pappe’s latest book, historian Benny Morris warned: "Anyone interested in the real history of Palestine/Israel and the Palestinian/Israel conflict would do well to run vigorously in the opposite direction….This book is awash with errors of quantity and quality that are not found in serious historiography." Pappe admits that most historians share Morris’ views and again freely admits that his "ideology influences his historical writing."

As part of his UCLA presentation, Pappe purported to expose an ideological paradox between the external presentation of Israeli society and what he perceives to be its reality. Pappe maintains that Israel is inaccurately viewed as a country torn between "peace camp" and "settler camp" ideologies. He sternly cautions against such an interpretation of the current discourse within Israel. Pappe instead advances the view that there is no authentic or meaningful debate, crisis or strife within Israeli society today. "This is the most consensual phase in Israeli history," he states.

Pappe blames this development on the rise to power of Classical Zionists, including Prime Minister Sharon, who believe in responsibly balancing the imperatives of democracy with the survival and security requirements of a Jewish state. Pappe bemoans the decline of the post-Zionists, and the diminishing resonance within Israel of their critique of Zionism. He claims that the newly invigorated national pride of Israel is wrongly "dictating the peace agenda to the world."

Pappe concluded his UCLA lecture by calling for a "political and geographical structure to contain Israel" and the imposition of economic sanctions on Israel, in the spirit of the boycott against apartheid South Africa. He called for activists to pressure the international community to pressure Israel in turn. He also advocated the imposition of an international force in the West Bank to protect Palestinians.

Pappe emphasized the need to convince others to abandon the idea of a two-state solution which he deems not viable. He called instead for the creation of one political structure to best serve the interests of Palestinians and Israelis. This recipe for a "multinational democratic state" conforms precisely to the formula long held by the PLO, and of course would result in the immediate and complete destruction of the Jewish State of Israel.

Pappe excoriated the American media for its ostensibly pro-Israel bias, and observed, no doubt correctly, that "Palestinians get a better hearing in Europe." He memorialized Edward Said by recommending acceptance of Said’s Principle of the Three "A"s: acknowledgment by Israel of the ethnic cleansing of 1948; accountabilty by Israel, to include repatriation or compensation to the Palestinian Arabs; and acceptance by the Palestinians of a "Jewish element" in their midst.

It is noteworthy that, during the question and answer period following his lecture, Pappe entertained queries mostly from students of Arab appearance. Participants with dissenting opinions were cut off and subjected to terse answers. Those who agreed with Pappe’s views were afforded ample time to complete their comments, and were granted gracious, respectful, and lengthy responses.

Clearly, so long as Pappe is supported by an American professoriate that shares his views, he will continue to propagate those views on American campuses. Students should take the advice of Benny Morris, and run the other way. His lectures serve only as object-lessons of the degree to which facts can be distorted to support an ideology. Any serious examination of the true history of the Middle East, or consideration of how desperately Israelis want peace and have repeatedly offered concessions toward that elusive goal, will always be absent from Pappe's discourse. Little else but distortion and falsehoods should be expected from an advocate of Israel's destruction.

Anti-Israel Bias On Campus
By Sol Stern and Fred Siegel
The New York Sun | February 10, 2005

You might think that Columbia University would be on its best academic behavior on the issue of the Middle East conflict these days. After all, several professors in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, known as MEALAC, are credibly accused of anti-Semitism and intimidating pro-Israel students. The university's president, Lee Bollinger, has appointed a committee to look into the charges. But even with the media spotlight on, Columbia apparently can't help itself.

Last Monday night we attended a university panel on the Middle East conflict titled "One State or Two? Alternative Proposals for Middle East Peace." Even the panel's title was a giveaway that we were in for more anti-Israel bias on campus. The "one state" solution is a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state - a trope of the most extreme rejectionist elements within the Palestinian movement and their allies in Syria and Iran. Terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah want to create an Islamic Republic in place of Israel. A few splinter Marxist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by George Habash, offer the Jews a solution that's far more "progressive." They murder innocents merely to replace Israel with a "secular democratic" Palestine.

The scene at Columbia, with Spartacists handing out literature outside the packed auditorium and proponents of Palestinian military victory in the vast majority, was wildly at odds with the hopeful development on the ground, where Messrs. Sharon and Abbas are now scheduled to meet. One of the panelists was Mark Cohen, a Princeton historian of medieval Islam. He gave a measured scholarly presentation on the subject of Arab Muslim anti-Semitism, insisting that attacks on Jews in the Koran had little to do with hostility to Jews. It's a debatable proposition. But professor Cohen never even engaged the issue at hand. He largely served as a prop for the ranting to follow.

Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia professor whose recent book argues that Yasser Arafat was right to reject the best peace deal he had ever been offered, opening the way to four years of bloodshed, presented a tendentious argument for a one-state solution that strained to stay within the bounds of reasoned discourse.

Then Joseph Massad took the floor, and the floodgates of hatred opened wide. Mr. Massad is one of the MEALAC professors accused of demanding of one Israeli student, "How many Palestinians did you kill today?" At the forum, he used the phrase "racist Israeli state" more than two dozen times. He used seemingly universalist language of anti-racism to drive a fascist argument. Mr. Massad is so extreme that he argued that Arafat was in effect an Israeli collaborator for even talking about compromise.

Whatever can be said of this rant, its "academic" content was hard to discern. But to judge by the applause he received, Mr. Massad was the star of the evening. Obviously, Mr. Massad, an acolyte of the dear departed George Habash, isn't worried about President Bollinger's panel, which includes three professors who have signed petitions demanding that all universities divest from Israel.

The final act of hatred came from the Israeli quisling "historian" Ilan Pappe, who has stated openly that his so-called scholarly work is an attempt to create a counter narrative to official Zionist historiography and to undermine the international legitimacy of the state of Israel. He bizarrely insisted that the destruction of Israel would pave the way for enhanced rights for women, and the feminist students in the audience cheered.

Instead of providing an alternative to hatred and extremism from both sides, this panel was a hate-fest masquerading as academic discourse. And this was no aberration attributable only to one misguided student group. In addition to Qanun, a Columbia Law School student group, the panel was cosponsored by the university chaplain, the Student Senate, and two of Columbia's most prestigious academic affiliates: the Middle East Institute, headed by professor Khalidi, and the School of International and Public Affairs. SIPA's dean, Lisa Anderson, was appointed by Mr. Bollinger to the committee looking into the charges against professor Massad - whose dissertation adviser she was.

Coming away from Monday night's hate panel and then looking at this tangled web of conflicts of interest within the university, we realized that the issue of misconduct in the classroom by one or two professors, important though it is, is dwarfed by a more fundamental question: How did a great institution of higher learning allow itself to be transformed into a platform for vicious political propaganda and hate speech directed against one country, Israel?

Surely one crucial moment in this transformation was Columbia's decision to raise $4 million - including a contribution from the United Arab Emirates - to create the Edward Said endowed chair in Arab studies, and then to give the prize to professor Khalidi. We don't doubt that Mr. Khalidi has academic credentials. Compared to professors Massad and Pappe, he is a model of decorum and moderation. But when Columbia academic officials made this choice they knew they were getting a Palestinian political activist. From 1976 to 1982, Mr. Khalidi was a director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA. Later he served on the PLO "guidance committee" at the Madrid peace conference.

In bringing professor Khalidi to Morningside Heights from the University of Chicago, Columbia also got itself a twofer of Palestinian activism and advocacy. Mr. Khalidi's wife, Mona, who also served in Beirut as chief editor of the English section of the WAFA press agency, was hired as dean of foreign students at Columbia's SIPA, working under Dean Anderson. In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. (There were also testimonials from then-state Senator Barack Obama and the mayor of Chicago.)

The message sent by Columbia University officials by this choice was that they were determined to honor the memory of Edward Said by continuing to have radical Palestinian activism on campus. That's what they now have in spades. The question is whether it's now possible within the university's public space to even make an argument for the only democratic country in the Middle East.

Zionists love to sign other people's names. That's the kind of people they are, fundamentally dishonest. False flag ops are their specialty. We cannot help but wonder how many atrocities they have signed Osama bin Laden's name to, or Hamas' or the PLO's or Hizbullah's.

For more about "black propaganda," see:

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1711536

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9495

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”.

Aggressive

Surely, say Israeli commentators, the war that meant to regain Israel its lost power of deterrence has eroded that power even further.

In other societies common sense would have dictated that such a defeat would lead to a rethinking over the usage of military power - but not in Israel.

The danger is that the conclusion would be to use more force to regain that lost deterrence.

The first buds of the local soul searching indeed indicate that this is going to be the major conclusion of both the army and the political system.

Thus, we should expect more bloodshed and more aggressive policies - if not immediately against Syria and Iran, then against the Palestinians.

The second realm is the politics of the Arab world in general and that of Palestine in particular. Enormous admiration is felt in the Arab world and in Palestine for the success of Hizbollah.

However, with all the respect for the resistance and its steadfastness, secular and socialist movements are fearful that such an admiration is not just for the resilience of the Hizbollah but also for the dogma that guided it.

This can and should lead to a more fruitful and meaningful dialogue between the left and the popular Islamic movements of resistance in order to find a common ground for the future.

This future must be based on respect for tradition and religion, an aspiration for social and economic justice and, hopefully, careful observance of human and civil rights for all.

Without the rebuilding of the left in the Arab world there is a danger that a much narrower interpretation of Islamic tradition would reign in the Arab world and beyond.

And yet it seems that many in the Arab world - and particularly in Palestine - were empowered by the successful resistance Hizbollah has shown.

Without Hizbollah, the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora would not have dared to tell US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, “You are not welcome here without a ceasefire agreement.”

If more moderate and secular forces in the Arab world would follow suit and use wisely the weapon of the weak - which is a refusal to play the role accorded to them in the US charade of “the new Middle East” - they would win the popular support and credibility enjoyed now only by Hamas and Hizbollah.

Siniora’s stance would hopefully encourage Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to follow suit. He is still seen by the US as a future authoritarian Arab leader who would rule a pro-US Bantustan.

The dismantlement of the Palestinian Authority he heads is going to be the most effective Palestinian move towards forcing the international community to rethink the basic features of a future solution.

The third realm is that of Lebanon. Whatever the United Nations (UN) resolution recommended, the south would be under the influence of three military forces - Hizbollah, the enlarged UN force and the Lebanese army.

Palestinians

It will not be long, before Israel is tempted to reinvade Lebanon. And as long as there is no substantial change in the US fundamentalist vision, the same destructive US policy that has pushed Iraq back into pre-modern chaotic times is going to be attempted in Lebanon.

Therefore, we can say that we have only witnessed the first phase in a long conflict over the future of Lebanon, intertwined with the longer conflict over the future of Palestine.

The renewed lethal Israeli air raids on Gaza in the first day after the ceasefire in Lebanon is a precursor of worse to come.

To sum up, Hizbollah’s achievement may indicate that the days of the US empire in the Middle East are numbered and nearly over. However in history “nearly” can take years.

These can be dangerous years in which we who live in this area - especially the Palestinians - are going to undergo tough times.

Pappe is a steaming pile of collaboration, which is why nessie is currently in another gushing schoolgirl binge.

Israeli academic employed by the University of Haifa, Illan Pappe, recently published a book "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples". The dedication at the front of the book is to Pappe's two sons as reads follows: "Ido and Yonatan, my two lovely boys. May they live not only in a modern Palestine, but also in a peaceful one".

You just can't trust identity thieves to be telling the truth about anything.

Now back to the topic:

Ilan Pappe Interview by Don Atapattu

"back to the topic"
by my name is whatever I say it is Tuesday August 29, 2006 at 10:06 PM

We have been on the topic, which is the collaborator Ilan Pappe, haven't you noticed?

By the way, when are you going to post the list of names which has been granted a patent and/or trademark/copyright status by the United States Government? Can you produce deed and title?

Ilan Pappe has justly been described (by Salman Abu Sitta, an expert on the Palestinian right of return) as "an honourable academic with integrity and conscience." Pappe is a Jewish Israeli, born to a German Jewish family in Haifa in 1954. He is one of the Israeli "new historians", a group of historians who are so-called because their writings, based on access to material recently released by the British and Israeli archives, has started to undermine myths about the foundation and early years of the Israeli state, myths that were promoted by an earlier generation of Israeli historians who were more concerned about building up the self-image of the new state than in historical accuracy. The books written or edited by Ilan Pappe include:

In November 1999, Baudouin Loos (a journalist for the Brussels paper "Le Soir") conducted a very interesting interview with Ilan Pappe. In an article which he wrote in Al-Ahram in May 2002, Pappe gives an interesting account of his experience as a Jewish child growing up in Haifa in the 1950s and how he finally became aware of the fact that he was living in a city whose Palestinian inhabitants had been expelled in 1948.

Pappe has a PhD from the University of Oxford and is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Haifa. Recently (early 2002), he was threatened with dismissal by the university because of his support for Teddy Katz, a Jewish graduate student at the university whose dissertation had brought to public attention the massacre, by Israeli forces in 1948, of a large portion of the population of the Arab village of Al-Tantura, on the coast south of Haifa. (See an article about the treatment meted out to Katz for daring to write about the subject. See a letter written by Ilan Pappe about his threatened dismissal.) After an international protest, the university withdrew the threatened dismissal proceedings. This threat to academic freedom was not covered in most Western media; however, there was an article in the English weekly edition of Al-Ahram about it. You can also read the on-line petition in support of Dr. Pappe, which was signed by several thousand intellectuals from many countries around the world, including many from within Israel. One of the most prominent supporters of Dr. Pappe during these attacks was another Jewish Israeli, another of the new historians -- Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations and a fellow of St Antony's College at the University of Oxford. On 16 May 2002, Prof. Shlaim wrote to Aharon Ben-Ze'ev, the Rector of the university in Haifa, stating that the charges against Dr. Pappe were "a blatant violation of Dr Pappe's right to academic freedom and it is your duty, as Rector of Haifa University, to uphold his right".

While the Katz controversy brought the Al-Tantura massacre to public attention in Israel, it had been well-known among Palestinians -- see a collection of eye-witness accounts from survivors of the massacre. (It is interesting to note that the Tantura massacre was carried out by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade and that, during the 1948 War of Independence, Ariel Sharon commanded an infantry company in the Alexandroni Brigade. One cannot help wondering whether there is any causal psychological connection between the Al-Tantura massacre and later massacres in which Sharon was involved: the massacre of 66 villagers at Kibya (Qibya) in October 1953, committed by Commando Unit 101 of the IDF which was led by Sharon; the massacre at Qalqilya in 1955; the murder of 273 unarmed prisoners, Egyptian soldiers and Sudanese workers, during the 1956 Suez invasion; the more famous massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside Beirut in September 1982.)

Dr. Pappe is a member of the Advisory Board of the Council for Palestinian Restitution and Repatriation (CPRR), an organization which declares that "every Palestinian has a legitimate, individual right to return to his or her original home and to absolute restitution of his or her property."

You can hear an interview with Ilan Pappe, which was broadcast on Pacifica Radio in the United States on 23 April 2002.

There are 36 articles in this database which discuss Ilan Pappe. To see a list of them, click on the button below.

Is Pappe a Communist?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n08/papp01_.html

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.

None of this is new. The population problem was identified as the major obstacle in the way of Zionist fulfilment in the late 19th century, and David Ben-Gurion said in December 1947 that ‘there can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 per cent.’ Israel, he warned on the same occasion, would have to deal with this ‘severe’ problem with ‘a new approach’. The following year, ethnic cleansing meant that the number of Palestinians dropped below 20 per cent of the Jewish state’s overall population (in the area allocated to Israel by the UN plus the area it occupied in 1948, the Palestinians would originally have made up around 60 per cent of the population). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, in December 2003 Binyamin Netanyahu recycled Ben-Gurion’s magic number – the undesirable 60 per cent. ‘If the Arabs in Israel form 40 per cent of the population,’ Netanyahu said, ‘this is the end of the Jewish state.’ ‘But 20 per cent is also a problem,’ he added. ‘If the relationship with these 20 per cent is problematic, the state is entitled to employ extreme measures.’ He did not elaborate.

Israel boosted its population with two massive Jewish immigrations, each of about a million people, in 1949 and in the 1980s. This kept the Palestinian proportion of the population down and today Palestinians account for nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel (not counting the Occupied Territories). Ehud Olmert, the leader of Kadima and acting prime minister, thinks that if Israel stays in the Occupied Territories and its inhabitants are included in the Israeli population, Palestinians will outnumber Jews within 15 years. So he advocates hitkansut – meaning ‘convergence’ or, better, ‘ingathering’ – a policy that would leave several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control. But even if this consolidation takes place, there will still be a very large Palestinian population inside the 88 per cent of Palestine in which Olmert hopes to build the future, stable Jewish state. How large exactly we don’t know: demographers in Israel belonging to the centre or the left provide a low estimate, which makes disengagement seem a reasonable solution, while those on the right tend to exaggerate the figure. But they all seem to agree that the demographic balance will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution.

Once the ‘Arabs’ in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as ‘Muslims’ it was easy to elicit support for Israel’s demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a ‘demographic problem’. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: ‘A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.’ The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel’s next ‘ticking bomb’. The increase in the ‘Muslim’ population – 2.4 per cent a year – was not a problem anymore, but a ‘danger’.

In the run-up to the election, pundits discussed this question using language akin to that employed in Europe and the United States in debates over immigration. Here, however, it is the immigrant community that decides the future of the indigenous population, not vice versa. On 7 February 1948, after driving to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and seeing the first villages that had been emptied of Palestinians on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, a jubilant Ben-Gurion reported to a gathering of Zionist leaders: ‘When I come nowadays to Jerusalem I feel it is a Hebrew city. This was a feeling I only had in farms and in Tel Aviv. Not all Jerusalem is Hebraic but there is already a huge Hebraic bloc – no Arabs in it. One hundred per cent Jewish. If we can persevere,’ Ben-Gurion added, this miracle will happen elsewhere.

But despite their perseverance, a sizable community of Palestinians remained. They are students at my university, where they attend lectures by professors who talk about the grave demographic problem. Palestinian law students – the lucky ones who constitute an informal quota – in the Hebrew University may well come across Ruth Gabison, a former head of the Association for Civil Rights and a candidate for the Supreme Court, who has come out recently with strong views on the subject, views that probably seem to her to reflect a consensus. ‘Israel has the right to control Palestinian natural growth,’ she has declared.

Away from the campuses, these students can’t escape the knowledge that they are seen as a problem. Whether from the Zionist left or the hard right, they hear daily that Jewish society is longing to get rid of them. And they will worry, and rightly so, whenever they hear they have become a ‘danger’. While still only a problem they are protected by a certain pretence to democracy and liberalism. Once they constitute a danger, however, they could be faced with emergency policies based on the British Mandate’s emergency regulations. Houses could be demolished, newspapers shut down and people expelled under such a regime.

The 2006 elections have brought to the Knesset a solid coalition determined to deal with the demographic problem: first and foremost, by disengaging from more of the West Bank; and second, by completing the network of walls around the rest of the Palestinian areas. The border between Israel and the West Bank is 370 kilometres long, but the serpentine wall will be double that length, and will strangle large Palestinian communities. In the Palestinian areas within Israel, segregation is ensured by construction programmes approved when Sharon was minister of national infrastructures: Jewish settlements overlook and encircle large Palestinian areas such as Wadi Ara and Lower Galilee.

On 31 July 2003, the Knesset passed a law prohibiting Palestinians from obtaining citizenship, permanent residency or even temporary residency when they marry Israeli citizens. The initiator of the legislation was a liberal Zionist, Avraham Poraz of the centrist party Shinui. He described it as a ‘defence measure’. Only 25 members of the Knesset opposed it and Poraz declared that those already married and with families ‘will have to go to the West Bank’, regardless of how long they had been living in Israel.

The Arab members of the Knesset were among those who appealed to the Supreme Court against this racist law. When the Supreme Court turned down the appeal, their energy petered out. The Arab members come from three parties: the Communist Party (Hadash), the National Party of Azmi Bishara (Balad) and the United Arab List drawn up by the more pragmatic branch of the Islamic movement. The Supreme Court ruling made clear their irrelevance, in the eyes of both the parliamentary and judicial systems. We’re always told that Palestinians should be pleased to live in the only democracy in the region, to have the right to vote, but that vote brings no power.

In the dead of night on 24 January this year, an elite unit of the border police seized the Israeli Palestinian village of Jaljulya. The troops burst into houses, dragging out 36 women and eventually deporting eight of them. The women were ordered to go to their old homes in the West Bank. Some had been married for years to Palestinians in Jaljulya, some were pregnant, many had children, but the soldiers were demonstrating to the Israeli public that when a demographic problem becomes a danger, the state will act swiftly and without hesitation. One Palestinian member of the Knesset protested, but the action was backed by the government, the courts and the media.

The ten members of the new Knesset from Palestinian parties will not be included in any coalition and will probably be sidelined and forgotten, as they were in the previous parliament (there are two other Arab members and two Druze members from Labour and Kadima). Haaretz sent a journalist to live for a few days in the ‘Arab areas’ in order to write – as an anthropological tourist – on the Palestinians’ reaction to the elections. Apart from this piece of reportage, the Israeli media had nothing to say about how the Palestinians voted. After all, they are the problem, not the solution. And if disengagement doesn’t ‘stop’ the growth in their numbers the Jaljulya operation could show the future.

No wonder many Palestinians now want the international community to intervene. But Israel ignored the ruling of the international court on the wall, and is unlikely to be moved by what it will see as interference in its internal affairs. There is another call coming, still hesitant, although it will grow in volume: a call for the creation of an autonomous parliament for the Palestinians in Israel. In a world that has marginalised this community twice over – both in the overall Palestinian polity and within Jewish society – the 1,300,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel have very little to lose by shunning the Knesset and opting for autonomy. Who knows, they may even convince the Jewish majority that they are ‘only’ a problem, not a danger.

7 April

Ilan Pappe teaches in the political science department at Haifa University and is the chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Israel.

It's why I'm in another gushing schoolgirl phase. Communists and child predators are my idols. It says a lot about me, doesn't it?

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

Wednesday April 20, 2005
Guardian Unlimited

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 colonisation, 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 colonisation 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.

Violence and armed struggle have also failed, and they can't be easily condoned by people like myself who are basically pacifists at heart. Historical examples, such as in South Africa and Gandhi's movement in India, prove that there are peaceful means for achieving an end to the longest oppression and violation of human rights in the last century. Boycotts and outside pressure have never been attempted in the case of Israel, a state that wishes to be included in the civilised democratic world. Israel has indeed enjoyed such a status since its creation in 1948 and, therefore, succeeded in fending off the many United Nations' resolutions that condemned its policies and, moreover, managed to obtain a preferential status in the European Union. Israeli academia's elevated position in the global scholarly community epitomises this western support for Israel as the "only democracy" in the Middle East. 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.

Military and financial support to Israel is significant in enabling the Jewish state to pursue the policies it does. Any possible measure of decreasing such aid is most welcome in the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East. But the cultural image in Israel feeds the political decision in the west to support unconditionally the Israeli destruction of Palestine and the Palestinians. The message that will be directed specifically against those academic institutes which have been particularly culpable in sustaining the oppression since 1948 and the occupation since 1967, can be a start for a successful campaign for peace (as similar acts at the time had activated the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa).

Calling for a boycott of your own state and academia is not an easy decision for a member of that academia. But I learned how the concerned academic communities, worldwide, could mobilise at the right moment when I was threatened with expulsion by my own university, the University of Haifa, in May 2002. A very precise and focused policy of pressure on the university allowed me, albeit under restriction and systematic harassment, to purse my classes and research, which are aimed at exposing the victimisation of the Palestinians throughout the years. This is a particular important avenue, as I am the only one who does it in my own university, and one of the few who does it in the country as a whole, and also because the university has a large community of Palestinian students, who are prevented by draconian regulations from expressing their anger and frustration at what had been, and is, done against their people. These students have felt totally isolated since the university established close links with the security apparatuses in the country. The fact that the university is closely connected to the security services - by providing postgraduate degrees - is by itself not a crime, but as these are the agencies that exercise on a daily basis the occupation in the Palestinian areas, their presence in the campus means academia is significantly involved in perpetuating the evil.

As I learned from my own case, outside pressure is effective in a country where people want to be regarded as part of the civilized world, but their government, with their explicit and implicit help, pursues policies which violate every known human and civil right. Neither the UN, nor the US and European governments, and societies, have sent a message to Israel that these policies are unacceptable and have to be stopped. It is up to the civil societies, through organisations like yours, to send messages to Israeli academics, businessmen, artists, hi-tech industrialists and every other section in that society, that there is a price tag attached to such policies.

I thank you in advance for your support. Should you decide to embark on the bold policy suggested, you empower me and my friends who will, I am convinced of this, be able to build together with our Palestinian comrades a just basis for peace and reconciliation in Palestine.

· Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the department of political science in Haifa University and the chairman of the Emil Touma institute for Palestinian studies in Haifa.

Are we not surprised that a child molester from SF keeps promoting a traitor to his own people?

The present dismal reality unfolding in the Middle East has clear historical roots and a journey into the past may help to illuminate what lies behind the destructive policies of Israel in both Palestine and Lebanon.

Zionism arrived in Palestine in the late 19th as a colonialist movement motivated by national impulses.

The colonisation of Palestine fitted well the interests and policies of the British Empire on the eve of the First World War.

With the backing of Britain, the colonisation project expanded, and became a solid presence on the land after the war and with the establishment of the British mandate in Palestine (which lasted between 1918 and 1948).

While this consolidation took place, the indigenous society underwent, like other societies in the rest of the Arab world, a steady process of establishing a national identity.

But with one difference. While the rest of the Arab world was shaping its political identity through the struggle against European colonialism, in Palestine nationalism meant asserting your collective identity against both an exploitative British colonialism and expansionist Zionism.

Thus, the conflict with Zionism was an additional burden. The pro-Zionist policy of the British mandate there naturally strained the relationship between Britain and the local Palestinian society.

This climaxed in a revolt in 1936 against both London and the expanding Zionist colonisation project.

The revolt, which lasted for three years, failed to sway the British mandate from a policy it had already decided upon in 1917. The British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, had promised the Zionist leaders that Britain would help the movement to build a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.

The number of Jews coming into the country increased by the day - although even at that point, during the 1930s, the Jews were just a quarter of the population, possessing 4 percent of the land.

As resistance to colonialism strengthened, the Zionist leadership became convinced that only through a total expulsion of the Palestinians would they be able to create a state of their own.

From its early inception and up to the 1930s, Zionist thinkers propagated the need to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population of Palestine if the dream of a Jewish state were to come true.

The preparation for implementing these two goals of statehood and ethnic supremacy accelerated after the Second World War.

For the British the country lost its strategic importance once they were evicted from India.

It was a tense place that required the presence of British forces in equal numbers to those kept by the empire in the Indian sub continent - without obvious imperial rewards.

While the Zionist leadership finalised a plan for taking over the land and expelling the people between 1946 and 1948, the Palestinian leadership hoped the British empire would transfer to them their country in which they were still the vast majority and the indigenous population.

But Britain decided to transfer the issue of Palestine to the United Nations (UN) in February 1947. Palestine was the first conflict in which it was asked to mediate in a significant way.

It offered a pro-Zionist solution, and a very unjust and impractical one at that.

The first obstacle was that since the Palestinians demanded to be treated as any other Arab national movement, they expected the international community to recognise, without any conditions, their natural right to the country.

They did not expect this right to be negotiated with a colonialist movement. They therefore boycotted the process.

The UN ignored this and the special committee it appointed for the question, Unscop (United Nations Special Committee for Palestine) conversed only with the Zionist leadership. It devised a solution that catered for the needs and aspirations of that side alone.

In any case, the Palestinians had a difficult time presenting the moral side of their demands due to the Holocaust.

The Western international community was only too happy to evade any discussions about the implications of the genocide in Europe and to drop the problem on Palestine’s doorstep.

The inevitable result of this approach was accepting almost unconditionally the Zionist demands for a state in Palestine.

Territorial

At the end of November 1947, the UN offered to divide Palestine into two states almost equal in their territorial space. The Jews were only one third of the population by 1947 and most of them had arrived in Palestine only a few years earlier.

The categorical Palestinian refusal to go along with this deal, backed by the Arab League, allowed the Zionist leadership to plan carefully the next step. Between February 1947 and March 1948, a final plan for ethnic cleansing was prepared.

The Zionist leadership defined 80 percent of Palestine (Israel today without the West Bank) as the space for the future state.

This was an area in which one million Palestinians lived next to 600,000 Jews.

The idea was to uproot as many Palestinians as possible. From March 1948 until the end of that year the plan was implemented despite the attempt by some Arab states to oppose it, which failed. Some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, 531 villages were destroyed and 11 urban neighbourhoods demolished.

Half of Palestine’s population was uprooted and half of its villages destroyed. The state of Israel was established in over 80 percent of Palestine, turning Palestinian villages into Jewish settlements and recreation parks, but allowing a small number of Palestinian to remain citizens in it.

The June 1967 war allowed Israel to take the remaining 20 percent of Palestine.

This seizure defeated in a way the ethnic ideology of the Zionist movement. Israel encompassed 100 percent of Palestine, but the state incorporated a large number of Palestinians, the people who Zionists made such an effort to expel in 1948.

The fact that Israel was let off easily in 1948, and not condemned for the ethnic cleansing it committed, encouraged it to ethnically cleanse a further 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

But the June 1967 war was too short - six days - and the international community more aware. Palestinian society was more experienced. Hence Israel was left with a large number of Palestinians under its control and could not complete “the job”.

The Palestinian national movement rose again in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and even if it did not liberate one square inch of Palestine, it did relocate the Palestinian issue and the 1948 Nakbah (catastrophe) in the centre of world public attention.

The ethnic cleansing operation was also defeated by the persistence and resilience of those Palestinians that were allowed to stay in Israel.

They became one quarter of the population.

Demography thus became the major issue in Israel’s national security agenda. It overshadows any other concern, be it for social equality, democracy or human rights.

The educational system, the media and the politicians all stress the “danger” Palestinians constitute for the state’s existence and the Jewish citizens’ wellbeing.

In this situation the Israeli “left” urges downsizing the territory, the right calls for downsizing the Palestinians.

But the moral and ideological distance between the two poles of the political system is very short indeed.

After two uprisings in the occupied territories and a failed international diplomatic effort that totally ignored the root of the conflict as represented above, we are now back to the very basics of the conflict.

Impose

For the last six years, with the full backing of its Jewish electorate, successive Israeli governments have tried to impose by force what for them is the ideal solution.

It consists of imprisoning large numbers of Palestinians in enclaves in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, controlling thorough an apartheid system the Palestinian minority in Israel, and rejecting categorically any repatriation of the Palestinian refugees.

This plan is fully backed by the US.

Bush’s neo-conservative presidency pursues its own unilateralism, trying to impose by military means and intimidation its economic and strategic values on the rest of the world.

Only two movements in the area resist Israel and the US.

Sadly for people of the left, like myself, they are not from “our school”, but we should respect their steadfastness and will to resist occupation and colonisation. These are Hamas and Hizbollah.

Israel feels it has now a window of opportunity to eliminate these forces in Gaza and in Lebanon - and beyond in Syria and Iran.

The regional war that is developing may in the short run undermine these two forces, but in the long run it may mean Israeli confrontation not only with the Arab world but with the Muslim world as a whole.

At that point, the US might abandon it, and the Jewish state would end like the crusaders’ kingdom of medieval times.

A disaster thus is looming for us all - Jews and Arabs - and it is only Europe that could avert it, if it would stop slaving its interests and ours, to the interests of the US and Zionism.

Why am I, an editor of an IMC in California, suddenly on a posting frenzy on an indymedia in another state, about a Communist turncoat Jew? Who's funding me?

http://www.counterpunch.org/pappe10272005.html

No US-Backed Israeli Government Has Offered Equal Rights to Palestinians

By ILAN PAPPE

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Palestinian uprising and may well be the last moment for making peace in Israel and Palestine. Peace is not only important for the people who live there. It will pay dividends to the world and especially to the United States.

This is because a prolonged conflict in Palestine will destabilize the Arab world and allow its leaders to continue ignoring urgent issues such as poverty and democracy. The unsolved Palestinian question means that that the age of colonialism is not over and that dealing with poverty or liberty can be described as a luxury. As long as the Palestinian refugees who were expelled by Jewish newcomers in 1948 cannot return home and as long as the military occupation of the territories conquered by Israel in 1967 persists, there will be no lasting solution. No peace proposal to date has offered a fair solution to either the Palestinian refugees or those continuing to live under a brutal military occupation.

This perception of Israel as an aggressive relic of a colonialist past is widespread in the Muslim world. And it has ominous implications for the United States. Israel could not have uprooted close to a million Palestinians in 1948 and occupied another two million for the past 38 years without American support. Indeed, American taxpayers foot the bill for a $3 billion annual grant. This financial backing, combined with unremitting diplomatic support, has enabled Israel to sustain the longest occupation of another people in modern times.

Here are the horrors inflicted on the Palestinians that are witnessed by people across the Arab and Muslim world: widespread home demolitions, the confiscation of private property for the construction of Jewish-only settlements and Jewish-only roads and the expulsion of Palestinian Christian and Muslim people. And their wrath is not always limited to protesting Israel, the occupier and expeller. They sometimes also challenge --with condemnable terror --the United States, whom they see as the superpower behind the oppressor. The US does not need to be embroiled in a tense relationship with a fifth of the world population.

And yet this is a moment of opportunity. It is unrelated to the Gaza pullout, which has turned out to be an internal Israeli ploy to substitute direct occupation with an indirect one. The opportunity is a very American one, reminiscent of the civil rights struggle fought by and behalf of African Americans.

Despite their expulsion and occupation, anyone who has visited Palestine and who has Palestinian friends would tell you that, just like other human beings, Palestinians simply wish to be treated as equals. They yearn for a normal life, next to, and with the Jews in the tiny land of Palestine and Israel. If Christian and Muslim Palestinians were offered the kind of equality with Jews in Israel that all Americans now enjoy, they would accept it with open arms.

No Israeli government in history, backed by the US, has offered equal rights to the Palestinians, either in Israel or in the occupied territories. Israel has always demanded a Jewish majority and exclusivity in the shared land, while allowing, in the latest peace proposal, an impossible Palestinian state over a fragmented 8% of historic Palestine. More generous Israelis offer a few more percent.

Snippets of Palestinian territory, reminiscent of South African Bantustans --as the failed Oslo accords have proven --is a recipe for more bloodshed. It will drag the United States even more deeply into an endless conflict --one which could be solved today by embracing the very values Americans hold dear: equal rights and justice for all.

Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer in political science at Haifa University, is a leading Israeli historian and equal rights advocate.

who's paying nessie?
by where does nessie get it's funding? Thursday August 31, 2006 at 09:49 AM

nessie is on welfare. So who pays it to run a web site dedicated to terrorists? Who pays it to post it's pro-terrorist propaganda here?

Ilan Pappe
Senior lecturer, Department of Political Science, Division of International Relations, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Host: Department of Peace Studies, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
Faculty Associate: Daniel Bertrand Monk
Grant Dates: October 2005

Israeli 'new historian' engages campus community

Article courtesy of The Colgate Scene
Fulbright logo

One of Israel's most prominent "new historians" spent a week at Colgate discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with students and professors in a variety of settings.
Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer at Haifa University, Israel, and director of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa, began his visit on Oct. 11. Pappe discussed "The Role of Islam in the Israel-Palestine Conflict" at a lecture in Olin Hall; introduced the documentary film Jenin, Jenin at Little Hall; spoke at a Hamilton Forum event in the Colgate Inn; taught two mini-courses; held several faculty seminars; and had dinner and discussions with students at two college theme houses on Broad Street.

Pappe's visit was funded by a grant from the CIES Fulbright Visiting Specialists Program: Direct Access to the Muslim World. The program is designed to promote understanding of the Muslim world and civilization by providing opportunities for direct access to scholars specializing in that area.

Daniel Monk, the George W. and Myra T. Cooley Professor of peace studies and director of peace studies, said Pappe's work on the history and historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely important and, he readily admitted, controversial.

"Pappe's work has put him in the center of a great number of disputes concerning how Israel came into being and how the Palestinian diaspora came into being," said Monk. "His understanding of the role that has or hasn't been played by Islam in the history of this conflict is unique." Timing of Pappe's visit was perfect, Monk said, as Colgate has just this year launched a minor concentration in Middle East and Islamic Studies.

Monk also said that establishing global links with scholars and universities in locations where questions of peace, conflict, and security are matters of urgency here and abroad is one of the goals he has set for the Colgate peace studies program.
"My hope, and the hope of the peace studies faculty, is for our program to contribute meaningfully to scholarship in the field, and in the process produce important publications. We want to serve as a resource not only for our immediate community, but for a much wider academic constituency," said Monk, who is in his first year heading the program.

who's paying nessie?
by where does nessie get it's funding? Saturday September 02, 2006 at 10:27 AM

nessie is on welfare. So who pays it to run a web site dedicated to terrorists? Who pays it to post it's pro-terrorist propaganda here?

Ilan Pappe writes the story of Palestine, a land inhabited by two peoples. It begins with the Ottomans in the early 1800s and traces a path through the arrival of the early Zionists at the end of that century, through the British mandate at the beginning of the twentieth century, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent wars and conflicts which culminated in the intifadas of 1987 and 2000. While these events provide the background to the narrative and explain the construction of Zionist and Palestinian nationalism, at centre stage are those who lived through these times, men, women and children, Jews and Arabs. It is a story of coexistence, as well as oppression, occupation, and exile. Ilan Pappe is well-known as a revisionist historian of Israel. Lucid and typically forthright, his account is a unique contribution to the history of this troubled land.

• A unique approach, the author traces the history of the land of Palestine, one land inhabited by two peoples with two separate nationalist aspirations

• A lucid and typically forthright account from an Israeli historian well-known as an outspoken critic of Israel and its policies towards the Palestinians

• A must-read for students, policy-makers and journalists - anyone concerned with the history and politics of the Middle East
Contents

Introduction: A New Look at Modern Palestine and Israel; 1. Fin de Siecle (1856-1900), Social Tranquillity and Political Drama; 2. Between Tyranny and War (1900-1918); 3. The Mandatory State: Colonialism, Nationalization and Cohabitation; 4. The 1948 War between Nakbah and Independence; 5. The Age of Partition, 1948-1967; 6. Greater Israel and Occupied Palestine: The Rise and Fall of High Politics, 1967-1987; 7. The Uprising and its Political Consequences, 1987-1996; Conclusion: Post-Oslo Palestine and Israel

About the Author

Ilan Pappe teaches politics at Haifa University in Israel. He has written extensively on the politics of the Middle East, and is well known for his revisionist interpretation of Israeli history and as a critic of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. His books include The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (1992/4) and The Israeli-Palestine Question (1999).

Reviews

‘Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history. He is also one of the most scholarly … here, for the first time, is a textbook on Palestine that narrates the real story as it happened - a non-Zionist version of Zionism … To its credit, Cambridge university Press has published Pappe’s pioneering and highly accessible work as an authoritative history.’?
- New Statesman

' … Ilan Pappe has written a book that is lucid and forthright. It is a unique contribution to the history of this troubled land, and all those concerned with developments in the Middle East will have to read … Ilan Pappe's book is a valuable contribution to the historical research of Palestine as a general survey for those studying the subject. Designed for students and general readers, the book's new approach to the analysis of well-known events will be of interest to academics, journalists, foreign-policy makers, and to all those concerned with Palestine's complex past and its uncertain future. The inclusion of illustrations, maps, short biographies, a glossary of terms, a bibliography, and a reliable index further increases the usefulness of the book.'?
- Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies

who's paying nessie?
by where does nessie get it's funding? Sunday September 03, 2006 at 04:15 PM

Where does nessie get the funding to run a web site when he's on Welfare? What Communist and/or terrorist organization is funneling money to nessie? Why does nessie ignore the question?

April 21st, 2005 at 03:34pm

There have been some interesting debates recently on whether the university boycott of Israel would be productive or not. Although I am generally in favor of boycotting Israel on the same grounds as I would have supported boycotting South Africa during Apartheid, an intellectual boycott poses more complicated problems than merely not buying Israeli wine or technology. Ilan Pappe, noted Israeli scholar from the university of Haifa, has an article in the Guardian urging both types:

I’m not convinced about the inherent value of this type of intellectual boycott — university professors are the type of opinion-makers one might want to engage rather than isolate. But I applaud his call for a more general trade boycott of Israel. This brings me to the debate over normalization in the Arab world, in which some Arabs and most Westerners (and particularly American opinion-makers like Thomas Friedman) have slammed the knee-jerk anti-normalization stance of the Arab left (the story of playwright Ali Salem in Egypt is a notable example.) In a democratic Egypt, for example, would widespread anti-normalization feelings trump the advantages of staying on the good side of Washington and incentives like QIZ agreement signed in December? To take it to another level, should a democratic government cancel the Camp David agreement — wildly unpopular when it was signed — at the risk of losing aid and a facing military attack? Or is this anti-normalization stance completely exaggerated by the intellectual class, which we might deduce from last December’s protests by Ismailiya textile workers when they learned the QIZ agreement would not apply to them? Anti-normalization would be a great platform for a populist politician in an open political contest.

To put it in another way: what impact a boycott of Israel, which at most only has the chance of being a consumer issue rather than a government one in most countries, have on the actual policies and politics of Arab states than have engaged Israel like Egypt and Jordan?

He's history's greatest monster.

Nessie is irrelevant to this thread.
Please try and keep to the topic.
Much obliged.

F*cks sheep, eats babies, worships the devil.

And not just any sheep, either:

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/1546540_comment.php#1693588

nessie the Jew hating terrorist propagandist started this thread, Brainiac.

By constantly giving him attention, you re-inforce his ego "So many people pay attention to me, I must be important"
He is not entirely evil . He has done some good work in the area where he lives. But he doesn't merit he time or attention you lavish on him.
I've gone to his shop to visit him twice. Neither time would they let me in, and I'm as harmless as they come. I think he's in the catagory "More goofy than menacing"- he seems genuinely afraid of me, perhaps because I'm local and I know quite a bit about him and his.
My conclusion- the bravado is an act. Its all an act. It is primarily for attention. You really want to have an effect- just ignore him.

shut up, stupid
by shut up, stupid Thursday September 14, 2006 at 10:28 AM

nessie is a terrorist propagandist, and a propagandist for NAMBLA idols. So fuck you.

Nessie is a sad aging little anarchist.
Ask someone who knows.

Apparently, that's easier said than done.

Why does 'nessie' follow us over to here and then feign being a victim of attention?

Word on the street is that nessie and "Smashy" are one and the same. If nessie can't drum up attention for himself, then he'll create a dragon to slay. He has himself said that no publicity is bad publicity.

the Zionist propaganda mill would rather you focus on people like "nessie" than on people like Ilan Pappe.

The antisemitic propaganda mill known as 'nessie' is only concerned with drawing attention to itself and deflecting your attention from articles whose themes he detests.

There they go again.