Deemed a persona non grata in Israel, Prof. Ilan Pappe (currently a professor of history at the University of Exeter in the UK, and co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies) minces no words in telling the real story of Zionist crimes against Palestinians.
The price he paid: Effectively being forced out of his teaching post in the University of Haifa and ultimately out of the country of his birth.
Up until 2007, he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Haifa but fearing for his and his family’s safety, he felt impelled to leave Israel after he was bombarded with death threats.
Condemned by the Knesset, his picture had appeared in the country’s biggest-selling newspaper at the center of a target. Next to it, a popular columnist addressed his readers thus: “I’m not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn’t be surprised if someone did.”
Why all this? Well the road to his semi-voluntary exile in Britain started in 2000-2001 with the Katz affair when Pappe defended Teddy Katz and his thesis on the 1948 massacre and expulsion of Palestinians from villages in the vicinity of Haifa.
As a result he was vilified and compared to a Nazi collaborator. When Pappe signed on to a boycott of Israeli universities in 2002, he was accused of “defamation” in a disciplinary hearing and called to stand for trial in his university.
His intent to teach a course on the Nakbah (Catastrophe) as well as his support for boycott on Israel has led the university to the conclusion that he can only be stopped by expulsion, as Pappe wrote in a letter about his threatened dismissal.
In 2006, Pappe published his controversial book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” in which he explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population.
He meticulously and painfully reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they initiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.
(Image alongside: The expulsion of the Palestinians from Haifa).
Pappe debunks the official line parroted in Israel and the West (and even by some misguided Arabs), maintaining that the refugee flight was not instigated by Arab leaders but rather caused by persecution, violence, expulsion.
Israel’s official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbors and that the Palestinians became refugees when they “voluntarily” fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a “second Holocaust” against Jews.
In his book, Pappe relies almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel’s “founding fathers” to deconstruct Israel’s myths.
These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population.
Pappé details how these Israeli “heroes” executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population.
In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.
In his introduction, he writes that the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel has been erased almost totally from the global public memory.
His aim was to explore the mechanism of the 1948 ethnic cleansing , and the cognitive system that allowed the world to forget and enabled the perpetrators to deny their crimes.
He emphasizes that when it created its nation-state, the Zionist movement did not wage a war that “tragically but inevitably” led to the expulsion of “parts of” the indigenous population, but the other way around: the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine.
Read an interview with Professor Ilan about the prospects of peace in Palestine, the exploitation of the Holocaust, falsification of history, and his plans as prime minister, here.
