[Peace-discuss] Ilan Pappe talk

[Morton K. Brussel]

FYI. Succinct rather pessimistic history.

The History of Israel Reconsidered: A Talk by Ilan Pappe
by gyaku
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 18, 2007

Professor Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and senior lecturer of  
Political Science at Haifa University. He is the author of numerous  
books, including A History of Modern Palestine, The Modern Middle  
East, The Israel/Palestine Question and, most recently, The Ethnic  
Cleansing of Palestine, published in 2006. On March 8, he spoke at a  
small colloquium in Tokyo organized by the NIHU Program Islamic Area  
Studies, University of Tokyo Unit, on the path of personal  
experiences that brought him to write his new book. The following is  
a transcript of his lecture, tentatively titled "The History of  
Israel Reconsidered" by organizers of the event.

Ilan Pappe: Thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here. I  
hope that you will ask me, afterwards, questions of a more general  
nature because I'm not sure how much I can cover in 40, 45, 50  
minutes. I will be a bit personal, to begin with, and then move to  
the more general issues. I think it will help to understand what I am  
doing.

I was born in Israel and I had a very conventional, typical Israeli  
education, and life, until I finished my B.A. studies at Hebrew  
University, which was many years ago in the mid-1970s. Like all  
Israeli Jews, I knew very little on the Palestinian side, and met  
very few Palestinians. And although I was a very keen student of  
history, already in high-school; I knew I would be a historian; I was  
very loyal to the narrative that I was taught in school. I had very  
little doubt that what my teachers taught me in school was the only  
truth about the past.

My life was changed, in a way; definitely my professional life, but  
after that also my private and public life when I decided to leave  
Israel and do my doctoral dissertation outside the country. Because  
when you go out, you see things that you would find very difficult to  
see from within. And I chose as a subject for my doctoral thesis the  
year of 1948, because even without knowing much the past, I  
understood that this is a formative year. I knew enough to understand  
that this is a departure point for history, because for one side, the  
Israelis, 1948 is a miracle, the best year in Jewish history. After  
two thousand years of exile the Jews finally establish a state, and  
get independence. And for the Palestinians it was exactly the  
opposite, the worst year in their history, as they call it the  
Catastrophe, the Nakba, almost the Holocaust, the worst kind of year  
that a nation can wish to have. And that intrigued me, the fact that  
the same year, the same events, are seen so differently, on both sides.

Being outside the country enabled me to have more respect and  
understanding, I think, to the fact that maybe there is another way  
of looking at history than what I lived -- not only my own world, my  
own people's way, my own nation's way. But this was not enough, of  
course. This was not enough to revisit history, this attitude, this  
fact that one day you wake up and you say: wait a minute, there's  
someone else here, maybe they see history differently; and if you are  
a genuine intellectual, you should strive to have respect for someone  
else's point-of-view, not only yours.

I was lucky that the year I decided to study the other side was the  
year when, according to the Israeli law of classification of  
documents; every 30 years the Israeli archives declassify secret  
material, 30 years for political matters, and 50 years for military  
matters. When I started in Oxford, in England, in the early 1980s,  
quite a lot of new material about 1948 was opened. And I started  
looking at the archives in Israel, in the United Kingdom, in France,  
in the United States, and also the United Nations opened its archives  
when I started working on this. They had interesting archives in  
Geneva, and in New York.

And suddenly I began to see a picture of 1948 that I was not familiar  
with. It takes historians quite a while to take material and turn it  
into an article or a book, or a doctoral thesis, in this case. And  
after two years, I, at least, found that I had a clear picture of  
what happened in 1948, and that picture challenged, very  
dramatically, the picture I grew up with. And I was not the only one  
who went through this experience. Two or three, maybe four,  
historians -- partly historians, partly journalists, in Israel -- saw  
the same material and also arrived at similar conclusions: that the  
way we understood Israel of 1948 was not right, and that the  
documents showed us a different reality than what we knew. We were  
called the group of people who saw things differently; we were called  
the New Historians. And whether it's a good term or not we can  
discuss later, but it's a fact that they called us the New  
Historians, this is not to be denied.

Now what did we challenge about 1948? I think that's very important  
to understand, the old picture, and the new picture, and then we can  
move on. The old picture was that, in 1948, after 30 years of British  
rule in Palestine, the Jewish Nation of the Zionist Movement was  
ready to accept an international offer of peace with the local people  
of Palestine. And therefore when the United Nations offered to divide  
Palestine into two states, the Zionist movement said yes, the Arab  
world and the Palestinians said no; as a result the Arab world went  
to war in order to destroy the state of Israel, called upon the  
Palestinian people to leave, to make way for the invading Arab  
armies; the Jewish leaders asked the Palestinians not to leave, but  
they left; and as a result the Palestinian refugee problem was  
created. Israel miraculously won the war, and became a fact. And ever  
since then, the Arab world and the Palestinians have not ceased to  
want to destroy the Jewish state.

This is more or less the version we grew up with. Another mythology  
was that a major invasion took place in '48, a very strong Arab  
contingent went into Palestine and a very small Jewish army fought  
against it. It was a kind of David and Goliath mythology, the Jews  
being the David, the Arab armies being the Goliath, and again it must  
be a miracle if David wins against the Goliath.

So this is the picture. What we found challenged most of this  
mythology. First of all, we found out that the Zionist leadership,  
the Israeli leadership, regardless of the peace plans of the United  
Nations, contemplated long before 1948 the dispossession of the  
Palestinians, the expulsion of the Palestinians. So it was not that  
as a result of the war that the Palestinians lost their homes. It was  
as a result of a Jewish, Zionist, Israeli, call it what you want,  
plan that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948 of its original  
indigenous population.

I must say that not all those who are included in the group of new  
historians agree with this description. Some would say only half of  
the Palestinians were expelled, and half ran away. Some would say  
that it was a result of the war. I have a clear picture in my mind.  
Of course I don't oblige anyone to accept it, but I am quite  
confident, as I wrote in my latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of  
Palestine, that actually already in the 1930s the Israeli -- then it  
was not Israeli, it was a pre-state leadership -- had contemplated  
and systematically planned the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.

To summarize this point, the old historical Israeli position was:  
Israel has no responsibility for the Palestinians becoming refugees,  
the Palestinians are responsible for this because they did not accept  
the peace plan, and they accepted the Arab call to leave the country.  
That was the old position. My position, and with this a lot of the  
New Historians agree, was that Israel is exclusively responsible for  
the refugee problem, because it planned the expulsion of the  
Palestinians from their homeland. Therefore it definitely bears the  
responsibility.

Another point that we discovered is that we checked the military  
balance on the ground, and we found that this description of an Arab  
Goliath and a Jewish David also does not stand with the facts. The  
Arab world talked a lot, still does today, but doesn't do much when  
it comes to the Palestine question. And therefore they sent a very  
limited number of soldiers into Israel, and basically for most of the  
time, the Jewish army had the upper hand in terms of the numbers of  
soldiers, the level of equipment, and the training experience.

Finally, one of the common Israeli mythologies about 1948, and not  
only about 1948, is that Israel all the time stretches its hand for  
peace, always offers peace to the Arab world in general, and the  
Palestinians in particular, and it is the Arab world and the  
Palestinians who are inflexible and refuse any peace proposal. I  
think we showed in our work that, at least in 1948, that there was a  
genuine offer for peace from the world, or an idea of peace, after  
the war ended, and actually the Palestinians and the Arab neighboring  
states were willing at least to give a chance for peace, and it was  
the Israeli government that rejected it. Later, one of the New  
Historians, Avi Shlaim from Oxford, would write a book that is called  
the Iron Wall. In this book, he shows that not only in 1948, but  
since 1948 until today, there were quite a lot of junctures in  
history where there was a chance for peace, and it failed not because  
the Arab world refused to exploit the chance, but rather because the  
Israelis rejected the peace offer.

So revisiting history, for me, starts with 1948. And I will come back  
again in the end of my talk to 1948 to talk more about my latest  
book. But I want to explain that in the path from looking back at  
1948 and questioning the common historical version and narrative, a  
group of Israeli scholars, academics, journalists, and so on, were  
not only content with looking at 1948 but also looked at other  
periods. We had a very strange time in Israeli academia, which is  
over now, in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Israeli academics went back to  
Israeli history, as I said not only to 1948, and looked at very  
important chapters in Israel's history, critically, and wrote an  
alternative history to the one that they were taught in schools, or  
even in universities. I say that it is a very interesting time  
because it ended in 2000 with the second Palestinian uprising. You  
won't find many traces of this critical energy today in Israel. Today  
in Israel, these academics either neglect Israel, or left the views  
and came back to the national narrative. Israel is a very consensual  
society nowadays. But in the 1990s it was a very interesting time,  
I'm very happy that I was part of it. I don't regret it, I'm only  
sorry that it does not continue, and time will tell whether it is the  
beginning of something new or whether it was an extraordinary chapter  
and is not going to be repeated.

Now what did these scholars do? They went from the beginning of the  
Zionist experience to the present time and looked at all kinds of  
stations. They began with the early Zionist years. The Zionist  
movement appeared in Europe in the late 19th century. The first  
Jewish settler in Palestine arrived in 1882. Now the common view in  
Israel is that these people came to more or less an empty land, and  
were only part of a national project, that they created a national  
homeland for the Jews, and for some unexplained reasons, the Arabs  
didn't like it, and kept attacking the small Jewish community, and  
this seems to be the fate of Israel, to live in an area of people who  
cannot accept them. They don't accept them because the attackers of  
Israel are either Muslims, or Arabs, which should explain a certain  
political culture that cannot live at peace with neighbors, or  
whatever the explanations Israelis give for why Arabs and  
Palestinians keep attacking the Jewish state.

Now the new scholarship decided to look at the movement of Jews from  
Europe to the Arab world as a colonialist movement. It was not the  
only place in the world where Europeans, for whatever reasons -- even  
for good reasons -- moved out from Europe and settled in a non- 
European world. And they said that Zionism in this respect was not  
different. The fact that the Jews of course were persecuted in Europe  
explains why they were looking for a safe haven, this is known and  
accepted. But the fact that they decided that the only safe haven is  
a place where already someone else lived turned them into a  
colonialist project as well. So they introduced the colonialist  
perspective to the study of early Zionism.

They also looked differently at a very touchy subject, and this is  
the relationship between the Holocaust and the state of Israel. Very  
brave scholars showed what we know now is a fact how the Jewish  
leadership in Palestine was not doing all it could to save Jews in  
the Holocaust because it was more interested in the fate of the Jews  
in Palestine itself. And how the Holocaust memory was manipulated in  
Israel to justify certain attitudes and policies toward the  
Palestinians. They also note the treatment of Jews who came from Arab  
countries in the 1950s, they found this Israeli urge to be a part of  
Europe very damaging in the way they treated Jewish communities who  
came from Arab countries. And of course it would have helped Israel  
to integrate in the Middle-East, because they were Arabs as well, but  
they de-Arabized them, they told them: "You are not Arabs, you are  
something else." And they accepted it because it was the only ticket  
to be integrated into Israeli society.

All this revisiting, if you want, of Israeli history goes from 1882  
to at least the 1950s. Around 100 to 120 scholars were involved in  
this in the 1990s. The Israeli public, at first, of course, did not  
accept these new findings, and was very angry with these scholars,  
but I think it was the beginning of a good chance of starting to  
influence Israeli public opinion to the point of even changing some  
of the textbooks in the educational system.

Then came the second Intifada, and a lot of people felt that Israel  
is again at war, and when you are at war, you cannot criticize your  
own side. This is where we are now, and so many of these critical  
scholars lowered down their criticism, and in fact people like myself  
-- I can only testify from my own experience -- in one night, changed  
from heroes to enemies. It is not an easy experience. In the 1990s,  
my university was very proud that I was a part of it. So the Ministry  
of Foreign Affairs sent a lot of people to show how pluralistic is  
this university, they have this guy who is a New Historian, and he  
can show you how critical he is and that Israel is an open society,  
the only democracy in the Middle East.

After 2000, I became the enemy of the university. Not only did the  
foreign office stop sending people to see me, the university was  
looking for ways of sending me abroad, not bringing people to visit  
me, and almost succeeded in 2002. There was about to be a big trial  
-- the trial didn't take place, thank God -- where I was to be  
accused of all kinds of things that you would think that a democracy  
doesn't have, accusing lecturers of treason and being not loyal to  
their country, and so on. I was saying the same things in the 1990s  
as I was in 2002; I didn't change my views, what changed was the  
political atmosphere in Israel.

I want to go, now, in the last part of my talk, to my new book. After  
working on this new scholarship I wrote quite a lot of articles and  
edited a lot of books that summarized this new scholarship that I was  
talking about, trying to assess its impact. I was also very  
impressed; in one of my books I wrote extensively about this -- how  
it influenced Palestinian scholarship to be more open and critical.  
It really created something which I call the "Bridging Narrative," a  
concept that I developed, and I am still developing. It is a  
historical concept that in fact to create peace you need a bridging  
narrative. You need both national sides, each has their own  
historical narrative, but if they want to contribute to peace they  
have to build a bridge narrative. I founded, together with a  
Palestinian friend, a group in Ramallah, called the Bridging  
Narrative Historians. We started to work in 1997, still work now, and  
it's a very good project of building a joint narrative. We looked  
jointly at history because we believe the future is there if you  
agree on the past.

After doing that, I felt still very haunted by '48, I felt that the  
story was not complete. I wrote two books on 1948, and I felt it was  
not enough. And then came the new archives. In 1998, the Israelis  
opened the military archives. As I said, they opened political  
archives after 30 years, but military archives after 1990. And then I  
felt I had even a more complete picture, not only of '48, but  
unfortunately, of how '48 lives inside Israel today. And the new  
documents, I think, show very clearly, although I knew it before, but  
the new documents show even more clearly, if you needed more  
evidence, that the Zionist movement, from the very beginning, it  
realized that in the land of Palestine someone else lives. That the  
only solution would be to get rid of these people.

I'm not saying that they knew exactly how to do it, I'm not sure that  
they always knew how to do it, but they definitely were convinced  
that the main objective of the Zionist project, which was to find a  
safe place for the Jews on the one hand, and to redefine Judaism as a  
national movement, not just as a religion, can not be implemented as  
long as the land of Palestine was not Jewish. Now some of them  
thought that a small number of Palestinians can stay, but definitely  
they cannot be a majority, they cannot even be a very considerable  
minority. I think this is why '48 provides such a good opportunity  
for the Zionist leadership to try to change the demographic reality  
on the ground. And as I tried to show in my book, ever since 1937,  
under the leadership of the founding father of Zionism, David Ben- 
Gurion, the plan for ethnic cleansing of Palestine was carefully  
prepared.

This has a lot of moral implications, not just political ones.  
Because if I am right -- and I may be wrong, but if I am right -- in  
applying the term ethnic cleansing to what Israel did in 1948, I am  
accusing the state of Israel of a crime. In fact, in the  
international legal parlance, ethnic cleansing is a crime against  
humanity. And if you look at the website of the American State  
Department, you will see that the American State Department Legal  
Section says that any group in history, or in the future, that lives  
in a mixed ethnic group, and plans to get rid of one of the ethnic  
groups, is committing a crime against humanity. And it doesn't matter  
-- very interesting -- it doesn't matter whether it does it by  
peaceful means, or military means. The very idea that you can get rid  
of people just because they are ethnically different from you, today,  
definitely, in international law, is considered to be a crime.

It's also interesting that the State Department says that the only  
solution for victims of an ethnic cleansing crime, who are usually  
refugees because you expel them, is the return of everyone their  
homes. Of course, in the State Department list of cases of ethnic  
crime, Israel does not appear. Everyone else appears, from Biblical  
times until today, but the one case that does not appear as an ethnic  
cleansing case is the case of Palestine because this would have  
committed the State Department to believe in the Palestinian right of  
return, which they don't want.

There is another implication. I am not a judge, and I don't want to  
bring people to justice, although in this book, for the first time in  
my life, I decided not to write a book that says "Israel ethnically  
cleansed Palestine." I name names, I give names of people. I give the  
names of the people that decided that 1.3 million Palestinians do not  
have the right to continue to live where they lived for more than one  
thousand years. I decided to give the names. I also found the place  
where the decision was taken.

I think far more important for me is not what happened in 1948. Far  
more important for me is the fact that the world knew what happened  
and decided not to do anything, and sent a very wrong message to the  
state of Israel, that it's okay to get rid of the Palestinians. And I  
think this is why the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today  
as we speak. Because the message from the international community was  
that if you want to create a Jewish state by expelling so many  
Palestinians and destroying so many Palestinian villages and towns,  
that's okay. This is a right. It's a different lecture, why -- and  
I'm not going to give it -- why did the world allow Israel in 1948 to  
do something it would not have allowed anyone else to do. But, as I  
say, it's a different lecture, I don't want to go into it.

The fact is that the world knew, and absolved Israel. As a result,  
the Israeli state, the new state of Israel that was founded in 1948,  
accepted as an ideological infrastructure the idea that to think  
about an ethnic purity of a state is a just objective. I will explain  
this. The educational system in Israel, the media in Israel, the  
political system in Israel, sends us Jews in Israel a very clear  
message from our very early days until we die. The message is very  
clear, and you can see that message in the platforms of all the  
political parties in Israel. Everybody agrees with it, whether they  
are on the left, or on the right. The message is the following. And  
to my mind -- I will say the message in a minute -- but I will say  
that, to my mind, this is a very dangerous message, a very racist  
message, against which I fight (unsuccessfully).

The message is that personal life -- not collective life, not even  
political life -- personal life of the Jew in Israel would have been  
much better had there not been Arabs around. Now that doesn't mean  
that everybody believes that because of that you go out and start  
shooting Arabs or even expelling them. You will see the paradox.

Today, I gave an interview to a journalist here in Japan, and he told  
me of someone -- I won't mention the name -- but a very well-known  
Israeli politician of the left, who said to him: "My dream is to wake  
up one morning and to see that there are no Arabs in Israel." And he  
is one of the leading liberal Zionists, he is on the left, very much  
in the peace camp. This is the result of 1948, the idea that this is  
legitimate, to educate people that the solution for their problems is  
the disappearing of someone just because he is an Arab, or a Muslim,  
and of course the disappearing of someone who is an indigenous  
population, who is the native of that land, not an immigrant. I mean,  
you can understand, maybe not accept, but you can understand how a  
society treats immigrants. Sometimes they find that these immigrants  
come to take my job, you know these politics of racism that are the  
result of immigration. But we are not even talking about immigrants,  
we are talking about a country that someone else immigrated into, and  
turned the local people into immigrants, and said that they have no  
rights there.

If someone who is from the Israeli peace camp, and very much on the  
left, has a dream that all the Arabs would disappear from the land of  
Israel, you can understand what happens if you are not from the left.  
You don't dream, you start working on this. And you don't have to be  
on the extreme right for that, you can be in the mainstream. We have  
to remember that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was  
committed by the Labor Party, not by the Likud, by the mainstream  
ideology.

In other words, what we have here is a society that was convinced  
that its need to have ethnic exclusivity, or at least total majority,  
in whatever part of Palestine it would consider to be the future  
Jewish state, that this value, this objective is above everything  
else in Israel. It's more important than democracy. It's more  
important than human rights. It's more important than civil rights.  
Because, for most Jews in Israel, if you don't have a demographic  
majority, you are going to lose, it's a suicide. And if this is the  
position, then no wonder people would say that if the Palestinians in  
Israel would be more than 20%, we will have suicide. You will hear  
people that will tell you that they are intellectuals, liberals,  
democrats, humanists, say this.

And if Israel wants to annex -- and it wants to annex -- half of the  
West Bank, as you know, and half of the West Bank has a lot of  
Palestinians in it, there is not one person in Israel that thinks  
that it's wrong to move by force the people that live in one half of  
the West Bank to the second half of the West Bank. Because otherwise  
the demographic balance in Israel will change. And it's no wonder  
that Israelis feel no problem with what they did to the Gaza Strip.  
Take one million and a half people and lock them in an impossible  
prison with two gates and one key, that the Israelis have, and think  
that people can live like this without reaction. In order to  
delegitimize the right of someone to be in their own homeland, you  
have to dehumanize them. If they're human beings you won't think  
about them like this.

I think that as long as this is the ideology of the state of Israel,  
and it is the ideology of the state of Israel, a lot of the good  
things in Israel -- and there are many many good things in Israel,  
it's an impressive project that the Zionist movement did, the way it  
saved Jews, the way it created a modern society almost out of nothing  
-- all these amazing achievements will be lost. First of all the  
Palestinians would lose, that's true. This is true. First of all the  
Palestinians are going to lose because the Israelis are not going to  
change -- it doesn't look like they're going to change their policy,  
and it doesn't look like anyone in the world is going to force them  
to change their policy. But in the long run, Israel is not alone, and  
it is a small country in the Arab world and in the Muslim world, and  
America will not always be there to save it.

In the end of the day, if the Israelis, like South Africa -- you  
cannot be in a neighborhood and be alien to the neighbors -- and say  
"I don't like you," or "I don't want to be here," eventually they  
would react. It could take one hundred years, two hundred years, I  
don't know. But the Israelis are miscalculating, I think, history.  
Only historians understand that sixty years is nothing in history.  
Look at the Soviet Union. The fact that you are successful for sixty  
years with the wrong policy does not mean that the next sixty years  
are going to be the same. They're making a terrible mistake, as the  
Jewish communities around the world are making a terrible mistake in  
supporting this policy.

The new book is trying to convince that the most important story  
about the ethnic cleansing is not only what happened in 1948 but the  
way that the world reacted to what happened in 1948, sending the  
wrong message to Israel, that this is fine, you can be part, not only  
of the world, but you can be part of the Western world. You can be a  
part of what is called "the group of civilized nations." So don't be  
surprised, if you go to the occupied territories and you see first- 
hand how people are being treated there, that the vast majority of  
the Israelis, firstly don't know what goes on there, secondly when  
they know what goes on there, don't seem to bother much. Because the  
same message they got from the world in 1948 is the message they get  
from the world in 2007. You can take a whole city -- imagine Tokyo --  
surround it by an electric gate, and one person would have the key  
for the only gate to the city. Any other place in the world, if you  
would hear of a city that is at the mercy of a warden, like a prison,  
you would be shocked. You would not allow it to continue for one day  
without protests. In Israel, the world accepts it. And this is  
despite the fact that there are more international journalists per  
square mile in Israel and Palestine than there are anywhere else in  
the world. That's a fact. And despite this international media  
presence, the Israelis have not changed one aspect of their policy of  
occupation in Palestine.

As I say, unfortunately I don't have time for this, but I think it's  
a very interesting question: why does the world allow Israel to do  
what it does? But it's really a different question; so I think I will  
stop here, and open up for questions and remarks. Thank you.
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