Israeli historian Ilan Pappé 

Israeli academic and writer Ilan Pappé is one of the foremost and bravest among ‘New Historians’, mavericks who unearthed untold stories and challenged traditional interpretations about the country’s creation thanks to declassified imperial British and local documents.

Born in Haifa, this 68-year-old son of German-Jewish emigrants had to leave the country of his birth in the face of threats and seek asylum in the UK in the 2000s. Now a professor at the University of Exeter, Pappé is an alumnus of the University of Oxford and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“Any settler colonial movement – and Zionism is one – needs to fabricate and manipulate history in order to justify the project of displacement of the indigenous people and their replacement by settlers,” he tells me of the grand strategy of Israel.

The scholar who has co-authored books with the likes of Noam Chomsky also dwells on the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the occupation of Palestinian lands, settler violence, and the political project of the Zionists. Pappé, the author of serial best-selling works as such The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel, speaks about the priorities of the Global North and what he calls the “dehumanisation” of the Palestinians as Israel readies for a mammoth ground invasion of Gaza where more than 2.3 million Palestinians live. He notes, “Israel cannot take the moral high ground given the atrocities it has committed in the past and commits today.” 

Edited excerpts:

As someone who has studied Israel and its occupation for a long time, what do you think was the logic of the Israeli government in encouraging hardliners — like Hamas — to plot the downfall of moderates among Palestinians?

It allows it to avoid the need to compromise with reality and shun any international pressure to change its intransigent position on the Palestine issue. Israel wants to appear as a peace-loving nation, but in essence still craves to have as much of historical Palestine as possible, with as few Palestinians as possible. Hardline Palestinians justify in the eyes of the world the ongoing occupation, dispossession, and now incremental genocide. 

The attack by Hamas has shocked the state of Israel, and several countries that were once sympathetic to the Palestinian cause are outraged. In this context, my question to you is: how is it that decades-long acts of terror by an occupying state are often immediately forgotten the moment a terrorist outfit that preys on the brutality of occupation and the frustration and hopelessness of youth kills civilians and soldiers? 

Israel enjoys exceptionalism and therefore its actions will never be depicted as terrorists or war crimes, while the Palestinian resistance was always framed as terrorist. This is how the global north decides for us who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter. Hamas did commit war crimes on October 7 (there was no need to attack the civilian population) but you are right Israel cannot take the moral high ground given the atrocities committed in the past, and commits today. 

There is this talk among a section of pro-Israeli commentators that Israel is the promised land of the Jews and Jews alone. Not only do they fall back on Biblical and other ancient texts they have also reconstructed a certain history that states that it was the Mufti of Palestine who played the pivotal role in convincing Hitler to a project to purge the Jews. Worryingly, such distortions by historians are finding greater acceptance among a large number of people, including scholars, top-notch professionals and journalists. How do you view these trends?

Any settler colonial movement – and Zionism is one – needs to fabricate and manipulate history in order to justify the project of displacement of the indigenous people and their replacement by settlers. This is usually done on the basis of misinterpreting religious imperatives and the conjuring of a new mythology. You refer to part of it. One is taking the old tenement, a spiritual text of faith, and turning it into a historical document of supposedly political promise from God to make Palestine Israel, which began as an evangelical Christian idea before it became a new Jewish idea. Another one is to claim that the Palestinians are the inheritors of the Nazis, which will justify their elimination; etc. We can only defeat these fabrications by solid research and challenging them with truth. And when it comes to the truth, Palestinians have nothing to lose. 

Where do you think Israel has been headed since its formation? What do you think would be its future in a changing world order? 

Israel was moving on two tracks. One is creating a modern successful high-tech country and the other oppressing millions of Palestinians in order to survive as a Jewish state. These twin targets will continue to have an opposing impact on Israel in the future. Its amazing achievements in terms of economic, military power, and technology will be dwarfed by this need to sustain an apartheid state and policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide. 

Violence by settlers on the local population in the West Bank has only complicated the crisis in Israel. Do you see Israel continuing that policy and further alienating the locals? 

Of course. The events of 7 October have already been used to increase the killing of Palestinians in the West Bank and allow settlers to join in the massacre. 

What do you expect to happen to Israel’s apparent policy of expecting the Palestinian cause to die a natural death by befriending Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia?

I think it is doomed to fail. It may have some initial successes, but the Arab societies will not go along with this policy, and therefore Palestine will be the main pan-Arab issue and as long as the Palestinian issues will not be resolved there will be no peaceful future for Israel.

Restraint has never been a word that the US or the West uses to counsel Israel. Why is it so? What is unique about Israel? 

The support for Israel and Zionism rests on several historical layers. Evangelical Christianity sees Israel as a step towards the fulfilment of the prophecy of the return of the Messiah and the end of times; the West feels guilty about centuries of antisemitism and is willing to see a Jewish state as the best compensation for that, in particular for the Holocaust. To this, one can add Islamophobia, orientalism and neo-liberal interests where profits are mixed with a wish to control the global south by the global north. 

It is true that Jews have suffered persecution worldwide for a long time and that is a story much older than Hitler. But there is another argument: Jews are the brightest and the most intelligent people on earth, listing out Nobel Prize nominations and academic excellence. This is a statement that offers the state of Israel further legitimacy to do things on a whim and with impunity. How effective is this projection of Jews (being the chosen people) as an excuse for the state of Israel to treat others (especially the Palestinians) as sub-human? 

Zionism is in essence a secular movement, not a religious one. The sense of a chosen people is not unique to Judaism and it also exists in Islam (Khayr al-Umma). It is therefore less central in the motivation behind the colonisation of Palestine or the treatment of its native population. Over the years, especially after 1967, a new Zionism, a messianic one, developed for which these notions are far more important and hence contribute to the dehumanisation of the Palestinians.