Ilan Pappé Actually Has the Gall to Defend the October 7 Atrocities

The anti-Israel Israeli historian Ilan Pappé appears not to have read any of the accounts of what went on from August 23 to August 29, 1929. Here is an account of the attack in Safed, different only in degree, but not in kind, from what took place elsewhere:

“At about 5:15 pm, on the 29th of August, Arab mobs attacked the Jewish ghetto in Safed…in the course of which some 45 Jews were killed or wounded, several Jewish houses and shops were set on fire, and there was a repetition of the wanton destruction which had been so prominent a feature of the attack at Hebron.” — Sir Walter Shaw, The Palestine Disturbances Report

“An eyewitness describing the pogrom that took place in Safed, perpetrated by Arabs from Safed and local villages, armed with weapons and kerosene tins. He observed mutilated and burned bodies of victims and the burnt body of a woman tied to a window. Several people were brutally killed. A schoolteacher, wife, and mother and a lawyer, were cut to pieces with knives and the attackers entered an orphanage and smashed children’s heads and cut off their hands. Another victim was stabbed repeatedly and trampled to death….

“Yitshak Mammon, a native of Safed who lived with an Arab family, was murdered with indescribable brutality: he was stabbed again and again, until his body became a bloody sieve, and then he was trampled to death. Throughout the whole pogrom the police did not fire a single shot.” — David Hacohen, Time to Tell: An Israeli Life, 1898–1984

A Scottish missionary who was in Safed as all this unfolded in 1929 recounted:

“On Saturday August 24, there was a demonstration of Moslems along the road past the mission property. They came beating drums and breaking the windows of Jewish houses en route…On the afternoon of Thursday the 29th… one of our church members came running to tell us that ‘all the Jews were being killed.’ A few minutes later we heard women shrieking their ‘jubilant refrain’ from the Moslem quarter and saw men running with axes and bludgeons in their hands, urged on by women…we heard rifle and machine gun fire all around us…Wild Arabs had come up from the valley unexpectedly into the Jewish quarter and began at once a systematic slaughter of the Jews. Some escaped with injury only but 22 were killed outright in the town…The inhumanity of the attack was beyond conception. Women were gashed in the chest, babies were cut on the hands and feet, old people were killed and plundered.” — The Glasgow Herald, Sept. 14, 1929

Such scenes were repeated all over Mandatory Palestine. The Arabs were always and everywhere the aggressors, hate-maddened murderers. But not according to Ilan Pappé.

Elder of Ziyon has more on Pappé’s claim that the 1929 pogrom was in fact a response to violence that was started by Jews: “Ilan Pappé makes up a new lie to justify Arab massacres of Jews as far back as 1929,” Elder of Ziyon, February 5, 2024:

But this little speech [by Pappé on Zoom] includes something seemingly new: the claim that Zionism has tried to displace and kill the “Palestinian people” since 1929.

Where does he get that from?

In the book that made him famous, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Pappé only mentions 1929 in romantic terms. He classifies the horrific 1929 pogroms where gangs of Arabs murdered every Jew they could find and raped and dismembered women as a mere “uprising.” And he writes it was an uprising against British policy, not Zionism….

The 1929 pogrom was not an “uprising” against the British authorities, but a series of wide-ranging attacks by Muslim mobs against Jews. The most famous of these pogroms took place in Hebron, the second holiest city in Judaism. Mobs of Arabs rampaged through the city, breaking into Jewish houses, slaughtering babies, children, women and the elderly, and raping, mutilating, and torturing.

In 1920, during the Nebi Musa riots, gangs of Arabs attacked Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem, killing five and injuring 216. Four Arabs were also killed while attacking Jews, and 18 wounded.

In 1921, Arabs again attacked Jews in Jerusalem and in Jaffa. Some of the Jews managed to find guns, and several Arabs were killed as a result. Almost all of the Arab casualties were killed by British soldiers trying to suppress the marauders. Again, the Arabs instigated the murderous attacks; the Jews were only defending themselves. But Pappé still refuses to acknowledge that.

As a fake historian, Pappé must show that the murderous 1929 rampage of Arabs against Jews in Hebron, Jerusalem, Motza and Safed were justified, just as he attempts to justify October 7. So he makes up a new accusation, that the righteous Arab rapists were not engaging in ethnic cleansing but responding to one.

This is an accusation that Pappé himself has apparently never made before, even though this is his main area of supposed expertise….

After the 1929 riots, many Jewish villages were destroyed and all the Jews who survived left. Has Pappé forgotten what happened to the villages of Bat Yam, Be’er Tuvia, Giv’on HaHadashah, Haftuv, Kfar Uria, Kiryat Ata, Motza, Ramat Rachel, and Hebron?

Ilan Pappé actually has the gall to defend the October 7 atrocities, that he mischaracterizes as an”uprising.” How? By claiming that the October 7 attacks were a response to 104 years — since 1920 — of “Zionist” aggression against the Arabs who, in a bit of nunc-pro-tunc backdating, Pappé insists on calling “Palestinians.” But during the Mandatory period, the record of eyewitnesses, not just Jews but also British officers and Christian missionaries, makes clear that Jews never were the first to attack, and in many cases, they were not even able to defend themselves because they were unarmed.

That’s what happened. And that’s what Ilan Pappé will never bring himself to realize.