Introducing Ilan Pappé, An Israeli Who Hates Israel

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has made himself famous, or rather infamous, as the Palestinians’ favorite Israeli, for his endless denunciations of Zionists and Zionism in his work as an historian. His entire quasi-scholarly oeuvre is devoted to the supposed atrocities planned or committed by the Jewish state. He is now a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. He has recently concluded that the 1929 pogrom conducted by Arabs in many parts of Mandatory Palestine was in fact a response to violence that was started by Jews. More on his claim, and the reply to it by Elder of Ziyon, can be found here: “Ilan Pappé makes up a new lie to justify Arab massacres of Jews as far back as 1929,” Elder of Ziyon, February 5, 2024:

Ilan Pappé is a fraudulent historian who has been found to falsify sources numerous times to twist history to fit his anti-Zionist ideology.

He attended a Zoom call over the weekend where he apparently made up another “fact” out of thin air:

The Israeli historian who supports the Palestinian cause, Professor Ilan Pappé, said that it is not possible to coexist with Zionism because it is “an evil that must be eradicated,” and peace cannot be reached with the Zionist entity, but rather it must be dismantled and eliminated.

How is Zionism an “evil that must be eradicated”? Are the Jewish people, who have been persecuted, and murdered, through many centuries and in many countries, enduring a history of hell that reached its apotheosis with the Holocaust in which more than six million Jews were shot, gassed, suffocated in cattle cars, tortured to death, not entitled to reconstitute their ancient homeland where Jews have been living for 3500 years, and where so much of Jewish history was made? The Jewish state that Pappé thinks is an “evil that must be eradicated” gives Jews everywhere the reassurance that they are powerless victims no longer, but possess a state, with a powerful military, that if necessary can come to their aid, by rescuing them (Entebbe), by bringing them to safety (the Jews of Yemen airlifted in Operation Flying Carpet), by providing a refuge (the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia), by offering a home for Jews enduring official antisemitism (the Jews of the Soviet Union).

Are the Jews not entitled to their tiny state, when the Arabs already have twenty-two states and no pressing need to destroy the one Jewish state and replace it by a twenty-third Arab one? The reason for Ilan Pappé’s malevolent view of Zionism can be found not in his facts — for he has almost none to support his claims — but in his mental makeup, which is akin to that of other well-known Jewish Israel-haters, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. They are clinical cases, who will not let facts stand in the way of their obsessive dislike — even hatred — of Israel.

llan Pappé thinks the world would be a better place if Jews, alone among the peoples of the earth, were to be denied a polity of their own. Pappé seems unconcerned that if the Jews, without a Jewish state to provide them with protection and a refuge in case of need, were again to be scattered to the four corners of the earth, that would likely be the end of the Jewish people. If they were to be cut off from their own history, and deprived of their place in the Land of Israel, the Land that is so central to Judaism, this would fatally vitiate the sense of peoplehood that is rooted in, and depends on, the Jewish presence in that land.

Pappé doesn’t think it wrong for the 475 million Arabs to possess twenty-two states, with a land area of five million square miles, which is 630 times the size of tiny Israel, with its 8,019 square miles. He doesn’t think it wrong that among the peoples of the earth, the Jews alone should be forced to exist without a state of their own in order that the Arab people, who are the most lavishly provided of all peoples with twenty-two states, should be given a twenty-third.