"The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"--Ilan Pappe Gets Personal
Posted by deleted 10 years, 9 months ago to Politics
"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."
It is difficult to imagine a more inflammatory title than "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," but that is what Ilan Pappe--born in Israel, at first a renowned scholar there, but, after agonizing "intifada" of 2000, driven out by death threats--writes in his latest book. If you don't tend to read whole books, then here he gives a very informal, highly personal revelatory lecture in Japan about how he started, how he changed, what he discovered as Israeli archives opened after many decades, and how he was treated after that. (He now teaches in England, at the University of Exeter, but certain Jewish watchdog groups like CAMERA are trying to get him fired.)
I do not know enough, as yet, to judge this. But from what I have read in other sources, Pappe should be heard. This is worth reading.
It is difficult to imagine a more inflammatory title than "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," but that is what Ilan Pappe--born in Israel, at first a renowned scholar there, but, after agonizing "intifada" of 2000, driven out by death threats--writes in his latest book. If you don't tend to read whole books, then here he gives a very informal, highly personal revelatory lecture in Japan about how he started, how he changed, what he discovered as Israeli archives opened after many decades, and how he was treated after that. (He now teaches in England, at the University of Exeter, but certain Jewish watchdog groups like CAMERA are trying to get him fired.)
I do not know enough, as yet, to judge this. But from what I have read in other sources, Pappe should be heard. This is worth reading.
So tell me... what's your Moslem name, and in what prison did you convert?
by Efraim Karsh
http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Is-Pa...
(free PDF download)
or
http://www.amazon.com/Fabricating-Israel...
A reader review on Amazon.com by
Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia
Karsh (a professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London) presents the first full-length and detailed rebuttal to those Israeli scholars who call themselves the "new historians." This group, whose ranks include Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim, seeks to expose Zionism as a rapacious movement and Israel as the actor that bears nearly full responsibility for the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian plight. Noting that others have critiqued the new historians' ignoring important source materials, Karsh concentrates on proving that "the very documentation used by these self-styled champions of `truth and morality' reveals a completely different picture from that which they have painted."
Elaborating on the argument first made in his June 1996 article in the Middle East Quarterly, Karsh focuses on three main issues: David Ben-Gurion's alleged endorsement of "transferring" Arabs out of the territory to become Israel, "collusion" between the Zionist movement and King `Abdallah of Jordan to snuff out a Palestinian state, and secret British support for this joint effort. To establish his case, Karsh digs deeply into the documentary record, even going so far as to interpret crossed-out sections in Ben-Gurion's handwritten letters. That's all vital to making his case, but Karsh's key strength is the application of unprejudiced common sense to clarify issues clouded by the pseudo-scholarship of propagandists.
http://cifwatch.com/2011/11/12/the-faux-...
The faux Zionist history of Ilan Pappé
By now, it’s reasonable to conclude that famed revisionist historian Ilan Pappé has transgressed the sacred ground between quotation marks by inventing a quote and attributing it to Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. It’s also reasonable to conclude that his publisher, Oneworld Publications and his colleagues at the University of Exeter will fail to hold him account for his actions.
The quote in question appeared in an article Pappé wrote for the Autumn 2006 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies and in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications) that came out a few weeks later. In these texts, Pappé reported that in a 1937 letter to his son, Ben-Gurion declared:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war.”
Historian Benny Morris declared that the quote was an invention in December 2006. He did not challenge Pappé directly, but journalist Johan Hari used the quote to assail Israel in a commentary that appeared in The Independent soon after it appeared in print twice under Pappé’s name.
In declaring the quote an invention, Morris was on solid ground. The quote does not appear in any of the references that Pappé cited for it. In Ethnic Cleansing, Pappé cites the July 12, 1937 entry in Ben-Gurion’s journal and page 220 of the August-September issue of New Judea, a newsletter published by the World Zionist Organization. The quote appears nowhere in these texts, nor does it appear in the source he references in the article appearing in the Journal of Palestine Studies, a book by Charles D. Smith.
Morris’ statement that the quote attributed to Ben-Gurion was an “invention” should have prompted Pappé to either provide an accurate, verifiable source for the quote or to issue a retraction to prevent others from using it. Instead, the quote lingered on – without correction or retraction – in the fever swamp of anti-Zionist commentary.
[The fictitious quote attributed to Ben-Gurion eventually was retracted but not by its fabricator, Ilan Pappé, who has remained silent about it.]
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Ilan Pappé and Efraim Karsh debate on British TV
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Pappé
Ilan Pappé (Hebrew: אילן פפה; born 1954) is an Israeli historian and socialist activist . . .
. . . In 1999, Pappé ran in the Knesset elections as seventh on the Communist Party-led Hadash list.
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[Pappé is also an avowed Marxist. Marxism not only embraces "polylogism" — the notion that there's a logic specific to bourgeois (including Zionist) ways of reasoning, and a logic specific to proletarian (including Palestinian Arab) ways of reasoning; but Marxism also embraces the practice of using history as a propaganda tool for the purpose of inciting (or at least hastening) the downfall of capitalism and replacing it with the socialistically planned economy.
DONWAY, HE'S A GOOD CHOICE TO MAKE YOUR POINTS CONTRA ISRAEL. GIVEN HIS VALUE SYSTEM AS EXPRESSED BY HIS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, WE'RE SURE HE CAN BE TRUSTED IMPLICITLY TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING, ESPECIALLY THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL, THE ZIONISTS, AND THE ARABS, IN THAT AREA, SINCE THE 19TH CENTURY.]
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Middle East Quarterly
JUNE 1996 • VOLUME III: NUMBER 2
Rewriting Israel's History
by Efraim Karsh
Middle East Quarterly
June 1996, pp. 19-29
[Efraim Karsh is director of the Mediterranean Studies Programme at King's College, University of London, and editor of the quarterly journal Israel Affairs.]
The [Palestinian] refugees and their present rights inspire two very different approaches. The Israeli view, based on an assessment of the 1947-49 period that ascribes primary responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy to an extremist and short-sighted leadership, sees Palestinian wounds as primarily self-inflicted and so not in need of compensation. In contrast, Palestinian spokesmen justify their "right of return" to the territory that is now part of the State of Israel (or an alternative compensation) by presenting themselves as victims of Jewish aggression in the late 1940s.
Ironically, it is a group of Israelis who have given the Palestinian argument its intellectual firepower. Starting in 1987, an array of self-styled "new historians" has sought to debunk what it claims is a distorted "Zionist narrative." How valid is this sustained assault on the received version of Israel's early history? This question has real political importance, for the answer is bound to affect the course of Israeli-Palestinian efforts at making peace.
THE NEW HISTORIANS AND THEIR CRITICS
. . . Its foremost spokesmen include Avi Shlaim of Oxford University, Benny Morris of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ilan Pappé of Haifa University. Other prominent adherents include Tom Segev of the Ha'aretz newspaper, Benjamin Beit Hallahmi of Haifa University, and researchers Uri Milstein and Yosi Amitai.
Above all, the new history signifies a set of beliefs: that Zionism was at best an aggressive and expansionist national movement and at worst an offshoot of European imperialism;3 and that it was responsible for the Palestinian tragedy, the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, and even the Middle East's violent history.
In an attempt to prove that the Jewish State was born in sin, the new historians concentrate on the war of 1947-49 (in Israeli parlance, the War of Independence). Deriding alternative interpretations as "old" or "mobilized," they dismiss the notion of a hostile Arab world's seeking to destroy the Jewish state at birth as but a Zionist myth. They insist that when the Jewish Agency accepted the U.N. Resolution of November 1947 (partitioning Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states), it was less than sincere.
It is obviously a major service to all concerned to take a hard look at the past and, without political intent, to debunk old myths. Is that what the new historians have done? I shall argue that, quite the contrary, ***they fashion their research to suit contemporary political agendas; worse, they systematically distort the archival evidence to invent an Israeli history in an image of their own making.*** These are strong words; the following pages shall establish their accuracy.
A number of scholars have already done outstanding work showing the faults of the new history. Itamar Rabinovich (of Tel Aviv University, currently Israel's ambassador to the United States) has debunked the claim by Shlaim and Pappé that Israel's recalcitrance explains the failure to make peace at the end of the 1947-49 war.4 Avraham Sela (of the Hebrew University) has discredited Shlaim's allegation that Israel and Transjordan agreed in advance of that war to limit their war operations so as to avoid an all-out confrontation between their forces.5 Shabtai Teveth (David Ben-Gurion's foremost biographer) has challenged Morris's account of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem.6 Robert Satloff (of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy) has shown, on the basis of his own research in the Jordanian national archives in Amman, the existence of hundreds of relevant government files readily available to foreign scholars,7 thereby demolishing the new historians' claim that "the archives of the Arab Governments are closed to researchers, and that historians interested in writing about the Israeli-Arab conflict perforce must rely mainly on Israeli and Western archives"8 -- and with it, the justification for their almost exclusive reliance on Israeli and Western sources.
This article addresses a different question. The previous critics have looked mostly at issues of politics or sources; we shall concentrate on the accuracy of documentation by these self-styled champions of truth and morality. By looking at three central theses of the new historians, our research reveals a completely different picture from the one that new historians themselves have painted. But first, let us examine whether the alleged newness of this self-styled group is justified.
NEW FACTS?
The new historians claim to provide factual revelations about the origins of the Israeli-Arab conflict. According to Shlaim, "the new historiography is written with access to the official Israeli and Western documents, whereas the earlier writers had no access, or only partial access, to the official documents."9
The earlier writers may not have had access to an abundance of newly declassified documents, which became available in the 1980s, but recent "old historians," such as Rabinovich and Sela, have made no less use of them than their "new" counterparts, and they came up with very different conclusions. Which leads to the self-evident realization that it is not the availability of new documents that distinguishes the new historians from their opponents but the interpretation they give to this source material.
Further, much of the fresh information claimed by the new historians turns out to be old indeed . . .
. . . As for new interpretations, some are indeed new, but only because they are flat wrong.
NEW INTERPRETATIONS?
. . . Ilan Pappé has gone so far as to argue that the outcome of the 1947-49 war had been predetermined in the political and diplomatic corridors of power "long before even one shot had been fired."20 To which, one can only say that the State of Israel paid a high price indeed to effect this predetermined outcome: the war's six thousand fatalities represented 1 percent of Israel's total Jewish population, a higher human toll than that suffered by Great Britain in World War II.21 Further, Israel's battlefield losses during the war were about the same as those of the Palestinians; and given that its population was roughly half the latter's size, Israel lost proportionately twice the percentage of the Palestinians . . .