Ilan Pappe

Ilan Pappe        (historian, activist)
Born	1954 Haifa, Israel
Nationality	Israeli
Alma mater	Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Oxford
"Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian."

"Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian." (John Pilger)

Reprinting of 'Ethnic Cleansing'

On 19 May 2021, this message from Ilan Pappé was posted on Facebook:

"I know many of you contacted me that they can not get a copy, apart from kindle, of the 'Ethnic Cleansing'. Here is the message from my publisher:

'The rumours are true! Amazon suddenly ordered tons of copies as did others. We’re reprinting but it takes a few days. Annoying but can’t be helped. There’s stock in US but they will run out soon as well so we’re sending books there too.'

"This is good news it means that more and more people don't accept the Zionist propaganda anymore and want to know the truth about what has happened to the Palestinian people."

Collapse of the Zionist project

In February 2024, Ilan Pappe wrote:

"Even the Nakba (Israel's creation through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948), which was an unimaginable catastrophe, does not compare to what we are seeing now – and what we are going to see in the next few months.

"We are, in my mind, in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians...

"We are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.

"This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end. Such projects usually collapse violently. And thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project – and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope, it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness...

"Collapse like this, however, produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void was not filled by any constructive and alternative project. In such a case, the chaos continues.

"One thing is clear: whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look [to] Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future.

"These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole."

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:The arrest of journalist Richard Medhurst and the fight to defend democratic rights	Article	27 August 2024	Robert Stevens	Now, in a move that would have been agreed to by PM Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Labour has pioneered the use of an amendment to the Terrorism Act passed by the Tories to once again attempt to silence and criminalise a journalist and political activist. The same course is being pursued by governments throughout the world.

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