Israeli academic Ilan Pappé first came to prominence in the 1980s as a member of Israel’s “New Historian” movement, which chronicled the war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Dr. Pappé teaches political science at Haifa University and is the academic director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. He is currently writing a second edition of his most recent book, A History of Modern Palestine, One Land, Two Peoples (2004). The following interview was conducted by Don Atapattu, a free-lance writer in London.
Q: You are of German-Jewish descent. How did your parents actually come to be in Israel?
Dr. Pappé: They came separately in the early 1930s. It was Hitler’s Reich that pushed them out of Germany. My father, more for Zionist reasons, chose Palestine, but my mother looked at it as the only practical possibility because it was the cheapest to go there. It was an escape from Nazism.
Q: You would think you would be an ardent supporter of Zionism with that kind of background, but you have an ambivalent attitude at best. I assume you haven’t always held the views you have now.
Dr. Pappé: No, definitely not. I cannot blame my family, so to speak, and they did not educate me in that way. I think it is a long process in which people challenge the indoctrinations from above. The fact that I grew up in an Arab-Jewish city like Haifa and had several Arab kids in my classopened my eyes at an early age that there is another group of people which are a bit different from the majority. Also, events like the 1973 conflict in which I participated and saw some of the evils of war. Later on, events like the initiative Sadat took to Israel, the Lebanon invasion, and the first intifada were all formative events that contributed to a change of mind.
That’s one trajectory, so to speak. The other was to become a student outside of Israel and to choose 1948 as my doctoral subject, and realizing through studying the archives what really happened in 1948. So I think that it is the political developments to which I was a witness, on the one hand, and the very specific nature of my research, on the other, that contributed to my having such a different point of view from most Jews in Israel.
Q: You have written about how the main allure to East European Jewry was the wave of Russian and Polish antisemitism and, obviously, the rise of Nazism. What do you think of Edward Said’s view that the Palestinians are “the victims of the victims” and that the conflict is a case of the abused becoming the abuser?
Dr. Pappé: I share it. I think that Zionism is a movement seeking a solution to the problems of the Jews in Europe, especially to the constant and systematic persecution of the Jews. Zionism, before it chose Palestine, was a national movement with which I could empathize. But the moment it opted for Palestine, it persecuted the indigenous population and created, as Edward Said says, a “chain of victimization.” I think he meant that there is a kind of shared destiny here that affects the nature of the best solution for the problem and explains the dialectical relationship between the Jews and Palestinians in the land. As a general definition of the relationship between what happened to the Jews in Europe and what happened to the Palestinians in Palestine, I think it is an apt description.
Q: Do you accept the idea common among pro-Zionists that antisemitism has effectively reversed itself? Where Jews previously fled persecution from Christian to Arab and Islamic nations, now the bulk of antisemitism is found among Muslims against Jews in both Israel and the West.
Dr. Pappé: Not entirely. I accept the first half, which describes what antisemitism was before the creation of Israel; but I think after the creation of Israel there was still what one can call the classical movements of antisemitism. Also, I am not sure that a Semitic group of people like the Muslims can be that easily called anti-Semitic. Second, unlike antisemitism in Europe, I think that the animosity and hatred directed towards the Jews, and especially the Jews in Israel, has a lot to do with what the Jews are doing rather than with who the Jews are, which I think is a very important difference. It is not that I condone every attack on a synagogue in Europe or on Jewish symbols or people; but I think it comes from a very different place, and I fail to see the kind of ideology and theology that accompanied Christian antisemitism for centuries. In the case of the Islamic movement in Europe, there is a very direct target: oppressive Israeli policies. The second point is that the fact that so many Jews in Europe, especially in France and Britain, are willing to be ambassadors of Israel, means that when an angry Muslim youth throws a stone at a synagogue that has an Israeli flag, this is the closest symbol or institution he knows of that represents Israel. So I think it is far more difficult to attach the adjective anti-Semite to the attacks on Jewish targets directly associated with Israel. Anti-Israeli, yes, but I don’t think that anti-Israeli attitudes, policies or actions are equivalent to antisemitism. I think the old anti-Semitic groups may be fellow travelers with this new trend. The new trend itself has much more to do with the complex relations between Islam, the Arab world and the Middle East, and that very alien political entity that settled itself by force in the midst of the Arab world in the late nineteenth century.
Q: What happened to the indigenous Palestinian Jews? I heard that most of them were anti-Zionist. Did they get absorbed?
Dr. Pappé: They did. In the 1920s and 1930s, they became a very small portion of the overall Jewish community in Palestine, so numerically they could not have any influence. Very few of them dared to actually oppose the Zionist interpretation of the reality. Although they knew much better who the Palestinians were and what Arab culture was all about, they disappeared as an elite. By the time the state of Israel came into being in 1948, you can see a small aristocracy of people who were originally there. But the next generation had a very different perspective. One such person was the father of A.B. Yehoshua. He comes from such a family, and there is a distinct difference between the position of his father, who was much more empathetic to the indigenous population of Palestine as a whole, and his son. He certainly adopted a very clear outspoken Zionist point of view.
Q: Did they consider themselves Palestinians?
Dr. Pappé: Absolutely. But you have to understand that the moment was roughly 1929-30, when the leadership of the Jewish community regarded an anti-Zionist position as tantamount to treason. They had to change or pay a very high price.
The same would happen later on, even to the ultraorthodox Jews who basically had to be anti-Zionist. According to the ultraorthodox point of view, you cannot tamper with the divine plan (which allows the Jews to return to Palestine only with God’s intervention). If you tamper with it and bring back false Jews, you are not doing the word of God. Therefore, at the beginning, most of the ultraorthodox Jews said they cannot be Zionists and opposed the idea of Jewish statehood as sacrilegious. But, with time, they were Zionized. A very small group, Neturei Karta, has remained loyal to this idea to this day.
Q: Do you have any faith yourself?
Dr. Pappé: No, I am an agnostic. I have no problem with my Judaism or my Jewishness, but I am not a religious person. As you probably know, the majority of Jews in Israel are not religious. My guess is that only 15-20 percent of the Jews in Israel are observant. It is a very small portion of the society, and it has become smaller because of immigration from the former Soviet Union. Thirty-one percent of the Jews in Israel today are people who came from Russia and its satellites, and the vast majority of these people are very secular. In fact, for me it’s nice because the delicatessen shops that sell non-kosher meat or ham disappeared for a while, until the Soviet Jews — and some of them are not Jews — came.
Q: In your last book, you attribute much of the friction between Jewish settlers in mandate Palestine and the Palestinians to the Zionist leadership being dominated by racist East Europeans. It has been noted before that the most accommodating segment of the Ashkenazi community has mostly come from Central Europe, while the most chauvinistic elements have been East European. Can you expand on this?
Dr. Pappé: The East European Jews were the majority in the Jewish community between 1918 and 1948. But it is not only the numbers; they also occupied almost exclusively the centers of power where decisions were made. Therefore, they are responsible for shaping the kind of policy I described towards the indigenous population. Jews came from Central Europe in greater numbers after the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and were kind of a bourgeoisie. They also brought capital, which was very important for the Jewish community. The Eastern Europeans came without anything. They needed the newcomers to energize the economy of the Jewish community and so on. But, politically, they totally excluded them, and they did not integrate them into the political elite. East European Zionism in and before 1882 started as a movement of national revival, especially the revival of the Hebrew language. They insisted on Hebrew being the dominant language, and you had to be quite fluent both in writing and speaking. The Central European Jews came with no Hebrew at all and were very disadvantaged in this respect. Third, there was an accompanying ideology: most of the Eastern Europeans were socialists. It had to with the collective settlement in the form of kibbutzim and putting forward the ideas of the working people or the peasants in those agricultural settlements. Obviously, you did not fit the ethos if you had a lawyer’s office in Haifa or Jerusalem.
Q: Do you think it mainly a class issue that the attitudes of the two groups differed towards their Arab neighbors?
Dr. Pappé: Class was one thing. But more importantly, the kind of nationalism that Eastern European Jews brought with them was a very romantic Polish variety of nationalism. It is a nationalism that is very strong on ethnicity and race or culture or religion. The Central European Jews had a more civic or liberal kind of nationalism that maybe had room to accommodate even non-Jews in it. However, the fact remains that it was the East Europeans who built the colonialist project. This kind of reality informed their attitude. There came an interesting transformation of the definition of a Jew. When they were in Europe, they defined a Jew as someone who is not a Christian; and, when Zionism transferred Jewish people into Palestine, a Jew became someone who is not an Arab. As I write in my book, it created a lot of problems when they finally decided to bring in all the one million Arab Jews. They had to decide if they are Arabs or Jews, because they couldn’t be both. I think that also explains the kind of attitude that developed towards the native population.
But above all, if you take romantic nationalism and you take colonialism, it means that any part of Palestine that has been defined as the ancient land of Israel is a force that cannot tolerate the existence of anyone else but the Jewish people. Then comes the question of how you achieve it, but the strategy was, in my mind, very clear from the beginning.
Q: In your book, you illustrated the racial hierarchy in Zionism through the agricultural hiring practices of the mandate-era Jewish settlements. The bosses wanted to hire Arabs, who worked cheaper than Jewish immigrants, but Zionist leaders wanted Jews to hire only Jews. They resolved this by using Arab-Jews, who were politically acceptable as Jews but worked at Arab wages! One interesting thing about the racial fault lines within modern Israel is that, while Oriental Jews complain of discrimination, ironically they are now the most belligerent towards the Palestinians with whom genetically and culturally they share more in common than with the secular Ashkenazi elite. Even the extreme right-wing murderer of Yitzak Rabin was a Jew of Arab descent, and Shas leader Ovadia Yosef (who demanded that Arabs be “annihilated”) is an ethnic Iraqi. Why do you think this is?
Dr. Pappé: Romantic nationalism mixed with colonialism is what fed the attitudes of the Jewish community. You create this idea that a Jew is very different from an Arab. He is different from an Arab because he is also European. He is the West; the Arabs are the East. He is the orient; he is the primitive side of the story. It works well until 1948. But, because of the fact that so many survivors of the Holocaust did not opt to come to Israel but preferred to go to the United States or to remain in France, it meant that there was a demographic need to increase the number of Jews. I studied the problematic period in which the Jewish leadership made the transformation; after the years of deciding that they do not want the Jews of the Arab world to come to Israel, they changed their minds and opted for this alternative. The whole Zionist project until 1948 was based on the principle of getting as much of Palestine as possible with as few of the Palestinian Arabs as possible, and in 1948, they drove almost one million Arabs out of Palestine. As someone in the Israeli government later lamented, “We drove out one million Arabs, and now we are bringing in one million Arabs.” To cut a long story short, what they decided to do is to deArabize these people. One of the means of de-Arabizing people was conveying a very clear message to these people, who were pushed into the economic and social margins of society, that you have to show us that you are not an Arab. What is the best way of showing that you are not an Arab? By being venomously anti-Arab. The other day I read a book about the Irish community in the United States. When they came over, poor and enslaved in many ways, they were worried that they would be treated like blacks. They adopted a very strong anti-Black attitude in order to prove that they were white. I think the same happened here: this was the ticket to being integrated into a society that despised everything Arabic despite the fact that this was actually the culture and the language of those people who came from the Arab world.
Q: Presumably the desire to dilute the number of Arabs in Israel today is
behind the Israeli government’s import ing hundreds of thousands of Russians, many of them not in fact actually Jewish?
Dr. Pappé: Definitely. As long as you are not an Arab, you are welcome, especially after you exhaust the resource of Jewish immigration from the Arab world. You are even willing to do something very different from the Israelis, which was to allow African Jews to come over. They later regretted it, as you can see from the way they treated the Jewish Ethiopians in Israel, but they were invited because they were not Arabs. Bringing white people from the former Soviet Union, Jewish or non-Jewish, was important as far as the political elite was concerned, due to their obsession with maintaining a demographic majority.
Q: Would you agree that the distortion of scholarship is due to the extremely emotional and partisan baggage people have on this subject and fails to provide outsiders with accurate and objective information? It is only recently that mainstream academia has accepted that the Palestinian narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict is closer to the truth than the traditional Zionist mythology (no Palestinian expulsion, “settlements not conquest,” “purity of arms,” etc.). I am thinking in particular of Israel’s leading historian Benny Morris, who justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 by saying, “The great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians …. (There) are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.” Israel was created in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, but here he is expropriating the Nazi ideology of lebensraum against “inferior” peoples! ¹
Dr. Pappé: I would agree with this. I was thinking about Morris’s so-called transformation. I know the man well, and I know these ideas were hidden. After October 2000, he felt it was right to voice them more clearly because the whole political and cultural system in Israel moved to the right, and it became first book, became an existential struggle for survival. I think that if you are very emotional about killing people, raping women and so on, you should have serious problems with the ideology that it’s all about. Also, I think the most interesting point about people who write in the name of the nation is that they are usually those who claim most vociferously that they are doing it objectively and scientifically. The more you are committed to a national ideology, the more you claim you write objectively. It’s more than just an extreme emotional attachment; it’s being acceptable. I am bewildered by the fact that very intelligent people, whom I have known for many years, can articulate very clear moral and logical positions on almost every issue in the world except programmed in a terrible way, to my mind.
Q: Some might argue that you required deprogramming as a member of the Israeli Communist party, which is way out of the mainstream Zionism, where they leave behind any moral or ethical consideration. They are totally blinded, but I am not sure it is only emotion. The important thing is not just the facts, which we are very thankful to Morris for exposing (war crimes in 1948), but what you do with them. What he did was return them to the ideological presence of Zionism; he did not become an anti-Zionist because of them. What you realize when you read him is that, even if the story was worse — let’s say a genocide, not just ethnic cleansing — he would remain a Zionist. If the nature of the crime is admitted, the crime is not really a crime. Suddenly, what started as a crime in the discourse in Israel and the West.
Dr. Pappé: That’s a very interesting way of putting history. One, I am not a member of a Communist party; I am a member of a front that includes the communists. In fact, I angered my communist comrades when, in an interview with Le Monde, I said I could not be a communist, as I love life too much. I was nearly chucked out of the party for saying this!
Secondly, I joined political life after being de-programmed. It’s not that I joined a party and then was de-programmed. I was first de-Zionized, so to speak, and then I decided to do something. In fact, I blame Britain for my views and the four years I spent in Oxford as a doctoral student. The simultaneous work on the Israeli archives and the fact that I had an Arab tutor and Palestinian friends very much enabled me to see the alternative narrative. Then I think I developed a third narrative. I am also not a Palestinian nationalist.
Q: Despite your left-wing views, you accept that there wasn’t really a nation of Palestine prior to Zionism, and that the inhabitants of mandate Palestine identified primarily with towns and villages rather than the “country.” Palestinians think this negates their claim to Palestine, which Israelis are very keen to do, as demonstrated by the “memoricide” of 1951. ²
Dr. Pappé: I totally agree. As long as the ruling Turkish Empire was Muslim and Islamic in civilization and nature, most of the Arabs saw themselves as part of it. In 1908, when the Young Turks took over and said, you are all Turkish citizens, or the French took over Algeria in 1930 and said to the locals, you are a colony of France, a different kind of attitude developed that could be called Arab nationalism. Until 1908, if you look at what most of the Arab nationalist intellectuals talk about, they talk about the Austro-Hungarian model of sharing the empire with the Turks. So this means there was no Palestine, no Syria or Iraq. The moment when the young Turks want to Turkify everyone, suddenly they don’t want the Hungarian model; they want an independent Arab kingdom. The moment the colonialist powers carve out the Levant between themselves into administrative areas, these administrative areas become national entities, including Palestine. I think there are many Palestine historians today who would agree with this description.
Q: The traditional Chomskyite Leftist view of Israel’s role in the Middle East is as a surrogate army for the United States. A newer and highly controversial theory is that Israel and its American lobby are actually the tail wagging the dog. According to this analysis, the cause of the Iraq War was an alliance between non-Jewish ex-cold warriors and oil-industry insiders (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.) and the Jewish “neocons” (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams, etc.) who had previously worked for think tanks promoting the Eretz Israel agenda. Which more closely reflects your opinion?
Dr. Pappé: I think it is really somewhere in the middle. I don’t really buy this idea that the Jews of Israel are so powerful as to totally control American policy, even to the point of causing the American president to send troops into Iraq. As a historian, I know that American support for Israel developed in a very bizarre and unpredictable way. It was not there to begin with, so I lean more towards the Chomsky view. I would like to believe this. If Israeli and Jewish influence is so dramatic, then we are in for a very long winter. There was a kind of ad-hoc American policy in the Middle East to begin with in the 1950s and 1960s, not a very clear-cut American policy, some people say. As it developed the Israelis very cleverly pushed themselves into becoming a central pillar of that policy. I think they had the ability to say, this is your policy, and so what you need is a bastion like ours. Now, I think that neoconservatives developed independently of Israel during the Cold War. It’s a strategy that believes that America needs a constant enemy and a constant war between the good and the bad. However, there is the new development of the Christian Zionists, and it’s premature to say whether it’s so fundamental that they will stay there forever. Together with AIPAC, there was definitely an attempt by the tail to wag the dog, but the dog has other tails, and they are not all coming from Israel and Jewish people. If you read carefully the ideology of the Christian Zionists, it’s very anti-Semitic. For the time being, it is pro-Israel, but the idea is to basically get rid of the Jews once their divine plan materializes. If you look at the complex relationship between the industrial and military complexes on both sides, I think the center is America, not Israel. I don’t think the Israeli military industry is the one that dictates strategic American policies. I think it became almost an integral part of that military-industrial complex, which needed new markets after the end of the Cold War. Definitely, there is a kind of mutual reciprocity of interest, but I think that it is mainly Israel as a proxy and America as the empire — not the empire that fights the war of the proxy. I am very open and wouldn’t fall from my chair if people would show me the fact that neoconservatives were pushed by Israeli ideas to change the nature of the Middle East. You have the well-oiled AIPAC, but you cannot blame Israel for the 90 million members of the Christian fundamentalist movement in America. It’s an alliance, a terrible alliance, but don’t misunderstand me; Israel will suffer from it in the end. I think the empire can change the policy, and it can also collapse, as we know. Empires do collapse. Then the Jews in Israel will be in dire straits. Secondly, it is destructive to the interests and welfare of the locals in the area.
Q: Speaking of the neocons, they and their supporters are similarly keen for global Jewry to be considered solely Western rather than a people of Oriental origin. They speak of “Judeo-Christian” civilization and are dismissive of the Judeo-Islamic civilizations that once existed in the Middle East and Spain. It strikes me as a means of emphasizing solidarity between Jews and the Christian West, and correspondingly distancing the Islamic enemy in the “war on terror.” Would you agree?
Dr. Pappé: Yes. I think the Huntington kind of idea of a “clash of civilizations” puts Israel at the frontline. It’s the last line of defense against Islamic barbarism, and they phrase their support for Israel as such. But, if you read the neocons, they may one day say, “All right, let’s see the cost-benefit ideas, not just the ideological terms.” They are also very conservative and very concerned about the overall costs. This goes back to Henry Kissinger’s point of view in the 1970s, which says you take from the Middle East what you need, but you do not have to be there. If you need your oil field, take your oil field. If you need to make sure that Muslims don’t get out of the walls of the Middle East, then you make sure. It doesn’t necessarily mean you go the Bush way, in the sense that you democratize the Middle East by force. In this sense, Israel can be a liability rather than an asset. Then, we have a different kind of development around Wolfowitz and the others, who say Israel can be a vehicle to democratize the Arab world. This fits into the kind of ideology that says you have a clash of civilizations, but luckily you have the brave Israelis at the heart of the enemy, and with their help we can win. But that it is not typical of every neoconservative thinker that I know of, and I have talked to some of them.
Some of them can see a scenario where it would be better to have allies in the Arab world, without democracy and development, than to have the complication of Israel, which breaks any ties between America and Arab leaders.
Q: George Bush and the neocons have apparently been hugely influenced by ex-Minister Natan Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. Can Sharansky really be serious in his stated desire for democracy and liberation while supporting the occupation and expropriation of Palestinian land, or is this cynical political window dressing?
Dr. Pappé: I don’t know, but after a while people take themselves seriously. I think it is a mixture of very clear ideological perceptions that developed out of necessity. Sharansky is a very different case, by the way, to ex-Prime Minister Netanyahu, who wrote a similar book. Netanyahu was educated in the United States and has the mixtures you see in America between naiveté and the cynical brutal ideology of imperialism, and the same comes out in his book A Place Under the Sun. Sharansky is a different case. He worked for the CIA in the Soviet Union, but also was, I can say, bravely resisting the regime at the same time. He came here as a hero and expected to be a much more important figure in Israeli politics than he was, so he reinvented himself as an intellectual. He was a scientist actually; he never wrote about social or political sciences. Maybe what is missing in the question is the kind of relationship that Netanyahu and Sharansky have with academia in Israel. You have all these shallow popular books that say in very simple terms that until democracy emerges in the Arab world, there is no point in reconciliation. Until that point, we should rely on the United States to fight against the sources of evil. Now, this is reflected in a supposedly more complex way in the works of American and Israeli academics (that Sharansky’s and Netanyahu’s books quote extensively) who say they have all these theories and case studies and hypotheses that prove their so-called academic research. Sharansky’s main argument is an old one, which says that democracies will never fight each other. I wish these stated beliefs were just “window dressing.” I would be more optimistic about the ability to confront these people.
Q: I remember Netanyahu’s brazen testimony to the American congressional hearing on the 9/11 disaster. He actually claimed that Israel was unpopular in the Middle East because of its association with the United States!
Dr. Pappé: Right! He thought he was winning a lot of support in the United States for that because the whole Middle East became the enemy after 9/11. He is a cynical person, a charlatan. But I am not convinced there was this sharp dichotomy between what one can call an ideological conviction and a cynical political opinion.
With time the two are intertwined in such a way that it doesn’t matter anymore. If someone goes on for very manipulative reasons adopting an ideological position, eventually he ends up believing that this is his ideological position. He is already captivated by it and informed by it. I think it is the ideology you can find in modernization theories and scholarly justifications for imperialism and later on for neo-imperialism.
Q: Another politician, former Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, has openly stated the view shared by both Labor and Likud that Israel should become a European country: “Otherwise we will blend into the Semitic region and be lost in a terrible Levantine dunghill.” Is there not a dichotomy with the government’s desire for Israel to be a country in the Middle East without being a Middle Eastern (or “Semitic”) country?
Dr. Pappé: Yes. As far as he is concerned, anything is justified in excluding Israel from the Middle East, as long as it is physically impossible to take Israel out of the Levant and attach it to Europe. The second-best means is building walls and adopting political and cultural systems that challenge and fight anyone who does not adapt to the perception of Israel as a European country. The dichotomy that he himself does not want to admit is the occupation and colonization of Palestine, and the fact that the Palestinians are there, and that so many Jews came from Arab countries. These are all nagging realities that defeat his idea of a European state.
He is very funny; he founded the political party that calls for something the founding fathers of the state thought would be the reality itself. There should have been no need for an Israeli party that would fight for keeping Israel a secular, democratic, Jewish, Western country. He has a party that calls for these ideas and gets only 15 members in the Knesset out of 120. That shows you how multicultural and binational the state has become in reality, if not ideologically. The contradiction is between the ideology of the country as a Jewish and Western State and the realities on the ground, where in every direction you look the whole idea is defeated. The sad story is that what the Israelis were brought up to believe (and Lapid is one of them) is that, if you cease to be a Western country (though Israel never was a Western country), it’s like a Holocaust. It is a matter of time, I think, before the gap between the overall ideology and the reality will not be able to be sustained anymore.
Q: In February you were a keynote speaker at the University of Toronto at a week-long event exposing what was described as Israeli apartheid. There are two views on this. Supporters say Israel is “a light unto nations” and a beacon of democracy, human rights and freedom of expression — diametrically opposed to what Edward Said called “a Jewish supremacist state.” Why are there wildly opposing outlooks?
Dr. Pappé: The “light unto nations” is an interesting appropriation of a religious Jewish point of view taken by the secular Zionist movement in order to convince European powers to support a colonialist project in the midst of the Arab world. You needed this image in order to win international legitimacy. Since 1917, the Zionist movement had been fighting for international legitimacy, which became easier to win after the Holocaust. It was also needed for domestic consumption, to explain to people why they should be living in a place where they are so hated by the neighborhood in which they chose to settle. So, I think it is a mixture of the religious ideology of the chosen people and a very functional ideology to explain the unique place of the Zionist project in an Arab world where other European projects such as the ones in Algeria and Egypt were forced to end, and the colonizers were forced to go back to Europe. In order to maintain the kind of enclave that the Jews wanted to keep in the post-colonialist Arab world, they needed to use a lot of coercion and policies of ethnic supremacy, which is actually the essence of Zionism today, to my mind. I will give you a few examples. We don’t have a constitution in Israel, but we have a constitutional law, a body of laws that is almost like a constitution; many of them are just apartheid laws. For example, the law of the land says that 94 percent of the land in Israel belongs to the Jewish people alone, not to the state of Israel, and therefore 20 percent of the population — the Arabs — are barred from this land. Although the Arab population in Israel has tripled compared to the Jewish population, there has not been one new Arab settlement or village built, while there are hundreds of new Jewish towns, villages and settlements. This is discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. You cannot exist in an agricultural society like the Arab one if you are not allowed to expand. Then there is the law of citizenship, which says that Palestinians, who may have brothers and sisters and relatives all over the Arab world, are not allowed to reunite with their families, but Jews all around the world have all the right to become full citizens from birth. The third one is the law of social welfare, which says that only people who have served in the army are entitled to the full social welfare system. The Arabs are not allowed to serve in the army, and therefore they are not allowed full social services. These are just the formal laws.
There are many de facto manifestations of apartheid towards the Arab population in the way that the budget is distributed, in the basic treatment by the authorities, the police and so on.
Q: A peace treaty will not be accepted by the Palestinians without the end of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (and certainly not via the “Bantustan” option offered previously by Ehud Barak). Do you see any positive developments for peace?
Dr. Pappé: The end of the occupation is a pre-condition for any genuine peace talks. What the mainly American masters of the peace process have done until now was to say that the end of occupation equates with the end of peace. I think this has been dispelled. Unfortunately, they will try to attempt it again and again in the near future through the Roadmap, and they will fail again. Whenever it fails, it drains the hope again, and frustration comes in the form of an uprising or a cycle of violence. I agree that only pressure will force Israel to end the occupation. It is interesting how the gradual Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai preceded the total Sinai withdrawal. You can, on the one hand, attribute it to the war of 1973, but in that war Israel was not defeated. There was American pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Sinai as it was an American interest.
Q: Was it not due to Israeli alarm at the Egyptian army performing much better than expected?
Dr. Pappé: Exactly. As someone who tries to be a pacifist, I find it hard to say that I would like (or that I think that there is a chance for) a military defeat of the Israelis that would cause them to leave the territories — although I was very impressed by Hezbollah in Lebanon forcing the Israelis to get out. I don’t think that the Palestinians have the ability to accomplish what happened in Lebanon; and, secondly, I am a supporter of something else that hasn’t been tried in the case of Israel and the West: sanctions and boycotts. But this may be related to your former question about Israel being an apartheid state. I have no idea whether it would work or not, but I know it hasn’t been tried. There are two ideas to end the occupation that are not going to work, to my mind. One is the diplomatic route, namely negotiations. The second is an armed struggle, which I don’t think is going to succeed. Therefore, we have only one other option left, which may not succeed, or we are all doomed here to a horrible future. But we have to try, and that is to pressure the Israelis through economic sanctions. The problem with this is that the governments in the West that have the leverage will not do it. However, there is a civil society that may have the ability to pressure these governments. The anti-apartheid movement did not begin from the government. It started from the civil society in Ireland with some very brave saleswomen on the floor who refused to do the bidding of the South Africans and handle their goods. We have to start somewhere. I am not sure whether it will work, but I can’t see any other consideration. Of course, in time — after the third, fourth or fifth uprising — maybe the Arab world will reunite briefly or partly in such a way that will defeat Israel, but I don’t want to be part of the military destruction of the place I live.
Q: Do you think the death of Yasser Arafat increases the chances for a peaceful settlement? Many regarded Yasser Arafat (along with his cronies in the PLO) as a disaster for the Palestinian people.
Dr. Pappé: I don’t think his death has contributed to the chance for peace at all. His death contributed to the closing of a chapter of Palestinian national history, and this always happens. People like Arafat, who have a central role in reviving Palestinian national identity, we will leave history to judge. It will be a complex judgment I think, not black and white. But it was a chapter that was important to close for the Palestinian people. He became weaker physically and mentally, and they needed new leadership. The crisis required a great leader. My analysis has always been, ever since 1957, that there is no chance for peace if the Israeli mentality and Zionist ideology continue. Israel’s adhering to Zionist ideology is the reason we do not have peace with the Palestinians. As long as the ideology of ethnic supremacy exists, I think that whoever the Palestinians choose as a leader (and however corrupt he may be) is a very minor element in explaining the failure of peace. The main explanation comes from the fact that Israeli society as a whole does not want to reconcile with the people it ethnically cleansed in 1948. It doesn’t want to be part of the area that it penetrated by force in the late nineteenth century. As long as these are the fundamental positions of Jewish society and its leadership, there will be no peace.
1 The destruction of the American Indian societies by white settlers was the primary influence on Hitler’s views on the racial destiny of “Aryan” peoples.
2 Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine, One Land Two Peoples (2004). p. 147: “The tragedy of the loss of more villages (to Israel) was further highlighted by the hasty erection of new Jewish settlements on top of the 370 Palestinian villages destroyed in the 1948 war and on the land of those evicted after the war. In July 1949, Ben-Gurion personally supervised a large project to give ‘Hebrew names to all the places, mountains, valleys, springs and roads, etc.’ in the country. This act of ‘memoricide’ was completed in 1951.”
Via MEPC
