At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two.
Here is a clear and typical example—in detail, which is where the devil resides—of Pappe’s handiwork. I take this example from The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. On February 2, 1948, a young Jewish scientist named Aharon Katzir came to see David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive and the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine. Two months earlier, the General Assembly of the United Nations had recommended the partition of the country into two states. The Zionist establishment had accepted Resolution 181, but the Palestinian Arab leadership, and the surrounding Arab states, had rejected it—and Palestinian militiamen began to shoot at Jewish traffic, pedestrians, and settlements. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun.
(full article online)
The Liar as Hero
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Ilan Pappe, a history lecturer at the University of Haifa, freely admits that, in his view, facts are irrelevant when it comes to the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. "Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts, Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers," Pappe said in an interview with the French newspaper
Le Soir, Nov. 29, 1999.
Elsewhere, Pappe elaborated on his attitude toward historical investigation and academic objectivity: "Historical Narratives . . . when written by historians involved deeply in the subject matter they write about, such as in the case of Israeli historians who write about the Palestine conflict, is motivated also...by a wish to make a point" (
History News Network, April 5, 2004.) A more complete collection of Pappe's statements repudiating the value of historical facts is available
here.
In light of Pappe's openness about his contemptuous view of scholarship, and his rejection of historical facts in favor of ideology, it is negligent that Scott Wilson's profile of him omits this key context. The piece portrayed the Haifa historian as a "revisionist scholar" who languishes in "nearly complete isolation" in Israel supposedly due to his alleged myth-busting research and political views, in which he opposes the existence of a Jewish state, even within its 1948 boundaries. For example, Wilson quotes without challenge Pappe's absurd allegation that "My research debunked all of the lessons about Israel's creation that I had been raised on."
(full article online)
CAMERA: The Washington Post Ignores the Facts on Pappe
