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Ilan Pappé Biography

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“The Hamas fighters who stormed into Israel on 7 October were largely young people who learned the language of violence from the bombs that Israel dropped on them. This is not a justification of what they did. But we should not be so certain that, had we been subject to the same trauma, with no resolution in sight, we would respond much better.”

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“But beyond numbers, it is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case of Palestine. It is indeed hard to understand, and for that matter to explain, why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present, should have been so totally ignored.”

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“Imagine that not so long ago, in any given country you are familiar with, half of the entire population had been forcibly expelled within a year, half of its villages and towns wiped out, leaving behind only rubble and stones. Imagine now the possibility that somehow this act will never make it into the history books and that all diplomatic efforts to solve the conflict that erupted in that country will totally sideline, if not ignore, this catastrophic event.”

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“Ben-Gurion himself, writing to his son in 1937, appeared convinced that this was the only course of action open to Zionism: ‘The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.’ The opportune moment came in 1948. Ben-Gurion is in many ways the founder of the State of Israel and was its first prime minister. He also masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

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“For both Christians and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at the expense of the native people of Palestine.”

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“The translation of these European notions of racial superiority into the Israeli context became evident as soon as the interviewer asked him about the government’s plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled as they agreed that the policy should involve the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership, that is all the members of the Palestinian Authority—about 40,000 people.”

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“The crime committed by the leadership of the Zionist movement, which became the government of Israel, was that of ethnic cleansing. This is not mere rhetoric but an indictment with far-reaching political, legal, and moral implications. The definition of the crime was clarified in the aftermath of the 1990s civil war in the Balkans: ethnic cleansing is any action by one ethnic group meant to drive out another ethnic group with the purpose of transforming a mixed ethnic region into a pure one.”

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“The most reasonable compensation for the particular case of the Palestinian refugees was stated clearly already in December 1948 by the UN General Assembly in its Resolution 194: the unconditional return of the refugees and their families to their homeland (an homes where possible). Without some such restitution, the state of Israel will continue to exist as a hostile enclave at the heart of the Arab world, the last reminder of a colonialist past that complicates Israel's relationship not only with the Palestinians, but with the Arab world as a whole.”

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“It was clear to the government that denying citizenship on the one hand, and not allowing independence on the other, condemned the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to life without basic civil and human rights...The demographic fear that haunted Ben-Gurion -- a greater Israel with no Jewish majority -- was cynically resolved by incarcerating the population of the occupied territories in a non-citizenship prison.”

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“Today more than 90 percent of land is owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Landowners are not allowed to engage in transactions with non-Jewish citizens and public land is prioritized for the use of national projects, which means that new Jewish settlements are being built while there are hardly any new Palestinian settlements. Thus, the biggest Palestinian city, Nazareth, despite the tripling of its population since 1948, has not expanded one square kilometer, whereas the development town built above it, Upper Nazareth, has tripled in size, on land expropriated from Palestinian landowners.”

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“Isrrael participated in that conference [the Lausanne meeting of April 1949] only because it was a precondition for its acceptance as a full member of the UN, who also demanded that Israel sign a protocol, called the May Protocol, committing itself to the terms of Resolution 194, which included an unconditional call for the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or to be given compensation. A day after it was signed in May 1949, Israel was admitted to the UN and immediately retracted its commitment to the protocol.”

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“The reality of the current colonization of vast parts of the West Bank by Israel renders any two-states solution an improbable vision...The two-states solution, as noted earlier, is an Israeli invention that was meant to square a circle...The two-states solution, indirectly one should say, is based on the assumption that Israel and Judaism are the same. Thus, Israel insists that what it does, it does in the name of Judaism and when its actions are rejected by people around the world the criticism is not only directed toward Israel but also toward Judaism.”

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“The most important item to go six feet under is the dictionary of illusion and deception with its famous entries such as “the peace process,” “the only democracy in the Middle East,” “a peace-loving nation,” “parity and reciprocity,” and “a humane solution to the refugee problem.” A replacement dictionary has been in the making for many years, redefining Zionism as colonialism, Israel as an apartheid state, and the Nakbah as ethnic cleansing.”

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“We need to change how we talk about Israel and Palestine. There is no point in talking about peace, as if both sides are equally at fault, when the process we’re really talking about is decolonisation. Historical Palestine has been subject to settler colonialism for over a century, at great cost. Decolonisation is closely associated with other terms that mainstream political discourse in the West avoids when it comes to Israel and Palestine: liberation and reconciliation.”

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