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Famous Ilan Pappé Quotes

“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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Book:A Very Short History of the Israel–Palestine Conflict
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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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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Book:Ten Myths About Israel
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