Ilan Pappe Talk

Here's some links about Ilan Pappe:
 http://www.labournet.net/world/0209/pappe1.html
 http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/pappecase.cfm
 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7281


an excerpt from:
 http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=264&aid=574&pg=5
Ilan Pappe. Dr. Ilan Pappe is Senior Lecturer of Political Science at
Haifa University, and the head of the Emil Touma Institute for
Palestinian Studies in Israel. Born in 1954 to a German Jewish family
in Haifa, at the age of eighteen he began military service in the
Israeli army, which introduced him to other groups and to the host of
social problems facing Israeli society. In the 1970s, at Hebrew
University as an undergraduate in the department of Middle Eastern
History, he was exposed to the plight of the Palestinians in Israel.
It was then that he found his love for history and formed his belief
that the present cannot be understood and the future changed without
first trying to decipher its historical dimensions.
It was clear to him that this could not be done freely inside Israel,
especially if its own history was to be the subject matter. So he
went to Oxford in 1984 as a PhD student. His thesis was on the 1948
war in Palestine. He wrote about the Zionist intentions to ethnically
cleanse Palestine of the indigenous population.
His extensive research brought him face to face with declassified
Jewish archives of the period. He discovered things that he'd never
heard or known before, things that contradicted the official Zionist
narrative he'd been taught as a child.
As Pappe discussed his work with me in his office at Haifa
University, he pointed out several Zionist myths. The first myth he
spoke of was what he called the myth of David and Goliath. This is
the myth that the Jews (Zionists) were a small, weak, defenseless,
poorly numbered and poorly armed group defending themselves against
the massive, overpowering, well armed, Arab hordes. Winning the war
made Israelis Invincible Supermen. "Even Hollywood portrays the
Israelis as heroic and the Arabs as dirty cowards, an example of
which is the movie Exodus," he said. He pulled out maps of that
period which showed large, thick arrows from the Arab side and small,
thin arrows from the Israeli side which were meant to suggest the
size and strength of the competing armies, thus feeding the
propaganda that the Jews were small and defenseless.
The truth is that the Jews had the upper hand from the beginning,
financially, militarily and politically. The Jewish leadership knew
exactly the balance of power and that they had the advantage. This
was partly due to agreements they made with Jordan, the strongest
Arab military at the time, not to attack in specified areas. This
substantially reduced any Arab threat, although the Jordan army did
fight when the Zionists reneged on their promise not to invade areas
around Jerusalem.
Pappe states, "For us, as Israelis, this was very important, because
it was not just a question of whether we were superhuman or not,
because there was a very normal explanation as to why we won the war,
which had nothing to do with our being David and the Arabs being
Goliath. The real myth was that Israel was supposedly on the eve of a
second holocaust or extermination. It was not. Jewish leaders
produced an atmosphere of fear to raise the commitment from others.
But they knew that such a threat did not exist."
Selling this myth to America was also very important as we can
observe today in the overwhelming bias the U.S. government shows
toward Israel and against Arabs and Palestinians. It also shows up in
the level of political intimidation, if not political extortion, of
anyone in Congress who might speak out in favor of Palestinian human
rights.
The second myth he spoke of was that the Arab leadership told the
Palestinians to leave their homes because the war was coming. "This
is the official Israeli narrative taught in schools," Pappe said, and
is considered the primary reason Palestinians left their homes and
became permanent refugees. "This is not true," he said, "they were
forced from their homes, driven away by the invading Jewish army." In
the special archives in London, British documents of every radio
transmission from 1936 through the 1948 war reveal no proof of any
such messages transmitted by the Arabs. Pappe says, "It was Israeli
propaganda, a myth to cleanse the Jewish conscience of any
responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem."


All Welcome at Meeting