Ilan Pappe & Benny Morris: A Shared History, a Different Conclusion
Ilan Pappe, one of the revisionist scholars known in Israel as the "new historians," began his career in some of the same wartime archives as Benny Morris. But his own ideological journey has taken him to the far shore of Israel's political gulf and nearly complete isolation.
The two disagree not on the facts about Israel's founding that they helped uncover but on what lessons they hold nearly six decades later. Morris maintains the rise of radical Islam is largely responsible for the region's strife; Pappe is virtually alone among Jewish Israelis in blaming the Zionist project to create a Jewish state in the Arab Middle East for the lack of peace.
"Zionism is far more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam," Pappe says.
The 52-year-old historian is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa, which overlooks the thriving port where Pappe's parents arrived from Germany seven decades ago. Many of the relatives who stayed behind perished in the Holocaust. Pappe's family was apolitical. He served in the Golan Heights during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
What Pappe calls his "journey to the margins and beyond" began at Oxford University, where under the guidance of the renowned Arab historian Albert Hourani he wrote a doctoral thesis that became his first book, "Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict." He mixed with Palestinian intellectuals when the Palestine Liberation Organization was outlawed in Israel.
"My research debunked all of the lessons about Israel's creation that I had been raised on," Pappe says.
In his view, Israeli professors were not criticizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land with the same stridency in academic conferences abroad as they did in the op-ed pages back home. He increasingly believed that land included all of Israel, not just the territories Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East War.
In 1996, Pappe joined Hadash, the mostly Arab anti-Zionist communist party and ran unsuccessfully for parliament. His work two years later organizing campus events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of "the catastrophe," as Palestinians call the 1948-49 war, placed him at odds with the university's politically powerful Land of Israel Studies department.
The university president began calling for his resignation.
"The debate that year prepared the way for the big battle -- the second intifada," Pappe says. "I looked around and I was alone."...
Read entire article at Scott Wilson in the WaPo
The two disagree not on the facts about Israel's founding that they helped uncover but on what lessons they hold nearly six decades later. Morris maintains the rise of radical Islam is largely responsible for the region's strife; Pappe is virtually alone among Jewish Israelis in blaming the Zionist project to create a Jewish state in the Arab Middle East for the lack of peace.
"Zionism is far more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam," Pappe says.
The 52-year-old historian is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa, which overlooks the thriving port where Pappe's parents arrived from Germany seven decades ago. Many of the relatives who stayed behind perished in the Holocaust. Pappe's family was apolitical. He served in the Golan Heights during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
What Pappe calls his "journey to the margins and beyond" began at Oxford University, where under the guidance of the renowned Arab historian Albert Hourani he wrote a doctoral thesis that became his first book, "Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict." He mixed with Palestinian intellectuals when the Palestine Liberation Organization was outlawed in Israel.
"My research debunked all of the lessons about Israel's creation that I had been raised on," Pappe says.
In his view, Israeli professors were not criticizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land with the same stridency in academic conferences abroad as they did in the op-ed pages back home. He increasingly believed that land included all of Israel, not just the territories Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East War.
In 1996, Pappe joined Hadash, the mostly Arab anti-Zionist communist party and ran unsuccessfully for parliament. His work two years later organizing campus events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of "the catastrophe," as Palestinians call the 1948-49 war, placed him at odds with the university's politically powerful Land of Israel Studies department.
The university president began calling for his resignation.
"The debate that year prepared the way for the big battle -- the second intifada," Pappe says. "I looked around and I was alone."...
He has accepted a post at the University of Exeter in England and will move there later this year....