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AN INTERVIEW OF ILAN PAPPE
By Baudouin Loos
Brussels, 29 November 1999
Ilan Pappe in not an ordinary Israeli citizen. "I
am the most hated Israeli in Israel", he says of
himself without any pride. Pappe, with several
others, leads the "new historians' school" which
took off in the eighties as a result of the new
availability of state archives concerning the
"Independence War". The new historians have done a
lot to dismantle the Israeli myths of the
foundation of the country. Now they are working on
other issues: no Israeli sacred cows will have the
opportunity to escape!
Unlike other new historians, Pappe makes no secret
of his political, or ideological agenda. "We are
all political", he argues. "There is no historian
in the world who is objective. I am not as
interested in what happened as in how people see
what's happened".
Pappe's most known book is "The Making of the
Arab-Israeli Conflict 1947-1951" I.B. Tauris,
London & New York, published in 1992.
TEXT :
Q: With people like Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom
Segev, Simha Flappan and others, you are a prominent
(and the most controversial) member of the school of
"new historians" in Israel. Could you summerize the
major trends of the contribution of the new Israeli
historians to the Israeli narrative?
A: It is an intellectual movement that started ten
years ago, not only of historians, but also of people
who deal with culture, academicians, journalists,
artists, novelists, etc, who looked critically at
Israel's past. I would say they adopted major chapters
in the Palestinian interpretation, narrivative, of the
past. The particular aspect of the historians' work is
that they did it with the help of archives and with
their professional expertise, and that added a certain
validity in the eyes of the public to these
interpretations. Because, in the past, you could have
heard the same arguments made by Palestinians or by
very extreme Israeli leftists, but this time the very
same things were substantiated by historic research
works.
There are several topics that those new academics,
intellectuals, researchers dealt with. The major
chapter in 1948. It's what they are known for. They
undermined some of the major foundation's myths of
Israel.
First, they didnt' accept that there was a war between
a Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. "The few against
the many". They claimed there was a parity on the
battlefields and even, as the war progressed, there was
an advantage to the Jewish and then Israeli forces.
Additionally, they found out that the most efficient
Arab army -- the Jordanian Army -- had a secret
agreement with the Jews/Israelis prior to the war.
"Collusion across the Jordan", as Avi Shlaim put it
(the title of his famous book). That understanding -- a
division of Palestine between the Jordanians and the
Jews, instead of between the Jews and the Palestinians
-- to a large extent determined the fate of the war.
Then they undermined the myth of the Arabs volunterally
flight. They claimed with various degrees of conviction
that the Arabs were expelled, that mass expulsions took
place in 1948, and then Israel did eveything to prevent
the return of the refugees.
And, lastly, they undermined the myth of "Israel the
peaceseeker". They said that there was a chance to
peace after 1948 but that was missed because of
Israel's intrensigence and inflexibility, rather than
because of the Arab inflexibility. (That was my major
contribution.)
The new history, now in Israel, doesn't only deal with
48. It analyses zionism as a colonialist phenomenon
from the late 19th century. It goes on to revisit the
fifties: they are very critical on both domestic and
foreign security policy of Israel in those years. The
myth till 1967 was that Israel was a small isolated
country surrounded by hostile ennemies. It was also
undermined: they claimed that Israel was quiet
aggressive, capable of leading powerfull policies. And,
domestically, Israel discriminated its Arab citizens as
it did, on similar ground, discriminate against the
Jews it absorbed from Arab countries. So far, the last
topic is the attitude of the Jewish community in
Palestine during the mandatory years toward the
Holocaust. It's a very touchy subject. The zionist
leadership came out as very pragmatic and it put the
interest of the Jewish community in Palestine above
that of the Jewish community in Europe even in the time
of absolute danger as happened during WWII.
Q: How do you see the answer given to the new
historians by the "old" historians like Shabtai Tevet,
Anita Shapira, Efraim Karsh or Itamar Rabinovich?
A: The first reaction was rather derogatory, claiming
that this work is not professional, shoudn't be taken
notice of. Then the second wave of reactions said that
the work is indeed important but it rejected its
findings. I can understand these historians, not so
much Ephraim Karsh who was the most vicious of all in
his attacks. In my case, for exemple, they dispute
everything! They seem to accept Benny Morris more
easily than me. I am not surprised: Benny Morris'
conclusion is more relieving. For exemple, when he says
about the fate of Palestinians in 48 "à la guerre comme
à la guerre", I claim that it was more like an ethnic
cleansing.
Q: It is precisely because of that very conclusion that
you appear to be so controversial in your country,
isn't it? Because you say "There was a unwritten
Zionist plan to expel the Arabs of Palestine in 48"...
A: Absolutely. They were cautious enough not to write
it although there was this "plan D" (Dalet), that
reveals enough of the systematic expulsion. The idea
was prepared by the Jewish military forces in March
1948. In that plan, they defined very a important
principle: any Arab village or neighbourhood that would
not surrender to the Jewish forces, that would not
raise the white flag, would be uprooted, destroyed and
the people expelled. I think they knew well that there
was very little chances for more than five or six
villages to surrender. Why should they surrender,
especially after (the massacre of) Deir Yassin in April
and the big fright in the Arab community? In fact, only
four villages rose the white flag. All the rest were
potentially an object of expulsion. I must add that a
few other neighbourhoods rose the white flag but it
didn't help them... All this is very clear. We have to
remember that the UN partition plan of November 1947
would have left an equal number of Jews and Arabs in
the Jewish state. This contradicted the idea of a
Jewish state. So they had to make sure that as few
Arabs as possible were still there. And that's what
happened.
Back to the old historians, I would say they are more
suspicious of my ideological trappings than that of
Benny Morris, also because I am more relativist. I
admit that my ideology influences my historical
writings, but so what? I mean it is the case for
everybody.
Q: Both Morris and you worked on the same issues,
established the same facts and yet you failed to draw
the same conclusions (Morris keeps on claiming that
even though there was expulsion of thousands Arabs, one
cannot say that there was ever a masterplan of mass
expulsion)...
A: Morris is more positivist: if it is only implicit,
not written, he doesn't want to raise it in his books.
I think historians should go further than that. The
nature of the discussion is that: Morris says that even
if someone says he wants to expulse you from your house
and you run away because you know that it is what he
wants to do, this is not called expulsion. I regard it
as expulsion. I regard the transfer of people from one
neighbourhood in Haifa to another as transfer, not as
dislocation: it is an experience of refugeehood which
is more difficult sometimes than leaving your town
altogether for you see daily the people who took you
house.
So these are the kinds of disagreement. I claim that
they also stem from ideological positions, not just
from facts. I am more anti-Zionist if you want, and
Morris still regards himself as zionist, may be this is
where the difference lies.
Q: You said somewhere that you were "non-Zionist"...
A: No, I meant "post-Zionist". Because, to be really
anti-Zionist would mean leaving Israel altogether: if
you want to serve the Palestinians, you have to leave.
If you help them from inside Israel, then you do allow
Jews to fulfill their dream on a homeland. This is an
important message to the Palestinians as well: there
are five millions Jews there, you cannot return the
clock backwards, you must take them into account.
Whether they came there as a result of an act of
injustice or not, they are part of the reality.
Q: Most of the Palestinians seem now ready to accept
the two state solution...
A: Yes. But it is more difficult for Israel because 20
% of the Israelis are Palestinian, so it's a binational
state. On the other hand one will have another
binational state, Palestine, because I don't see any
Israeli governement ever evicting the settlers, a large
and very hostile Jewish population. In the long run, it
will affect the two state solution, and we will have to
have only one state.
Q: But this is still very unpopular in Israel...
A: Of course! They have a vision of a peace plan that
doesn't include a genuine sovereign Palestinian state,
but bantustans while no single settlement would be
dismantled, the whole of Jerusalem for themselve, no
dealing of the refugees problem: in that case, why
should they oppose the idea of partition? But tell them
that the partition means full sovereign Palestinian
state with an army and so on, eviction of the
settlements, partitioning Jerusalem, some right of
return for the refugees, and you will see what they
think of the partition!
Q: Let's go back to 1948. Mr David Bar-Ilan recently
wrote, as many conservatives think, that the
responsability of what happened must be put on the
Palestinian shoulders because they refused the UN
partition plan...
A: This is an amazing accusation. Because, in 1947, the
UN proposed a solution which was accepted only by one
side, the Jewish one. And, in the history of the United
Nations, usually, if you don't have an agreement of
both sides, you don't implement that solution. There,
the story began to turn bad. The fact is that you force
the solution on a majority of the people living in
Palestine who oppose that solution, then you shouldn't
be surprised that they opposed even by force. This has
nothing to do with the expulsion of the Palestinians,
which was not the result of the rejection of the
partition plan but the result of the Jewish leadership
exploiting that situation to implement an ideology of
transfer. It was clear to the Zionist leadership that
without the uprooting of the local population it would
be impossible to implement the dream of a Jewish nation
state. The policy toward the partition plan has very
little to do with policy of the expulsion: one did not
lead to the other. What happened is that the Jewish
community waited for the right moment and exploited the
right moment to the full.
Q: The Israeli argument goes on by saying that the
Palestinian leadership missed a historic opportunity
when it rejected the partition plan...
A: May be they did. But even if it is a viable argument
-- and I don't think so -- you don't expel an entire
population because it has a stupid leadership. But we
don't even have the right to say they were wrong to
refuse the partition. They viewed Zionism as a
colonialist movement. And there are very little reasons
not to understand that point of view. Just imagine the
Algerian national movement agreeing in the fifties to
divide Algeria into two states, between them and the
white settlers ("les pieds-noirs")! Who would have said
to the Algerian leadership "Don't miss the historic
chance!"? Of course, the Palestinians had other
problems, they had patriarcal, feudal structures,
familial loyalties above national ones. But it has very
little to do with Israel which deliberately expelled
the local population. And, if you want a solution
today, Israel has to take into account that act, in
terms of compensation and in terms of return. Without
that, there will be no just solution for the Palestine
problem. This is a very simple truism which Israelis
refuse to accept.
Q: Israelis in general or mostly the leadership?
A: Israelis in general because of the leadership. But I
think it will change. The other day, a prominent member
of the Labor party, Moshe Katz, leading the Palestinian
committee of the Labor party, raised the idea of the
return of 100 000 Palestinians. Was it a trial balloon
of (Prime minister) Barak? I hope it was, but I doubt
it (Katz initiative was rapidly and strongly rebuked by
his party, B.L.). Barak says it is only a humanitarian
problem to which Israel has nothing to contribute.
Katz' proposal has something to do with the new kind of
post-zionist taking which takes place also in the Labor
party. It's a good sign.
Q: Three new textbooks were recently introduced in the
Israeli schools. Some people are very angry, saying
that those books would "undermine the feeling of
justice of the Zionist project, going to the point that
they question the Jewish right to the Land of Israel"
(novelist Aharon Megged said this is "a moral suicide
leaving our children without all what made us proud of
Israel")...
A: I read the books. They indicate a willingness among
educators in the ministry of Education in Israel to
rewrite the past. It is also a good sign, that would
have been unthinkable ten years ago. It still remains
to be seen how the teachers will use the books in
classrooms, we don't know yet. The move is part of the
dissemination of the views of the new historians and
other sections of the society. Another exemple is the
"T'kuma" TV documentary program (1998). Of course I
would have written it differently but still you can see
the impact of our work. And the new textbooks are very
different from the textbooks that I grew on! It also
arose quiet a row in the Israeli public opinion.
Q: You recently wrote in "Haaretz" that without an
Israeli recognition of acts of past injustice, there
will be no permanent solution with the Palestinians. Do
you think Israel is going in that direction?
A: Not yet because the political system has not
absorbed this solution. And unfortunately I think what
we are going into now is a period in which everybody
would talk about peace but on the ground this peace
would be a substitution of one form of occupation by
another. And it will take several years -- I don't know
how many -- for people in the Palestinian side to
realize that they were taken for a ride, and God knows
how they will react.
Q: The peace process is supposed to end within less
than a year...
A: It is not a peace process. It is one of the reasons
I am in Brussels: the Barak 's governement got an
international recognition as a peace-governement. On
the ground, it does not perform a peace policy. If
people like me succeed in convincing that there is a
problem with the peace process, that all the issues
should be reopened for negociation, may be we could
prevent the next catastrophy. If we don't, it will take
time but people will find out that declaring a
permanent solution for the Palestine question in which
only 60 % of the West Bank and of the Gaza strip are in
Palestinian hands, in which all Jerusalem remains in
Jewish hands, with no eviction of one Jewish
settlement, with Israeli control of borders, water and
economy in Palestine, and no solution for the refugee
problem, all this cannot be called peace. I think there
is a public illusion in the West that you have two
opening positions here: the Israeli opening position,
that I just described, and the Palestinian one, full
independent and sovereign state in the West Bank and
Gaza, but this is not true. There is no Palestinian
peace plan. The Americans, unfortunately the key here,
understand the final stage of the peace process is how
to convince the Palestinians to accept the Israeli
dictate. This is what we call now "peace". And at the
same time, Jewish settlements go on, silent transfer of
Palestinians of Jerusalem goes on, the Palestinians are
offered natural reserves instead of populated areas in
the interim stages, Israel has just completed the plan
today to build a ring road in East Jerusalem to
complete Greater Jerusalem which is 10 % of the West
Bank. And they would give Arafat another medal, so had
the kings of bantustans in South Africa.
Q: Arafat's kind of leadership is disputed but his
reaction is to put the critics in jail as he did on the
27th of November to nine people who had signed a harsh
petition against him...
A: Yes there is a problem. The Palestinian Authority,
under pressure, does two bad things. One is to totally
neglect the democratization and the building of a civic
society, using the negociation with Israel as an
excuse. Secondly, and probably more important, because
it is frustrated by the balance of power, it plays a
double game which is not working too well. On the one
hand they try, courageously in a way, to put forwards
some counterproposals to Israeli proposals, but on the
other hand they play according to the Americans' tune
because they 've no one else's to play. It gives a very
ambivalent picture of their ability to rule. They use
more often power than persuasion to deal with
opposition and they may inflict a lasting damage on the
Palestinian political life in the future that will not
be easy to reverse.
Q: In September, Mr Barak expressed regret in the name
of the Israeli governement for the suffering of the
Palestinian people but at the same time he denied any
sense of guilt or responsability. That prompted Gideon
Levy to answer in "Haaretz": "Are we not responsible
for expulsing people, torturing people, erasing
hundreds of villages, arresting ten of thousands
without trial?..."
A: Gideon Levy was very right. But Barak didn't
"regret", he only said "sorry" for them. He dissociated
the suffering from the Israeli policy. But we are not
only talking about policy in the past, we are talking
about policy in the present. Israelis continue to
inflict suffering on the Palestinians! They do it in
Lebanon, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip. The only
place where they almost stop doing it is in Israel
itself, where the minority of Palestinian Israelis are
now experiencing much better conditions than they did
before.
Q: It seems that, although they are generally well
educated, Jewish Israelis don't really realize (or
don't want to realize) what they did and still do to
the Palestinian people. How do you explain that?
A: It is the fruits of a very long process of
indoctrination starting in the kindergarten,
accompanying all Jewish boys and girls throughout their
life. You don't uproot easily such an attitude which
was planted there by very powefull indoctrination
machine, giving a racist perception of the other, who
is described as primitive, almost non-existing, hostile
-- he is hostile, but the explanation given is that he
was born primitive, Islamic, anti-Semite, not that
someone has taken his land. Add to this the experience
of the young soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, where
they have learnt to treat, like the first Zionist
settlers, the Palestinians as part of the scenery, not
as human beings. Palestinians are like desert,
mosquitos: things you have to conquer by vision,
energy, improvisation. The attitude to the Palestinians
is the other coin of the Zionist success. We were so
successfull like those in the wild West.
Otherwise, you would have had moral problems throughout
the story! You can't have it. You solve that moral
problem by saying these are not equal human beings who
were uprooted, just savages part of the native
population which we conquered as we conquered poverty,
as we conquered hostile mosquitos. This is the main
reason. The second reason is that much of the political
capital of the Jewish state is based on moral
superiority which is demanded by the name of the
Holocaust. I am hated in Israel more than everyone else
because I claim that I have a universal and not a
Zionist lesson from the Holocaust. In the name of the
Holocaust, I claim that Israel should be ashamed. If
you lived in Israel, you would understand that it is
really doing too much and may be I should be more
cautious when I do it because this may be a U-turn for
too many people. But this is exactly the problem.
Although many things had been done to the Palestinians
before the Holocaust, the Holocaust justifies
everything, what has been done before or after it. Even
someone great intellectual like Martin Buber could have
said the most stupid sentence of all: "We had to do a
small injustice in order to rectify a big injustice".
How could you say this! Why should the one be connected
to the other?
Q: Did you first become communist or "new historian"?
A: I have to correct something: I like life too much to
be communist! I am socialist. True I am member of
Hadash which is a front where you find the communist
party to which I don't belong. You also find the
non-Zionist Arab-Jewish group to which I belong. I
think both my political commitment and historian known
position developped simultaneously. And one supported
the other. Because of my ideology I understood
documents I saw in the archives the way I understood
them, and because of the documents in the archives I
became more convinced in the ideological way I took. A
complicated process! Some colleague told me I ruined
our cause by admitting my ideological platform. Why?
Everbody in Israel and Palestine has an ideological
platform. 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.
Q: I suppose you would agree with many Arabs who say a
Jewish state cannot be a democratic state?
A: It can't. If the identity of people is connected to
religion or ethnic group and not to citizenship, it
means that any citizen who does not belong to that
nationalism, religion or ethnicity is a second rate
citizen. If you declare that the state belongs to one
nation in a binational state, you immediately create a
discriminative state which cannot be democratic. It is
like in Belgium: if you declare the Belgian state
exclusively Flemish or exclusively Walloon, it would
not be declared a democratic state.
Q: Israel would answer that many Arab states declare
themselve "Islamic states"...
A: I criticize them as well...
Q: You admit that most of Jewish Israelis don't share
your views. Do you see things evolve soon?
A: In absolute term, you are right: we are a small
group of people, but in relative numbers it has grown
immensely. Two exemples: when we started our work as
new historians, there were only three of us. Morris,
myself and Shlaim who was not even living in Israel.
One day we were all three in my car driving to
Jerusalem and I said: if we have now a lethal accident,
this is the end of new history in Israel! Now, there is
a proliferation of academicians and so one sharing
those views. It is not a quantitive impressive fact but
it is a qualitative one because people at the heart of
cultural production in Israel have been convinced by
our views. Show me someone who works on TV or in a
theater or in the film industry and even among the
leading journalists (true, not everyone) who does not
accept our point of view. Second exemple: the vote for
Hadash. Again, it is ridiculous, but you have to
understand that in 1992, only 2.000 Jews voted for
Hadash, in 1996, 6.000 and in 1999, 15.000! Yes it's a
long way. I used to say to my colleagues that if they
are looking for quick results they are wrong. It may
take twenty years, but Israel will change like South
Africa. If apartheid could have been toppled down, then
the negative aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict
could be eventually be removed. My fear is that, in
case of crisis, the Israeli people in the middle would
rather choose to join the nationalist camp. Surveys
prove that it is the trend. People are asked: If you
have only two choices, a theocratic non democratic
Jewish state or a democratic non Jewish state, which
one would you prefer? And a majority of the Jews --
about 60 % -- answer the non democratic Jewish state.
We have to work hard on this middle ground, people of
the silent majority, people who don't have beliefs and
are more worried about the daily concerns.
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