Ilan Pappé — ‘Dehistoricizing Oct. 7’

Consortium News, October 25, 2023 —

The Israeli historian explains the history essential to understanding the current attacks on Gaza.

And the danger of suppressing that history. He spoke last Thursday at UC Berkeley.

Video courtesy of Hatem Bazian is also a professor in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ilan Pappé is the author of many books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which he documents that ethnic cleansing was a long-standing Zionist goal that was planned in detail by David Ben-Gurion in the Red House headquarters outside Tel Aviv. It included a much greater number of atrocities against Palestinians in the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s than Western establishments acknowledge.

Pappé says it was the start of a process of ethnic cleansing that continues until today, especially in what what is happening today in Gaza. (Israel expelled 36 villages between 1948 and 1967 inside Israel, Pappé says.) He says that some of the kibbutzim that Hamas occupied on Oct. 7 were built over the ruins of former Palestinian villages, many of whose inhabitants were expelled to Gaza.

About the The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Publisher’s Weekly wrote:

“Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappé offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.”