Ilan Pappé

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Ilan Pappé (born 1954) is an Israeli historian who teaches at Haifa University. He is one of the "New Historians" who have re-examined and hold controversial views of the history of Israel and of Zionism.

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[edit] Education and writings

Pappé was born in Haifa. He graduated from the Hebrew University in 1978, and obtained his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1984. He was the head of the academic institute for peace in Givat Haviva from 1993 to 2000, and is currently the chair of the Emil Touma institute for Palestinian studies.

His early books dealt with Israeli policy in 1948, a subject he has returned to in his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. His A History of Modern Palestine covers the last two hundred years and focuses on cultural and social issues. His The Modern Middle East is a textbook that brings to the fore the social and cultural developments in the region in the last century.

[edit] Politics

In 1996 Pappé ran in the Knesset elections as number seven on the Hadash list [1]. After years of being involved in the peace camp and talks, Pappé supported the boycott of Israel in 2005, including the academic boycott. According to Pappé, the reason for wanting the boycott is the "need to apply external pressure on Israel as the best means of ending the worst occupation in recent history".[2] As a result, University of Haifa President Aharon Ben-Ze'ev called on Pappé to resign, saying: "it is fitting for someone who calls for a boycott of his university to apply the boycott himself." He said that Pappé would not be ostracized, since that would undermine academic freedom, but he should leave voluntarily.[3] In the same year, Pappé initiated the annual Israeli Right of Return conferences, which called for the unconditional right of return of the Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948.

Pappé was involved in a controversy over an M.A. thesis by Teddy Katz, about an alleged massacre by Israeli troops in 1948 in the Palestinian village of Tantura.[4] Pappé publicly supported Katz. In December 2000, as defendant in a libel case, Katz retracted some details of his allegations about the massacre, but then retracted his retraction. The M.A. thesis, which had originally received an unprecedented 97% mark, was reconsidered and eventually disqualified by the University of Haifa because of alleged research errors. Katz was subsequently awarded a "non-research" MA. [5] [6]

[edit] Books

  • Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Macmillan, 1988, ISBN 0312015739
  • The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951, I.B. Tauris, 1992, ISBN 1850438196
  • The Israel/Palestine Question, Routledge, 1999, ISBN 0415169488
  • A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, Cambridge University Press, 2003 , ISBN 0521556325
  • The Modern Middle East, Routledge, 2005, ISBN 0415214092
  • The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2006, ISBN 1851684670

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

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