The anti-Zionist Israeli scholar told Democracy Now! that he sees signs that a free Palestine may be possible in which Jewish and Arab people can coexist.
National March on Washington to Free Palestine, Nov. 4, 2023. (Elvert Barnes, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Edward Carver
Common Dreams
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, a prominent anti-Zionist, expressed hope for a free, democratic Palestine in which Jewish and Arab people can coexist, during an interview on Tuesday with Democracy Now! following his interrogation by U.S. federal agents last week.
Pappé, director of the European Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, was interrogated by the agents for two hours about his views after arriving in Detroit on a flight from London on May 13.
The agents took his phone away before returning it. Pappé initially said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had interrogated him but later clarified that he was not sure which U.S. federal agency the agents represented.
Pappé cited the interrogation in Detroit as an example of the “sheer panic and desperation” of Israel and pro-Israel lobbies due to fear the country will become a “pariah state.” The interrogation came amid crackdowns on pro-Palestine demonstrations on U.S. college campuses, as well as arrests of protestors and cancellations of pro-Palestine intellectual activity in Europe.
In Tuesday’s interview, Pappé denounced Israel’s historical policy toward Palestinians, declaring it to be clear-sighted in its cruelty and intentional in its methods, as he has long done in his scholarly work, most notably in his 2007 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Referring to events in the late 1940s, he told Democracy Now! that
“the Nakba is a bit of a misleading term, because it means, in Arabic, a ‘catastrophe.’ But really what the Palestinians suffered was not an actual catastrophe, but rather ethnic cleansing, which is a clear policy motivated by clear ideology.”
“There is not one moment in the history of the Palestinians in Palestine, since the arrival of Zionism in Palestine, in which Palestinians are not potentially under danger of losing their home, their fields, their businesses, and their homeland,” he added.
Pappé has argued that as ugly as that history may be, the current war in Gaza is even worse — a step up from ethnic cleansing to genocide, in his view. His forthcoming book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, documents the influence of the pro-Zionist lobbyists in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere.
Despite that influence, Pappé said that he sees signs that the ideological hold of Zionism is weakening, and a freer, more democratic Palestine may be possible, telling Democracy Now!:
“I think we are seeing processes, important processes, that are leading to the collapse of the Zionist project. Hopefully, the Palestinian national movement and anyone else involved in Israel and Palestine would be able to replace this apartheid state, this oppressive regime, with a democratic one for everyone who lives between the river and the sea and for all the Palestinians who were expelled from there since 1948 until today.”
“I am really hopeful that there will be a different kind of life,” he added, “for both Jews and Arabs between the river and the sea under a democratic, free Palestine.”
Edward Carver is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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A two-state solution IS the only solution. And an end-to-end wall clearly separating the two nations. From what I understand, Ashkenazi Jews are NOT Semites, originating in Eastern Europe.
Anyone who thinks that life in the squatter entity will return to the norm of apartheid is deranged. The end of the colonial project is written on the wall for all who have eyes to see.
More Zionist Lies.
Netanyahu and Herzog themselves are leading a new lying hasbara campaign to divert attention from the ICC warrants.
It shows old footage from October of 5 Israeli women soldiers captured by Hamas at one of the Gaza Watchtowers.
They are bound and told to sit on the floor before being taken away in a vehicle.
They are not beaten or obviously maltreated in any way.
A deliberate false impression is given is that these are just innocent women taken hostage at random instead of captured soldiers, prisoners of war manning a forward military post.
Captions in English are added with no relation to the footage to suggest that the women are threatened with being raped.
This has been given the publicity that you would expect by the lying corporate western media, with the footage shown under headlines screaming “SAVAGES!”, “CHILLING!” and similar.
This is what the Zionists do.
Their “mass rapes” stories in the NYT quickly fell apart, so they just double down and produce some more.
The hundreds of thousands of extremely violent settlers in the West Bank, armed and full of hate for any Palestinians are unlikely to allow a peaceful arrangement to exist. Alastair Crooke has explained his reactions when hearing the real desires of this large group. The refusal to listen to any truthful account of Zionist misdeeds in most Western media and governments is, if anything, getting worse.
If Israeli officials don’t want Israel to be viewed as a pariah state, they need to quit behaving like one. They need to treat all people under their jurisdiction — in Israel and in the occupied territories — as full human beings. Easy peasy, except in the course of doing that they’ll need to stop being hateful, racist, nihilistic scumbags. That might be somewhat more difficult for these morality-denying ratbastards.
Jewish people have been at the forefront of calling out the Gaza Genocide for what it is.
Intellectuals and public figures like Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, Medea Benjamin, Miko Peled, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and many others. And of course many thousands of ordinary Jewish people who are not public figures.
They have been viciously targeted and threatened by the Zionist establishment and deserve great respect.