For Ilan Pappé, Gaza genocide brings more urgency to studying the history and crimes of Zionism

A packed audience came to listen to Ilan Pappé’s talk in Pantin, Seine-Saint-Denis, just outside of Paris on June 23 with three full rooms, two transmitting the event on screens.

He discussed the situation in Gaza, the history of the elimination of Palestinians by successive Israeli governments, and the political support for Israel in Europe. 

The talk comes as his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine was re-published in French by La Fabrique after the original publisher, Fayard, cancelled a reprint.
 
Originally published in 2006, the book has started selling again massively since Israel's war on Gaza began last year.

Since October 2023, more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed, 16,000 of them children.
 
“I was surprised to see Fayard stop distributing the book the moment it became in demand again,” he tells The New Arab. 
 
“This had to do with the change of ownership.”

Fayard now belongs to the Hachette group, owned by French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, a devoted catholic, heir of an energy distribution and media empire.

Though his father was a resistant during the Second World War and his maternal grandmother was a Jewish refugee in London working for la France Libre, led by Charles de Gaulle, he himself is a supporter of far-right ideas.

Fayard “used some technicalities to justify the end of the contract,” Pappé adds.

“I was disappointed to see that, in France, freedom of speech could be suppressed this way. But it goes beyond my case, it has to do with the era we live in, where ideologies and political positions are restricting our freedom of expression, especially when it concerns Palestine.”

Pappé started his research on Palestine in Israel, studying history, a subject that fascinated him from school.

“When I chose a topic for a doctorate, it was clear to me that 1948 was a formative year in the history of my country. And I began writing my PhD when Israel, Britain, France, the United Nations and the United States declassified documents from 1948 for the first time.”

After graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, he then moved to England to study at the University of Oxford, completing a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984 under the supervision of Albert Hourani and Roger Owen.

His thesis, titled British Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East, 1948-1951: Britain and the Arab-Israeli conflict, became the basis for his first book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51, released in 1988.

His work soon offered an unconventional view of Israel's establishment in 1948, and re-read the narrative about the ‘exodus’ of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from the land in 1948.

His analysis is that the expulsions were not decided as a reaction to aggression, as other historians have argued, but constituted a planned ethnic cleansing, following ‘Plan Dalet’, drawn up in 1947 by Israel's future leaders, including David Ben Gurion.

“I saw things in the archives that totally contrasted with what I knew about 1948 as a student. I saw the early commands distributed to the Israeli army, sent by a high command. And they were very clear: ‘occupy the village, kill the men, expel the people’. Then it repeated itself again and again. It undermined my faith in the project of Zionism as a whole.”

Born in Haifa, Israel, to a family of Ashkenazi Jews who came from Germany after fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s, he says that his “responsibility lies more with making sure such crimes are not repeated against any people than in protesting the Israeli Zionist project at any cost.”

“What is happening now in Gaza is genocide,” he insists, “for decades, Israel practised ethnic cleansing, and as Palestinians didn’t disappear, the far-right in power with Benjamin Netanyahu wants to go further.

"It’s a tragedy and a real danger for Palestinians but also for the survival of Israel itself,” he tells The New Arab. 

That’s why he saluted the decision by South Africa to take the case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Pappé is also the author of A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), The Modern Middle East (2005), Ten Myths About Israel (2017), and a new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic.

A few hours after our meeting, he was already back in England promoting the latter. 

“Anti-semitism is being brought up as a major issue in France, but also in Germany and in the US,” he says.

“And it's such a shallow debate; it's being used as a political tool. The left is using it to terrify people against voting for the right. The right is using it to create Islamophobic support for its voters.

"It's a diversion from dealing with the real issue: What is Europe today? Can we accept positively the kind of Europe that we created because we were colonialists? Anti-semitism for me is like a sideshow that diverts people from dealing with far more serious fundamental issues that are at the heart of the problem of our democracies.”

The book analyses the roots of the Zionist lobby, and its support among three groups: some Evangelist Christians, who believe the return of the Jews in Palestine is a sign of the return of Jesus; the Jewish European ‘aristocracy’, who supported the move of Jews of Eastern Europe far away, considering them as ‘communists’; and the imperialist racist western military-industrial complex, for practical reasons, to favour capitalism and colonisation of white people in Palestine rather than an Arab democracy.

“When Europeans mention the Holocaust guilt, it’s just an excuse,” Pappé strongly believes.

“The guilt complex is weaponised to avoid dealing with real issues like Islamophobia and other forms of racism.”

Melissa Chemam is a French Algerian freelance journalist and culture writer based in between Paris, Bristol and Marseille, and travelling beyond

Follow her on X: @melissachemam