<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[On Peace And Critics: Interview With Ilan Pappé –&nbsp;OpEd]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>By Emanuel Stoakes | Eurasiareview | Apr 3, 2011</p>
<p><em>(Emanuel Stoakes talks to  the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé about the  prospect of a peace  settlement in the Middle East, the plight of the  Palestinian refugees,  and his response to his numerous critics.)</em></p>
<p><strong>After attending the  Inaugural Lecture for the European Centre for  Palestine Studies at  Exeter University (the first institution of its  kind in our country), I  met the controversial Professor Ilan Pappé, who  – with some gentle  persuasion on my part – agreed to do an online  interview on the  Israel-Palestine conflict.</strong></p>
<p>In brief, Pappé’s association with  “controversy” stems from, amongst  other things, his much-debated claim  that Palestine was “ethnically  cleansed” (in part at least) in the war  of 1948; his claim, unpopular  in Israel, that “Zionism is far more  dangerous to the Middle East than  Islam”; and because he has been  accused of being, simply, a  politically-motivated distorter of the  historical “truth” by rival  scholars.</p>
<p>Benny Morris, one of the  prominent “New Historians” of Israeli  history (a category that includes  Pappé as well as the venerable Avi  Shlaim) described a book by Pappé on  Palestine as “appalling…  [containing] errors of a quantity and a quality  that are not found in  serious historiography”; be that as it may, it is  worth reviewing  Morris’ own justification for Palestinian  dispossession.*</p>
<p>King’s College’s Efraim Karsh and the inimitable  Melanie Phillips in  the Spectator are also voluble detractors; by  contrast, John Pilger  famously called him Israel’s “bravest” and “most  principled” historian,  whilst supporters in the academic world,  including Noam Chomsky and  Nur Masalha, continue to collaborate and  concur with him.</p>
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<p class="wp-caption-text">Israel</p>
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<p>Whatever one may think of his opinions, Pappé has  borne a heavy cost  for his heterodoxy: members of his family have  shunned him due to his  views, and he faced calls to resign from his  former lecturing post at  the University of Haifa, prompted by his  political activities, and  issued by none other than the university’s  President.</p>
<p><strong>I began by asking Professor Pappé if he  believed that peace  between Israel and the Palestinian Authority could  be achieved through  their (apparently moribund) peace talks, and if not,  why?</strong></p>
<p>Pappé: I have very little faith in the current  phase of the  negotiations. As in the past, it seems that the Israeli  government is  exploiting the ‘peace process’ to receive immunity for its  continued  dispossession of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the  barbaric  siege on the Gaza Strip. The current phase has already been  exploited  by Israel to expand its settlement in the Greater Jerusalem  Area –  which has been accompanied by demolition of houses and eviction  of  people – and to tighten its grip over the Palestinian villages and   towns which are in the vicinity of the ever-growing Jewish colonies of   the West Bank. Similarly, it felt free to tighten the siege over Gaza,   despite its promise to the international community to ease it.</p>
<p><strong>At  the recent inaugural lecture of the European Centre for  Palestine  Studies at Exeter University, you introduced Filipo Grandi  from United  Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in  the Near East  (UNRWA), who talked about the fate of the Palestinian  refugees. Could  you briefly outline the current human rights situation  of the refugees  and comment on their prospects for achieving some sort  of improvement in  their lives?</strong></p>
<p>These are refugees who have lived in camps  for more than sixty years  – an unprecedented existence in modern times.  Their situation varies  between being denied access to meaningful jobs  and benefits in Lebanon  to a very limited access to the local economy  and state benefits in  Jordan. And we should not forget the refugee camps  in the West Bank and  the Gaza Strip, where people suffer from the  double oppression of  being both occupied and refugees.</p>
<p>There are  also internal refugees in Israel itself and refugee  communities in the  world at large. Those in Israel live in better  conditions than those in  the occupied territories or the Arab world;  but psychologically they had  to undergo unbearable experiences for the  past sixty years, such as  watching their houses, businesses, factories,  shops, fields and villages  being pillaged and taken over by Jews.</p>
<p>There are two elements to  this predicament. One are the dismal  conditions in which people live,  caged in camps that even when they  become neighborhoods are on the  margins of local society and in a limbo  existence. Secondly, there have  been more and more refugees as result  of Israeli policy since 1948.  There is no end to the dispossession,  while at the same time the  international community had already declared  on 11 December 1948 through  the UNGA resolution 194 that all these  refugees have the unconditional  right to return. As long as this  continues, there is very little hope  for peace and reconciliation in  Israel and Palestine.</p>
<p><strong>In  the publication “Gaza in Crisis” (by yourself and Noam  Chomsky) you  mention that you are working on a book with a ‘particular  focus on the  Israeli decisions taken in the early years’, that you  claim ‘have not  been deviated from’ up to the present. What were those  decisions and how  has the political class in Israel consented to their  continued  application?</strong></p>
<p>The gist of these decisions was that there  could be no overall  strategy for Gaza after the Israeli ‘disengagement’  from it in 2005.  Therefore, there were two options for the Israeli  policy makers. Either  they would succeed in subjecting the Strip to  Israel’s will – and  putting it under a joint Israeli and PA control –  encircled by barbered  and electric wire. In such a case life would have  depended on Israel’s  goodwill, and the people would have to resign to a  life in Ghetto-like  conditions. Should the people of Gaza resist the  first option they  would be subjected to collective punishment until they  surrender – this  is the second option. There is no real bottom line to  collective  punishment, but given the circumstances on the ground, by  inertia it  turns into a slow genocide. The Israeli public did not only  endorse  this policy, in the main it demands more punitive and more  drastic  actions against the people of Gaza.</p>
<p><strong>Changing topic  slightly, how do you view the Israeli claims  that Hamas hides amongst  civilian infrastructure and uses human  shields, as a justification for  civilian deaths as “collateral damage”  to IDF offences? What evidence is  there for this, and is it a fair  point?</strong></p>
<p>This always  strikes me as a curious allegation. Gaza is the most  densely inhabited  urban space upon earth, where can Hamas operate from  within a territory  that is no bigger that the largest metropolises in  the world? When you  cage a million and half people in a tiny squeezed  space like this, and  they resist, and you retaliate, you know in  advance what kind of  collateral damage you are going to inflict.</p>
<p><strong>Do you see the  Palestinian Authority as being possibly  “corrupt and complicit” in the  oppression of those in the West bank, as  has been suggested by some  commentators?</strong></p>
<p>I do not think the PA is more corrupt than  any government in the  world, or let alone in the Middle East. It is  complicit but so is  anyone who in a way who does not actively resist the  occupation. And  yet, resisting today is almost like signing your own  death certificate  so that one should be very careful to make moral  judgments from the  outside.</p>
<p>One can make political judgments and  the one I offer is that the PA  helps the occupation and the illusion of a  peace process and its seems  that its dismantlement could be more  beneficial for the attempt to  expose the rouge nature of the Israeli  regime and the criminal  character of its policies.</p>
<p><strong>One of  your most controversial claims is that Palestine (as  it was) was  “ethnically cleansed” – at least in part – as a part of a  systematic  attempt to create a Jewish state at the cost of its Arab  inhabitants. In  the book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” you write  that the  Hagana’s Plan Dalet documents such intentions. Could you  clarify and  explain your position on this subject? Furthermore, how do  you respond  to the fierce criticism of your views? For example, David  Pryce-Jones,  described you in the Literary Review as “an Israeli  academic who has  made his name by hating Israel and everything it  stands for.” Others  have simply called you a falsifier. What is your  response?</strong></p>
<p>I  am not going to respond to name calling – “Nazi”, “Falsifier”,   “Communist”, “self-hating Jew” or whatever. I am willing to respond to   any concrete question. Plan Dalet is a cluster of orders send by the   Hagana High Command from the beginning of March 1948. Each command   instructed a specific unit to occupy villages or urban neighbourhoods,   destroy them and expel the people living in them. The famous document   Plan D, published on March 10, 1948 referred only to the areas the new   state would occupy from the UN Arab states, but it included the same   graphic description of how to deal with the native population of   Palestine. The plan as published and the systematic cluster of orders,   together with other evidence I cite in my book, show a clear intention   to ethnically cleanse Palestine from its indigenous population, as   indeed happened. Moreover, as shown by Nur Masalha, there is already   supporting evidence that this intention existed from early on in Zionist   thought and strategy.</p>
<p><strong>Finally, could you comment on the  under-discussed issue of  resources and their allocation in both the West  Bank and Gaza,  particularly water. Do you think that there is any hope  for parity  between Palestinians and Israelis in the future in this area,  without a  separate Palestinian state?</strong></p>
<p>No hope  whatsoever. The Israelis are intent of robbing the  Palestinians of land,  water and any other natural resources – this is  what dispossession is  all about.</p>
<p>(Note: In an infamous interview with Haaretz, Morris  controversially  justified the “tragedy” of the uprooting of Palestinians  thus: “there  was no other choice… Even the great [sic] American  democracy [sic]  could not have been created without the annihilation of  the Indians.  There are cases in which the overall, final good [sic]  justifies harsh  and cruel acts that are committed in the course of  history…”)</p>
<p><em>&#8211; Emanuel Stoakes contributed this interview to PalestineChronicle.com.</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.eurasiareview.com/on-peace-and-critics-interview-with-ilan-pappe-oped-03042011/">Source</a></p>
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