If it surprises you that the person who falsely teaches the world that 1948 was a story of Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and who was a key instigator of BDS, and who now says that, inshallah, Israel’s days are numbered is Jewish, it shouldn’t.
If it does, let’s look at some history before continuing:
- Circa 600 BCE: The Judean Ravshkeh joins Assyrian besiegers against his own people
- 2nd c. BCE: Hellenized Jews implore Antiochus IV Epiphanes to attack Jerusalem
- 1st c. CE: Bar Kamtza encourages Romans to destroy the Second Temple
- 50 – 120 CE: Parts of the Christian Bible invite a negative view of Jews, including, ahistorically, as Christ-killers. Were its authors Jewish Christians?
- 1144: Theobold, a Jew turned monk, is implicated in spreading one of the first blood libels, concerning the ritual murder of Christian children
- 1239: Nikolas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, tells Pope Gregory IX that the Talmud is evil. First Talmud burnings begin.
- 1263: Pablo Christiani, a Jew turned friar, convenes a humiliating debate with Rabbi ben Nachman in front of the king of Aragon in order to facilitate Jewish conversion
- 1509: Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Jew turned Catholic theologian, urges banning of the Talmud
- 1860s: Jacob Brafman, a rabbi’s son turned Russian Orthodox, writes Jewish conspiracy tracts asserting that Jews will enslave non-Jews, etc. It is a precursor to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Skipping over many more such individuals, let’s now meet Prof. Pappé:
- 2006: Ilan Pappé, Israeli born son of German Nazi escapees, publishes The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pitched as a newly authoritative history of 1948 based on declassified Israeli archives, it asserts that the Palestinians were victims of a long plotted Zionist plan to expel and massacre them. Arab states only figure into the story as bit players who did scramble at some point to rescue the Palestinians but were doomed by Zionist might and demonic fervor.
If you’re not sure that this version is inaccurate – perhaps you learned it at school! – have a look at this video, which compares Pappé’s text to newspaper archives.
There is much to say about Ilan Pappé – that his thesis adviser at Oxford, Albert Hourani, had been a spokesman for Palestinian leader and Nazi confederate Hajj Amin al-Husseini; that he made a run for the Knesset on the Communist ticket in 1999; that he pushed for a world boycott of Israeli universities while himself was a professor at Haifa University, prompting his dismissal in 2007 (he now plays the beleaguered exile in the UK); that he churns out an endless stream of books that demonize Jews, including one with Noam Chomsky…but I will leave it to the interested reader to investigate him further.
My concern here is Pappé’s alarming popularity after October 7 and the piss-poor response this menace has received. Most Israel-supporters who have heard of Norman Finkelstein or Peter Beinart draw a blank on Pappé. Yet go onto any social media platform – I’m not talking dark web, but the nominally respectable ones – and Pappé is a star. If you happen to live in the U.S. (or perhaps anywhere), his books are likely in your local public library. They are also normative book club fare and make it onto school resource lists. On Amazon, his Ethnic Cleansing ranks #7 in Emigration & Immigration Studies and #11 in Church & State Religious Studies (not bad!), and his books have been translated into at least six languages. Check out any Israel/Palestinian topic on Wikipedia, recently outed for its flagrant anti-Israel bias, and you will see Pappé listed as a reference.
Indeed, SuperSummary, publishers of study guides for such works as The Odyssey and Romeo and Juliet, came out with one for The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in March 2024. (In fairness, they publish many thousands of study guides, so I searched their site for Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. It gave me The Case for Christ and various other Cases. Then I searched by author for Ephraim Karsh, and it gave me a memoir by Sara Smarsh.)
Then there’s Pappé’s academic speaking circuit. Just days after October 7 he spoke at UC Berkeley to “contextualize” what happened. And in the past few months, his gigs have included Cambridge University and MIT; but woe to any student who questions his appearances. Indeed, Pappé is the go-to for anyone seeking a scholarly patina when shouting “colonialism,” “genocide,” “apartheid,” and more.
Criticizing Pappé Is Punishable
I read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine cover to cover (a vein-popping exercise) and in August posted a one-star review on Amazon. It drily cited his text, noted discrepancies with other sources, and critiqued his bypassing of the Arab invasion of Israel. It also questioned the many reviewers who praise Pappé’s “meticulous documentation,” given that Pappé provides no text for most footnotes; rather, just a volume and page number referencing archives that are in Hebrew and unavailable to the public. Finally, I noted that “truth-telling” should not be considered the strength of a book whose author is on record disclaiming an interest in truth.
The following day I received an email from Amazon saying that my post had violated their “Community Guidelines.” Profanity? Hate speech? Sexual content? External links? Gibberish? I saw nothing on their list that applied. Evidently, Soviet-style, it is not necessary to advise the accused of the charge.
But as it turned out, the review was still up when I checked several weeks later, so I assumed that some viewer had originally clicked “Report” on me (there’s no “Unhelpful” button; only “Helpful” or “Report”) but that human reason later prevailed. However, when I checked after some six months, the review was gone, though they’d never informed me. Hmmm.
My first impulse was to forget about it. Then for giggles, I decided to post a 4-star review titled Amazing Book with Some Minor Flaws, in which the “flaws” were to be understood as something more. The coded critique closed by saying that although Pappé completely contradicts authoritative sources, I trusted his version because he’s Jewish (this is exactly how people think and it doesn’t violate Amazon strictures). I was very curious to see how the bots/humans would react.
Interestingly, within two days, my review had eleven upvotes! This level of engagement is entirely abnormal for Amazon, which has thousands of products. Even older favorable reviews had fewer upvotes. However, a few days later, there was a turnaround: I received a second “violation” email from Amazon, but this time, I was – as I remain – banned from all further reviewing. It would appear that some combination of politicized bot thugs and human thugs are monitoring if not running Amazon, and Pappé is a precious asset for the cause.
I share these details because my takeaway is disturbing: anti-Zionism (if you still want to call it that) has penetrated so many sectors and so deeply that even the largest online retailer in the world, certainly the U.S., is now ideologically totalitarian (Search “Amazon antisemitism.” It’s interesting).
It Won’t Get Better
To say that Jew-hating Jews are extremely problematic would be an understatement. But worse in my view is the passivity of the response.
Although we live in an age when virtually anyone can make their opinion known worldwide, in the nineteen years since Ethnic Cleansing was published, I know of only one serious article rebutting Pappé; namely, The Liar as Hero, by Benny Morris, himself a controversial historian. And it was not written until five years after the book came out. It’s hard to find much else. If you go on YouTube today, you’ll see hundreds of videos by Pappé and his fans, with new ones cropping up regularly; but virtually nothing refuting him (the one referenced earlier is hard-hitting, but obscure).
How can one expect a book that is slanderous in its very title to circulate for almost two decades in multiple languages and think nothing will come of it? Where were all the cash-rich Jewish organizations who let this happen? I myself contacted two pro-Israel groups asking for help getting the book out of U.S. tax-funded public libraries. The first one said it was better not to draw attention to the matter; the second never responded.
But if you want a sense of how well the book is playing, simply read some of the reviews on goodreads.com, an international site that to my knowledge is not politically jiggered. Over 90% of readers gave it four or five stars. Here are some comments from the over 6,000 five-star ratings:
- “Pappe writes [about] how they abused and manipulated the Arabs and their hospitality to achieve a Jewish state.”
- “What a courageous book…Pappe details…the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people enacted by the settler state of Israel.”
- “Near the end, Pappé writes that, were Israeli Jews to acknowledge the Nakba, they “would have to recognise that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare” (246). Painfully true in light of Israel’s recent announcement that it will heighten its genocidal offensive”
- “If you believe that what’s happening in Palestine started on October 7, 2023, I implore you to read this book.”
Post October 7, many people who sincerely wish to understand the conflict are turning to The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Sadly, what they take away dovetails with today’s equally deceitful war coverage, in which even the age-old baby killer trope is peddled daily via violence porn of unknown provenance and authenticity. The net effect is a cemented view that Israel is simply a misbegotten monster state and that the only opinion left to have is to be pro- or con-baby killing.
We surely need to commend the obscure Pappé for his decades-long labor to destroy Israel via faux scholarship. He’s of a piece with other ethnically Jewish individuals before him who for unclear reasons demonize other Jews with unremitting passion. They speak as “insiders,” forever “disclosing” some heretofore hidden malevolence that demands the world’s refreshed moral outrage… and it works. In Pappé’s case, this meant “revealing” that 1948 is not what we thought but rather was a strictly killer-Zionist op. Worse, many other Jews accept and promulgate the slander – as academics, journalists, activists, etc.
As for the abused party, they’re typically blissfully unaware or disinclined to fight back. The time has come for this pattern to be examined.
Our fundraising campaign ends in a few days and we still are well short of our target to keep Israellycool going:
