Ilan Pappé - Pt1 - Compilation

Ilan Pappé: that the land of Palestine is the land of Israel. Always when you hear it, think about someone coming to you in the dead of night in London and tells you, I used to live in your house 2,000 years ago, and because of that, the house belongs to me. And the next day, they come with the police.

Speaker 2: Yeah!

Ilan Pappé: And the next day, they come with the police, who says, They have a right, you have to give them half of their house. Zionism was a settler-colonialist movement that was running away from persecution, but it wanted as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. This was the aim of Zionism in the late 19th century. This is the aim of Zionism today. We are all entitled to go through the same process that happened in South Africa. We are entitled, as Jews and as Palestinians, to live in one democratic state where everyone is equal, and stop and reject an ideology that claims that some people are equal and some people are not. I'm asking you, for the sake even for Jewish communities around the world, because settler colonialism in Israel will become worse. As the century will continue. For the sake of the people who live here and the sake of the people who live there, we are entitled to have the same kind of democracy. Nakba is an operation of ethnic cleansing, which was a systematic expulsion of the Palestinians in order to de-Arabize Palestine and create on its ruins a Jewish state.

Speaker 2: In 1948.

Ilan Pappé: In 1948, but—

Speaker 3: Okay, thank you.

Ilan Pappé: No, no, no, it's important to I have to say, the Nakba continues, because only 50% of the people were expelled, and only 80% of the land was taken. The Nakba continues every day in Gaza, in Nablus, in the Galilee, in the Nakab. And we should have a discussion about the destruction of Palestine.

Speaker 4: For our final keynote, it's a man that is well known to all of you, Ilan Pappé. And as Hanan Ashrawi mentioned earlier today, in an age of alternative facts, I think we can all agree on the importance of being able to discern truth from fiction. While alternative facts may be a new term in American politics, the idea behind it is far from original. As we all know, for decades colonial powers have developed and propagated false narratives to legitimize the subjugation of indigenous peoples. Like colonists before them, Israel has relied on alt-history, a false or distorted account of history, to justify its policies towards the Palestinians. If the so-called conflict is ever going to be resolved, the events that led to the creation of Israel, namely the Nakba, must be reckoned with. This reality that an honest understanding of the past is necessary to pave a better tomorrow is the reason we invited historian Ilan Pappé to today's conference. Ilan Pappé has written prolifically and with honesty and courage on the history of Israel and the events that facilitated its creation. His 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, with its painfully honest title, created controversy but is nonetheless a seminal book on this issue. Professor Pappé chose the title knowing that it would be provocative But that it was also true to the research presented in his book. As I told him at dinner last night, one can say that in choosing the title, Professor Pappé was being more timeless than timely, as I'm sure as the West slowly comes to better grips with the reckoning of the history of Israel, future generations will find the title of his book progressively less controversial, at least I hope.

Jessica Desvarieux: Thank you.

Speaker 4: Ethnic Cleansing, of course, is just one of many books Professor Pappé has written. He has an upcoming book entitled 10 Myths About Israel, which will be released shortly and will surely be a valuable resource to those looking for a critical and honest assessment of pro-Israel narratives. Professor Pappé is currently professor of history and director of the European Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK. He was born in Haifa, And prior to coming to the UK, he was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. His keynote today will focus on how an honest assessment of history is necessary in order to resolve the seemingly intractable conflict. Professor Pappé.

Ilan Pappé: Thank you.

Speaker 2: Need some water? Water?

Ilan Pappé: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Ilan Pappé: Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm really honored to be here, and thank you for the warm and empowering reception. I told my dear friend Clayton that We have traveled further than anyone else. For me, it's midnight. For him, it's 2 o'clock in the morning. And yet we were put at the end of the conference, and we wondered what was the hidden agenda. Either they thought we can wake you up after a very long and exhaustive day, or they thought that you are sleepy anyway, so you won't notice the provocations that both of us are going to present to you. So we'll see which one of the two narratives is valid. Bill Quant, in a series of articles in the Journal of Palestine Studies, very cleverly charted what makes an American president's legacy about Israel and Palestine valid. And he pointed to 3 major factors that inform such a legacy. One is the personality of the president. The second one are the lobbies, and by the lobbies he meant both the Israeli AIPAC lobby, both AIPAC and the Christian Zionist lobbies. And the third group, he called them the professionals, the people who who work in the State Department, in the National Security Council, in the intelligence community, and who are there not necessarily just because of their political affiliation to the presidency but also because, at least allegedly, because of their professionalism.

Jessica Desvarieux: This one?

Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.

Ilan Pappé: He concluded, and I think he's right, that the president's personality, although it is very important, and I don't have to tell you this today, he wrote it before he thought that personality could be that important in a president, but he concluded that the personality of the president did not have a huge impact on American policy towards the Palestine question. It did have some impact, but not a fundamental impact. He did agree with everyone who spoke before me that the Israeli lobby had a huge impact on American policy towards Israel and Palestine, but also tended to grant or credit the professionals with an equal impact on American policy towards the Israel-Palestine question. And I would like really to focus on that third group because everyone else was talking about the lobby and I don't need to repeat the wise words that were already said. In fact, what I'm going to argue today, this afternoon, is that As much as the lobbies are important in affecting and influencing American policy, there is a basic and fundamental misunderstanding of what the conflict in Palestine is all about, including among those American diplomats, pundits, politicians who see themselves champions of Palestinian rights. The level of— I wouldn't call it ignorance because these are very educated, well-read people, so ignorance would not be a fair concept here. The level of blindness or the level of ignorance in the sense of ignoring certain chapters rather than not being able to understand reality. This level is so high that it really makes it impossible, even when you have a period in which the lobbies are not strong, or even when you have a president who is more pro-Palestinian than anyone before him, the level, the depths of that ignorance is so significant that it would not allow the 2 other factors, even if they are diminished or weakened, to influence fundamentally the American policy and in association the reality on the ground. Now what is missing, and this is what I would like to point out, what is missing is an understanding of the nature of Zionism the nature of the Zionist project in Palestine, not as a nostalgic journey into the past, but as a current analysis. The late and amazing scholar of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, said famously that settler colonialism is not an event, it's a structure. Zionism is not an event. It's a structure. And it is a settler-colonialist structure. It was a settler-colonialist structure in 1882, and it is a settler-colonialist structure in 2017. And you don't appease a settler-colonialist project by dividing Palestine into 2 states. That will never appease the settler-colonialist project. The only way to challenge a settler colonialist project is to decolonize the settler colonialist project. And this challenge has not been digested by American policymakers, including those who regard themselves as open-minded, balanced, if you want objective about the situation, because— and I don't blame them— Because to talk about decolonization in the 21st century is abnormal. Colonialism in our mind belongs to the 19th century. Decolonization belongs to the first half of the 20th century. But in the 21st century, if we will not resell or return to these fundamental concepts of colonialism and decolonization, we will not move forward towards a solution in Israel and Palestine. I will give a few examples of how the narrative, the discourse, the conceptual framework of settler colonialism can lead us to a different view on the reality today, not just about the reality in the past. I will begin with the— something that even here I think is sometimes accepted, maybe not intentionally, maybe unconsciously, but is part of the American heritage of dealing with conflicts such as Israel and Palestine. And this is the idea that in Palestine you have a conflict between 2 national movements. And then everything else comes out of this analysis. If it's— if these are 2 national movements, we have to satisfy both of them. We have to divide the land between both of them. They share responsibility for the conflict equally. They should— we should find a way of satisfying their aspiration equally. Now, it doesn't matter, of course, that when you translate this paradigm of parity to percentage of territory or demography, of course it was never suggested by any mediator, whether they were Americans or non-Americans, that the land would be divided 50/50. That was never on the cards. But even the idea of 20 '72 and '78 or the '55 and '45 of 1947 was based on this false analysis that what you have in Palestine is a genuine struggle between 2 national movements. Zionism is not a national movement. It's a settler colonialist movement. And the Palestinians, before they become a nation, they are first and foremost the native indigenous people of Palestine, who sometimes— Who sometimes chose nationalism as the best vehicle to defend their native indigenous rights and probably would have to find a different vehicle in the 21st century to protect their rights, much more an agenda of human rights and civil rights the national rights, because the national rights have been understood in the world as a wish to have a small Bantustan next to Israel, and this is not going to work. Another point which is important when you use the settler-colonial perspective on the situation in Israel and Palestine. A basic American assumption, and not just an American assumption, a United Nations assumption, in fact an international assumption, is that the conflict in many ways began in 1967. Not because people don't know what happened before 1967, but because in 1948 the international community through the United Nations legitimized the idea of a Jewish state over 78% of Palestine. So even Palestine's friends advised the Palestinians not to bring the future of the 78% of Palestine, namely Israel, into the negotiation. The best, they were told, you can hope for is to have a state over 22% of Palestine. Now, this idea that because the United Nations legitimized a state, which is of course an important fact, which we should never ignore. But this idea, of course, brings us to a narrative of why there is a conflict which has little relevance or connection to the reality on the ground. The conflict did not start in 1967. And the reason that there is still a conflict today is not because of the events of 1967.

Speaker 3: Right.

Ilan Pappé: In fact, our historical research these days shows something many of us who lived in Israel knew anyway, but it was always good to corroborate this by new documentations and archives, that Israel planned the occupation of the West Bank long before 1967. In fact, from a Zionist perspective, it made no sense whether you were on the left in the Zionist movement or the right of the Zionist movement. It made no sense whatsoever to allow the Transjordanians, namely the Jordanians, to annex the West Bank while the Zionist movement had the military power to take it over. The reason they allowed the Jordanians to annex the West Bank was because they wanted to neutralize the Arab Legion in the '48 war so that the most efficient Arab army would not be part of the all-Arab coalition that was supposed to save Palestine. From the Zionist conquest. But in any case, many among the Israeli generals and politicians regretted that decision and from 1948 onwards created a lobby that pushed the Israeli government to seek the opportunity to occupy the West Bank. In fact, since 1963, And a book of mine on this will come out in the summer called The Biggest Prison on Earth. Since 1963, the Israelis systematically and methodically prepared the occupation of the West Bank. And Gamal Abdel Nasser provided them the opportunity that they were looking for in June 1967. And the Israelis were very well prepared. For taking over the West Bank. They already had a military rule imposed on the Palestinian citizens in Israel, and all they had to do was transmit this military rule from Israel itself and impose it on another group of Palestinians. But maybe even more important, if you understand Zionism as settler colonialism and Israel as a settler colonial state, you understand that any depiction of the Israeli society as being torn between 2 camps, a liberal camp that wants to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and believes in a 2-state solution, and an intransigent, inflexible camp, a war camp that does not want to give up the territories, that this depiction is true only as far as the general public is concerned. But is not relevant to the DNA of the Israeli political, military, and strategic elite. They are united, and they were united since 1967, in their determination to do all they can to keep the West Bank as part of Israel and find ways of not incorporating the population that lives there. And they had a similar strategy towards the Gaza Strip as well. The peace process was not born in Washington. It was born in Tel Aviv as means of creating this charade of an internal Israeli debate that brings hope for anyone who believes that these 2 national movements could be coached through the intervention of a mature mediator into a reasonable peace treaty, one that you can easily find in a textbook in the political science departments in American university, which is drawn from the world of business where, as Madeleine Albright used to put it, everything visible can be divisible. So you divide land, demography, and she warned us when she was the Secretary of State that everything which is invisible is indivisible, namely don't talk about justice, morality, the refugee problem, the nature of Zionism and the nature of the State of Israel because there's nothing we who learned this in the departments of business and political science can offer in front of such realities. So what can be done in order to move forward the discussion so as the mismatch— so as that the mismatch between the discourse that we have been using for years about the conflict, its origin, its nature, the reasons for its continuation, how do we move from this mismatch to a conversation, at least a conversation that is far more relevant to the reality on the ground? And every passing day with these unilateral Israeli policies on the ground, you don't even need to talk to people about settler colonialism because the one Israeli state is already there. The one apartheid state of Israel came into being around 2001, but maybe we haven't noticed that, but it's there. It is there and it's going to be more and more legalized as an apartheid state with every passing day. And we will continue to talk— if we will continue to talk about a 2-state solution, if we will continue to talk on the basis of the assumptions of the previous peace process, there is nothing we could do to change that reality in which 6 million Palestinians would live under— continue to live under an oppressive regime in various So what can we do? One thing I think, and I know it's difficult for some people, is to realize that the two-state solution is dead. Many of us still sleep with the two-state solution, but you are sleeping with a corpse.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Ilan Pappé: Many of us still dine with the two-state solution, but you are sleeping with a dead body. It's time to go to the morgue together and watch together the the corpse of the two-state solution, and hopefully we will all be invited to the funeral so that we can get over it and move on. Secondly, and not less importantly, we should understand that decolonization is not a process that can be forced from the outside. What you can force from the outside is the end of occupation, the end of oppression, the end of the atrocities that are done in the name of apartheid, but you cannot force reconciliation between the settlers and the natives from the outside. But as long as you are not sending the message, as we did send the message to apartheid South Africa, That the end of apartheid is a precondition for a process of reconciliation, whereas in Palestine we always said reconciliation first and then the end of apartheid. As long as we don't send this message, either as a civil society or as a political and intellectual elite, we will continue to have this mismatch between the way we talk about the reality and the way the reality unfolds on the ground. And I think this clearer division of labor between the outside and the inside from the perspective of decolonization, not from the perspective of peace process, from the perspective of decolonization is very urgent, has urgently to be adapted, has to be urgently adopted by any one of us who is either a student of the conflict or is involved in it or is interested in it or wants to show solidarity with its victims, because if we in the universities, in the press, in the political arena, if we will not use the right dictionary and the right language to describe what goes on on the ground, then we will continue to provide an umbrella of immunity to the settler-colonial state of Israel to try and complete what it started in 1948, namely, to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. And believe me, I know what I'm talking about. I was born in Israel in 1954.

Speaker 2: I was—

Ilan Pappé: I'm a product of the Israeli educational system, probably not a very good product of the Israeli educational system, quite a flawed product of that system. But sometimes someone who was part of that system, who was indoctrinated in this system, when you hear the discourse abroad about the possibilities that are open in the Jewish society for change, when you hear that there is a 2-state solution around the corner somewhere in the globe, you find it very frustrating because you're— in your daily experience, you know how far away from the realities is this conversation. Now, analyzing correctly does not mean that it will be an easy ride. Forward, and I'm finishing. Analyzing or having the right analysis doesn't mean that the prognosis would be easy. I'm not going to say here that the move into decolonization, into probably the path on a one-state solution with various models that are possible, is an easy journey. It is as difficult as any journey we had to take as a human society when we faced an indoctrinated racist society that has to be deprogrammed, has to be decolonized in the mind because we— before we can decolonize it on the ground. What I— the only thing I'm saying is that for 50 years now we didn't even try to do that Because we claimed that the only urgent need we had was to convince the Israeli society to give up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and then we can lead to the path towards reconciliation and peace. Well, this was a waste of time. This was a waste of energy. 50 years are a lot of time in a peace process that was based on the wrong assumptions and had reaped the bitter fruits that anyone with his eyes in his head could have seen were the only possible consequence of such a misconception and misunderstanding of what the conflict is about. Finally, I would say this: nothing of what I said can at all be materialized without, of course, a new unification of the Palestinian political scene. We need a different Palestinian thinking. We need a united, authentic representation of the Palestinian people, which we don't have today, that should give us the lead. We will have to get rid eventually of the existing political structures in Palestine in order to be able to lead us, settlers and natives, together into a future that has normal life in it as you and other people in the world enjoy. Thank you.

Speaker 4: Thank you very much. So, Most of the questions here revolve around one point here, and that's what exactly a one-state solution would look like. So one person asks, what happens to the Palestinians? Another asks, how do Israelis, settlers, Palestinians, refugees coexist? What happens in that first day, week, year, decade?

Ilan Pappé: Right.

Khalid Michelle: Yes.

Ilan Pappé: Well, building a different political structure from the one you have It's a long journey, and any attempt to answer all these questions would be wrong because, first of all, as I said, you have to remove the one conversation that does not allow you to invest the same energy as you've invested in the last 50 years in the wrong solution. So I would put it— I would say this. Yes. 2 points about this. One is, as I think there is already a one-state solution, we don't need to build a one-state solution. What we need is to change the regime of that one state. We need to make it a democracy because now it is not a democracy. Now, you build it by a slow movement from below and not by big revolutions as the Arab world has learned unfortunately and painfully in the last 6 or 7 years. It is time, I think, for academics, pundits, and people who have the time and the energy to try and begin to build models of a joint curriculum, a joint judicial system, a joint political solutions for questions of symbolism such as names, the identity of the state, and so on. I don't think it's time for a political movement to do it as yet. It's too premature. I'm just saying we have to start this conversation. And there are more and more movements from below that define themselves as one-state movements. We talked about the BDS a lot today, but there's also an ODS, the One Democratic State movement, From below. From below. Now, this group of people, whether they are activists, whether they come from different walks of life, begin to give answers to the questions that you are asking. But I think more than anything else, I'm always surprised when I'm sort of listening to John Kerry, re-listening to John Kerry's last Yes. If you remember, he was in a very dramatic voice, he explained to us that without a 2-state solution, the only possible scenario is an apartheid Israel. And I wanted to say, hello, Jon, how are you? Looking up. The one-state apartheid is already there, so your warning is not about the future. You're actually describing the present. Secondly, couldn't you find one moment in your speech, maybe 2 sentences in your speech, to say that actually having a democratic state for Jews and Palestinians between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean is not a doomsday scenario? Couldn't you just say, wouldn't it be wonderful To have settlers and natives living as equal citizens in the same state. Why do you have to describe this as a doomsday scenario? The only people in the world who would describe this as a doomsday scenario are Zionists.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Ilan Pappé: Because they think that when the Jews are not a majority, the only possible thing that Palestinians— the only possible thing Palestinians can do Right. Well, I lived in Haifa all my life. I live in the Galilee. I was in political outfits and academic outfits where the Jews were the minority and nothing bad happened to us. And the idea that Palestine cannot be a political outfit if the Palestinians are the majority and the Jews are a minority is a racist idea that should be challenged.

Speaker 4: So a question about the role of the Palestinian Authority in the official rather than a de facto one-state. How would the Palestinian Authority go about disbanding and what would that look like?

Charlie Rose: Right.

Ilan Pappé: Well, I think anyway Israel is going to eventually disband the PA, so it's not my agenda. Exactly, I'm not a prophet. I don't know exactly how it will unfold, but I have no doubt that the way Israeli politics is going and the way American politics is going and the level of— the decreasing level of interest in the international community about Israel and Palestine. Given all these factors, I have very little doubt that there will be a moment where the reality that already unfolded, namely that Israel controls the West Bank and in many ways controls the Gaza Strip despite of what Hamas may feel, that this de facto reality would be declared as a de jure The reality. There's one interesting and significant development in the West Bank that people have not noticed. In the last few months, Israel has removed half of the checkpoints in the West Bank. So when I noticed that, I said, is it because an American president is coming? Because the last time they did it was before Obama's visit, and then they returned the checkpoints 2 days after he left. Right. No.

Charlie Rose: No.

Ilan Pappé: They have removed most of the checkpoints from Area C because they regard Area C, which is 55% of the West Bank, as part of Israel, and they don't want Israelis to move around a state which has checkpoints. It doesn't look nice. It doesn't feel nice. So the checkpoints are only in Area A and B and between Area A and B and C. Now, the next step is to do the same for Area B. Maybe Area A would remain, Greater Ramallah, as a Palestinian enclave. I doubt whether at that moment in time there would be enough Palestinians to say, this is what we were fighting for, a nation-state in Area A. I'm very blunt with you because I think I don't want to spend another wasteful year of talking the wrong language about a reality that I know very well and this language has nothing to do with that reality. So it's not a matter of saying the PA should go or shouldn't go. The PA belongs to a narrative and a story that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground and that story is going to change. In fact, it's already changing. It's just a matter— How? when people are willing to use the right words to describe a reality that they don't like, for various reasons, to acknowledge.

Speaker 4: A couple of questions about BDS. One person asks, would you say that BDS is the only way to achieve decolonization, and what are the possible outcomes of the movement?

Ilan Pappé: Yeah. I think one thing we shouldn't do is confuse BDS with a vision. We need the Palestinians to redefine what the liberation of Palestine means in the 21st century. We cannot rely on nostalgic ideas of the 1960s. Neither do I think the political Islamic movements have a vision that is going to work. So we need a redefinition of the Palestinian liberation project. And sometimes people, I think, confuse the means, which is the BDS, with the need to rethink the vision, the project of liberation. Now, however, as I said before, the outside world cannot be indifferent to the suffering of the people Just because we are in this limbo between a project, the 2-state solution, that is irrelevant, is not going to work, and as I said, is in the morgue for a few years but we haven't noticed, and a new project which will take quite a while to build because we need a unification of the Palestinian side, we need a more authentic representation, we need a lot of things to happen. For us to be on the road towards this new vision, but we don't have the luxury of remaining idle and indifferent while the clock of destruction, which is faster than the clock of reconstruction, is working. And therefore the BDS is so important because the BDS is there to say, yes, there is a void of leadership, yes, there is a chaotic moment in history where there is no peace process and there's no alternative to that peace process. But that doesn't mean that we as the international community have nothing to do and can nothing— and can do nothing in order to stop the suffering of the people on the ground. And the greatest thing about the BDS was that it introduced to us again the 2 groups that the Oslo process brutally excluded from the future of Palestine, the Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian minority in Israel. And we should be thankful to the BDS for reminding us that the people of the West Bank and the people of the Gaza Strip are only half of the Palestinian people and that these 2 territories are only 22% of Palestine. And you don't cure an illness by dealing with the hand if the whole body is ill.

Jessica Desvarieux: Thank you.

Speaker 4: So earlier today in his keynote, Meir Scheimer suggested the idea of an expulsion is unlikely, but lots of people here seem to be worried about it, because I'm getting lots of questions about this. So one person asked, what exactly is stopping another mass expulsion? One person says Netanyahu realizes the 2-state solution is dead, but doesn't want one state with Palestinians. So how, you know, what's stopping him from trying that again as in '48?

Ilan Pappé: I think Jon is right in the sense that it's difficult to envisage an ethnic cleansing on the scale that Israel committed in 1948, expelling half of Palestine's population, demolishing half of Palestine's villages, and destroying almost all the Palestinian Palestinian towns apart from Nazareth. Yes, I agree, this is difficult. But I think what is important to understand that ethnic cleansing is a paradigm as much as settler colonialism is. And the Israelis perfected the notion of ethnic cleansing and adapted it to the 21st century much better than any other political movement that I know in history. For instance, They found out that actually you can achieve the same goal of having a space without the people in it by not allowing people to leave the place in which they live. You don't have to expel people from villages. You can enclave them. You can siege them in villages and you get the same result, namely you don't have demographically to include the enclave imprisoned incarcerated people in your demographic balance, which is the most important thing for a settler colonial state. And even liberal people around the world somehow agree that Israel has the right to talk in these racist terms as if this is acceptable. So you don't need massive expulsion in order to annex Area C, for instance. You can— and they're already doing it. I don't know how many of you have been to Yes. How many of you have been to the Shuafat refugee camp? How many of you have been to Tulkarem, a whole town that is surrounded by a fence with one gate to the town in the hands of the Israeli soldiers? It's a big jail, and the only reason people are incarcerated in this jail is because they are Palestinians, for no other crime. Now, this is the model Israelis of the left like, because they are against expulsion. They are against expulsion. They say expulsion is an Israeli right-wing notion. Our notion is separation, or as they call it in Hebrew, hafarada, which means in English apartheid. Hafarada, segregation, more literally. We really believe that it's much better for the Palestinians to be incarcerated, enclaved in homogenic Palestinian areas. They don't even need green lungs, the Palestinians, because they're not a Western modernized society. And we can keep it forever like this because we have hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are part of the police state that manages— this is not an occupation— that manages the colonization of Palestine, whether it is in the Nakba, In the Galilee, in the Gaza Strip, or in the West Bank. So this— there's no need for mass expulsion. You have built an amazing— amazingly big apparatus that so many Israelis are involved in that you have the manpower to police daily the control over 6 million Palestinians within the one state that you have created 15, 16 years ago and still even sell this to the world as a democracy that unfortunately had to occupy a certain area but of course is looking for the right Palestinian partner to get it back to them. We are still hearing this bullshit today, unbelievably. Thank you.

Speaker 4: Question about terminology here. One person says, why didn't you choose to label the Palestinian suffering as genocide instead of ethnic cleansing? And this person contends that Palestine is the classic example of the UN's definition of genocide.

Ilan Pappé: Because I think there is a difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing. I did use the term genocide for Gaza. I called it incremental genocide, and this was reiterated by the United Nations report last year that talked about the de-development of Gaza in 2020, which means the Gaza Strip is under such circumstances that massive death of people and young people is inevitable. So it becomes an incremental genocide. But for me, genocide is also a term that talks about intention and ideology and racism. Now there is kind of in between, but that's a bit too scholarly and I'm— I don't like to use it in a world of activism, but I'll do this. There is something in between the term of genocide and ethnic cleansing that again, if I'll refer to Patrick Wolfe who I mentioned before. Patrick Wolfe is, for those of you who haven't read his work, I really recommend this. He has an amazing article called The Logic of the Annihilation of the Native. Maybe I'm a bit— as I said, it's 2 o'clock in the morning for me, so maybe it's not annihilation. Where's Andrew? Andrew, are you there? The elimination. The elimination. I knew it was wrong. Thank you. He's my student, so he knows he has to be awake and answer these questions even at midnight if I ask him. Okay, yeah, so the title is The Logic of the Elimination of the Native, and he refers to all the settler colonial societies, including in this country, in the South of America, in Australia, New Zealand, and so on, in which he explains quite simply and very convincingly that the people who escaped or fled from Europe in the last 3 or 4 centuries because of all kinds of persecutions and looked for a new homeland, encountered native populations that they believed they had to eliminate for the success of building this new homeland. Here it resulted in genocide. The same happened north of the border and south of the border. Also in Australia it ended in genocide. In South Africa, in Palestine, in Algeria, the methods of eliminating the native as an obstacle for creating the new homeland was not genocidal, but it was bad enough. It was bad enough. So yes, you can talk about the elimination of the Palestinians as a natural consequence of the logic of Zionism of all its shades. And colors. However, elimination in the 21st century with international focus on human rights and civil rights, with the internal wish of the Israelis to be part of the democratic world and maybe even genuine Israeli impulses of democracy, elimination becomes something far more complex than what I associate with genocide. And in fact, we saw the need for an accurate conversation when the terrible events unfolded in Syria in 2011. We as activists on behalf of Palestine in the West struggled to keep Palestine as an issue when people said to us, but how can you compare what happens to the Palestinians with what happens in Iraq, what happens in Syria? And we were trying to say, Yes, but you know, we are talking about the same brutality, the same inhumanity, but we are talking about a span of 100 years, not of 4 or 5 years. And this incremental inhumanity happens every day, and when it happens on a daily basis, it's not very dramatic. It doesn't catch the media's attention, and you can put it aside compared to the huge massacres and horrible things that are happening. And in Syria and Iraq. And this is where the idea of settler colonialism as a structure is so important. And this is why it's not necessary to talk about genocide as much as it is necessary to say that the DNA of the settler colonial state of Israel is to continue the project, as I put it in simple terms, of having as much of Palestine with as few Palestinians in it. Now, they have the whole of Palestine. In the last 50 years, they don't have a geographical ambition anymore. Israelis of all kinds do not want to occupy Lebanon, Jordan, or Egypt. They are satisfied with the borders that they have today. They have a demographic issue, not a geographical issue. And when they deal with the demographic issue, they found a formula that one should say is working, unfortunately. And that formula says you can police 6 million Palestinians and still the world will believe you that this is a temporary oppression, and still the world will believe you that you will stop this oppression once peace will arrive, and you still can convince the world that you are the only democracy in the Middle East and the oppression of 6 million people is not a relevant item when you analyze a country as a democratic state. This is the importance of analyzing what's happening in Israel as a settler colonialism that can sometimes result to genocide, sometimes results to ethnic cleansing, and quite often results to a charade of peace that provides it a shield of immunity from any genuine rebuke and condemnation in the global community. It's a great pleasure to be here for the second time. My last time— the last time I was here on this podium was 2011, and we had a very lively debate with someone representing J Street. This time I am a bit of alone, a little bit, but thank God there are 2 people next to me. So this is a bit of a return to 6 years ago. It's a great pleasure to be here, and I want to thank the organizers for making the effort to bring me over. Thank you. Particularly, I want to mention McDonald Sullivan, who really chased me physically all around the globe to make sure that I will not forget my promise to come back. So thank you. Thank you, Don, for your steadfastness. For those of us who are longtime activists on Palestine, and those of us who teach on Palestine either as official academics or as part of our activism or any other occupation that leads us to engage with the problem of Palestine, there is a growing frustration, I think, between the gap— between the gap— about the gap between The way the mainstream media, in a way also the mainstream academia, and definitely the mainstream politics depict the conflict in Israel and Palestine on the one hand, and what we feel is the essence of the conflict, what we feel is the reason for the conflict and the lack of progress in the attempts to solve it. Even if you read The New York Times in this country, even if you hear academics and politicians who are not denying the existence of a Palestinian people, who probably have been even to the West Bank, if not to the Gaza Strip, even when you hear these people, and let alone if you listen to those who haven't been there and who are not as open-minded as the New York Times, for instance, or the Washington Post, even if you hear the most progressive one and the less progressive one, the way that they tend to explain the origins of the conflict, the essence of the conflict, the reasons for any lack of progress in solving the conflict is very far, I think, from the way we understand it, from the way we sense it in the last 20 or 30 years. And for many years I thought Maybe the problem is that these people, whether progressive enough or not progressive enough, maybe the problem is that they're not spending enough time in the West Bank. Maybe they haven't seen enough of the Israeli atrocities on a daily basis. Maybe they should have more access to what goes on in the Gaza Strip. Maybe what is missing is more information. And then I came across these same people in government, in academia, in the media, being exposed to more information, and yet they remain loyal to the same basic assumptions, wrong assumptions, about the conflict, its origins, its essence, and the chances to solve it. And this is why I think that the problem is not only lack of knowledge of what goes on currently in Palestine. The problem is not even the fact that next door to Israel and Palestine even worse atrocities are being committed, which is the new excuse we hear for why Palestine is removed from the international attention and why there is lack of international interference in what goes on. I don't think that's— these are the reasons. I don't undermine the importance of people being well informed of what goes on today in Palestine. I don't underestimate the importance of the events in Syria and Iraq in shadowing What goes on in Palestine. I take this all into account. But even with all these explanations, I still find the basic understanding of why there is a conflict in Palestine and Israel and why this conflict is so crucial for the future of the Middle East and beyond is very far from what people like myself, and I suspect quite a lot of those who are here tonight, feel about the conflict, its origin, and its future. And the only way, I think, of challenging the wrong perceptions of Palestine, the misinformed assumptions that lead to the diplomatic effort that leads to nowhere, that creates a charade about Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East or creates this narrative that peace is very nearby, around the corner, and all you need is either an able Palestinian leader or a brave Israeli leader And that's— or maybe a grown-up American mediator, which is not exactly what we have in this moment in time, and then the issue is resolved. The only way of challenging these misconceptions, unfortunately for us as activists, is to go back to history. Right. Why do I say unfortunately? Because this is the 21st century. People don't have, it seems, time and energy to listen to long, profound analyses. People prefer soundbites. They want binary explanation— who is bad, who is good. They want it in 3 to 4 minutes.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Ilan Pappé: The span of attention is no longer than 5 minutes. We are defeated by the very technology sometimes that enable us in a way to bring more information what goes on in Israel and Palestine today. There is no way of understanding what goes on today, to my mind, in the right context unless you are also a student of history. And the reason you have to be a student of history is not because of an intellectual interest in the past. No, this is not the reason. It is because the historical chapter that began in Palestine with the arrival of the Zionist movement is still going on today. We have not concluded that chapter. We are in the same time zone as the beginning of Zionism. This is not— we don't have a closure of that chapter. So we're not actually going to study history. We're going to study our own contemporary reality, even if that particular moment began 70 years ago or maybe even 100 years ago. And there is a very good explanation why we are still in the same time zone when Zionism started and why are we still faced with the same problems that Zionists put in front of us as Palestinians, as Jews, and as people around the world who are interested in Israel and Palestine. We are— we have to deal with Zionism. As a structure, not as an event. It's a structure. And a structure in history means that yes, there is a moment when this structure is exposed, when this structure begins, but we are still inside this structure. And that particular structure which is— we are in recently was very well defined by scholars in various parts of the world. That particular structure is settler colonialism. In fact, one of the great writers on settler colonialism who just passed away, unfortunately, Patrick Wolfe, has this famous quote where he says settler colonialism Is not an event, it is a structure. I translate it to my particular case study. Zionism is not an event, it is a structure. And it is a settler colonialist structure. Now, in Israel at this point, even those who wouldn't understand what settler colonialism is would walk out of this hall. The fact that you are still here after I said that Zionism is settler colonialism made this trip worthwhile. And most of those people who would walk out from the hall really wouldn't know what settler colonialism is, but they would be offended by the word colonialism. 2 years ago, I organized a conference in my university, the University of Exeter, under the title settler colonialism in Palestine. And immediately there was an outcry in Britain. The Board of Deputies, which is the main Jewish organization, various pro-Israeli lobbies, even the prime minister's office— at the time it was David Cameron— called my university and said, you have to stop this conference from taking place. Because it's an anti-Semitic conference. To his credit, my vice chancellor said to the politicians who called him, do you know what settler colonialism is? And they said, no, but it doesn't sound good. He said, well, well, he said, you should come to Exeter and attend the conference. You may learn something about settler colonialism. And this is typical. This is part of the obstacle we face if we want to have a serious, profound, analytical discussion about Palestine. And we need— there's no way of going around it. There's no way of having a soundbite exchange about Palestine. There's only a moment where— there comes a moment where you say to people, So yes, it is complicated. Yes, it's information that takes time to take in. But if you really think that Palestine and Israel are important, you will have to make the effort. I always am bewildered when I'm on such stages with some of my compatriots from Israel who are supposed to present the opposite side. When they use the same sentence that I'm using about the realities being complicated for exactly the opposite purpose. They would say to the audience, this is such a complicated story, you will never understand it, so leave it to us. We understand what it is all about. No. Intelligent people, educated people don't need much time to understand. But it's important to understand, or at least to comprehend, that there is a total misunderstanding about what goes on from the level of the politicians, the highest levels of politicians, through mainstream media, mainstream academia. Part of it, part of the misunderstanding is intentional. Part of it is people who grew up in a certain ideological or theological or cultural environment that does not allow them to see the reality in Israel and Palestine in any different way from the way their parents or their communities were conditioned to see. So let me go back to this idea of settler colonialism. Because I think it's a crucial point. Settler colonialism, as you would know from the history of this country, is the movement of Europeans outside of Europe. And these people are moving outside of Europe in different moments in time, and mostly these movements are different from the expansion of empires into other parts of the world. These are movements of communities of individuals, sometimes according to the lines of imperial expansion, sometimes preceding imperial expansion or following imperial expansion. Most of these people are persecuted for various reasons, and most of these people have no wish to stay in Europe and are looking for a new home, and they want also when it comes to the 18th century, 19th century, they want to create also a new homeland. And in many cases, the main obstacle for creating a new safe homeland for people who were victims of persecution is the fact that they choose places where someone else is already living. And that's a problem. And that's a problem. And in many cases the settlers dehumanize the natives and the indigenous to such an extent that they find it in their hearts to genocide them, to eliminate them, or to impose an apartheid system on them, or as in the case of Palestine, to strive and get them out of their homeland. Or as I called it in 2007, to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland. If we can at any given moment enable— if at any given moment we can explain to people that there were many positive impulses behind Zionism, very noble, I would say, even, impulses behind Zionism, the wish to save the Jews from what definitely was eventually a genocide in Europe, the wish of people to become modern and a modern nation, even the wish to be reconnected to the Holy Land or the land of the Bible. These are all not negative impulses. These are understandable. But you cannot exclude the additional impulse which complicates this complicated life for all of us. The other impulse that is not talked about is to get rid of the people who were already there in the land of the Bible, that were already modernized themselves, that were already building a national identity and collective identity, who lived there for centuries and were entitled to continue their normal life and to make their own decisions about the future, whether they were good decisions or bad decisions. This is totally irrelevant. This was their homeland, and someone else came, immigrated into their homeland, and slowly but surely began to expel them and dispossess them in a process that started 100 years ago and reached a climax in 1948. There's no escaping from this. There's no way of rewriting that history. There's no escape from telling the Israeli Jews your ideology of who you are and who the Palestinians are was formed in that historical moment when your grandfathers and grandmothers, your modern ancestors, decided what quite a lot of Europeans decided elsewhere in the world, that in order to create a safe homeland— yes, in order to create or reconstruct ancient Israel, call it what you want— You were fully aware that the only way you could do it is by getting rid of the Palestinian population. And there is no escape because it exists in every travelogue that your leaders have written on the way to Palestine. It appears in every diary that they kept. to be found in the archives of the Zionist movement, in the archives of the Israeli state. You didn't hide it in 1882 because it was quite legitimate to talk about depopulation in 1882. You didn't even feel it was wrong to ask the British government in 1930 to help you to transfer all the Palestinians outside of Palestine because this was an accepted language in 1930. So we don't blame you for being the same as many other European settlers who came to a different place. But you came very late in the day, and the Palestinians, to their credit, resisted you in the name of Palestinian nationalism. In 1936, they began a serious revolt. Against you, against the idea that you had the right to dispossess them. Not that you had the right to live next to them. This you had the right, and they never denied you the right to live next to them. They resisted against your plan to dispossess them. And had not the British government helped the Zionist movement between 1936 to 1939 to destroy the Palestinian military elite and political elite, probably the resistance would have been even more successful than it was. And when you had as Zionists a great historical moment in 1948 to translate the idea of dispossession of the Palestinians from an abstract strategy that a small minority of Jews in Mandatory Palestine could not implement, to translate it into a proper military strategy of expulsion, you did it. You understood very well as a political movement that 3 years after the Holocaust, the world would allow you to expel the Palestinians and wouldn't do anything against it. You knew that there was no leadership on the Palestinian side. You knew that the Arab world was busy with its own liberation struggles. Yes, you were very clever as politicians, as leaders of a political movement. '48 was the right moment to do it, especially because the British decided to leave Palestine. And you manipulated very well the international community to depict the Palestinians as the people who resist peace, who refuse to accept peace.

Speaker 2: That's not true.

Ilan Pappé: You offered them to partition their homeland and to leave them 50% of their homeland, and you described their rejection of this generous offer, a term you will use again and again in your dealings with the Palestinians, as intransigence, as typical of a political culture in the Arab world, not progressive, not modern enough. And that's why the people of Palestine foolishly did not agree to give half of their homeland to a group of hundreds of thousands of Jews, mostly— most of them arrived in Palestine only 2 years before. Who wouldn't in the world say, I will give half of my country to immigrants who have just arrived 2 years ago? The cynical way in which so many people accepted that this was a foolish Palestinian position, that it had no moral basis, that it had no political wisdom, the cynical stance was so powerful that even some Palestinians began to believe in it, that it was a terrible mistake in 1947 not to accept the solution of partitioning Palestine to an Arab state and a Jewish state. And remember, the Jews were one-third of the population. Most of them came in 1945. And they had an ideology of ethnic cleansing that anyway would have been implemented even if the Palestinians would have accepted the partition plan. And yet even among people around the world who support the idea of two-state solution, you can hear them saying the Palestinians made a terrible mistake in 1947 when they rejected the partition plan, not to mention the Israeli propaganda that wants to show it that Palestinians were always rejecting peace plans. This particular peace plan ended in the expulsion of half of Palestine's population. In the demolition of 500 Palestinian villages out of 1,000, in the destruction of all the Palestinian towns except for one town, the town of Nazareth. And this all happened in 9 months. The world was watching. The world knew exactly what was going on. And the world was silent about the Palestinian tragedy. And the message from the world brings us back to the idea of settler colonialism as a structure. If the international community in 1948 would have said to Israel, colonialism, settler colonialism, this belongs to the 19th century, we are in a different century, 3 years after the Holocaust, we do not sanction massive expulsions of people just because of their identity. Imagine if that would have been the international community saying— and to the credit of someone who I don't like, John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State in 1949, to his credit, I should say, for the record, he is the only international statesman who said what I'm saying here. To his credit. In fact, he succeeded in convincing President Truman for a few months to impose sanctions on Israel for not allowing the Palestinian refugees to return. And then he was silenced, and America reorientated its policy, as you know, towards Israel and Palestine to the lines that we are familiar with today. But no one else had even thought of sending a message to Israel that this is not the way to compensate the Jewish people for the genocide that happened in Europe. This is not the way to build a secure, democratic Jewish homeland on Palestine, at the expense of Palestine, without succeeding in fully defeating the Palestinians. So the message from the world was, If you haven't completed your settler-colonialist project, why don't you continue it? You will continue to have international immunity. So between 1948 and 1967, Israel expelled from within Israel another 36 villages. The Palestinians who were left— out of the 1 million Palestinians who lived in what was Israel, 150,000 were left.

Jessica Desvarieux: Right.

Ilan Pappé: They were put under military rule. Those who live today in the West Bank know exactly what the military rule means. That means that a soldier is a little king in his kingdom and can destroy your shop, can prevent you from going to university, can arrest you without trial, can shoot and kill you without being worried about it. The Palestinian citizens of Israel were under such military rule between 1948 to 1966. And it's fascinating to read the reports of the State Department about this situation, how they accept cynically, I think, the Israeli explanation that this is temporary and therefore nobody in the world should really pay much attention to the fact that one-fifth of the Israeli population doesn't enjoy basic human and civil rights. So the message came loud and clear when in 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and incorporated another group, even larger group of Palestinians under Israeli rule. We have the documents from the Israeli meetings immediately after the occupation. And what these documents reveal is how the biggest charade on earth was designed. The Israeli government in 1967— and yes, Mary, this is another book written on a plane that will come out in June called The Biggest Prison on Earth. I tell about these cabinet meetings because I think they're very important. In 1967, The Israeli cabinet or government in 1967 had to decide— or was the first group of politicians that had to decide what to do with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It was a unique group of people, the members of the cabinet in 1967. It was the 13th government of Israel, and it was the most consensual government Israel ever had and ever is going to have. Every shade, every shade of the political parties in Israel was represented in that government. Socialists alongside Zionists, capitalists, ultra-Orthodox Jews alongside very secular Jewish parties, everyone was part of that government, and I think that's why that government felt rightly, that it represents Zionism in full. And they took 3 decisions that were the basis for the charade that we all— hopefully not here, but so many of us— still play with. The first decision was that Israel could not exist without the West Bank. And this is something that it's even hard to explain to Palestinians in the West Bank that still believe in a 2-state solution. It doesn't matter whether you're on the left, whether you're on the right within the Zionist politics in Israel. '67 was seen as the historical moment, not just from a religious perspective, namely that you were given all the ancient biblical towns that are the heart of the ancient kingdom, but that strategically you got rid of what Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign minister at the time, called the Auschwitz borders of Israel. The government was very clear that in no circumstances could Israel exist without the West Bank. They had only tactical disagreement of how best to achieve it. And what is so fascinating for me as an historian is how these tactical disagreements were seen in the world as genuine ideological disagreements about Zionism. These are tactical. Whether you are on the left and say, I don't have to control every part of the West Bank I can build a wall, which is what liberal Zionists decided to do. I can build a wall around the West Bank so I don't need to control it, but I only need to control the River Jordan. Or you are a right-wing who said, no, I have to— because of ideology, I have to be in every part of the West Bank. It doesn't matter. In the end of the day, the West Bank, which is 20% of Palestine, cannot be really out of Israel's reach and control and rule. Yes, there is the realpolitik of the pragmatic left that says rule does not have to be official, rule doesn't have to be formal, and the ideological stance of the right wing in Israel that says, no, we need to show that this belongs to us, every square inch belongs In the end of the day, in the end of the day, it means that those of us who believe in a 2-state solution should understand that as long as Israel is the powerful party that it is, there will never be a Palestinian state to talk about, a real Palestinian state in the West Bank. So that was the first decision. The second decision was, okay, we keep the territories and we will argue for years how best to keep it, but what we will do with the people. There was a genuine discussion of whether Israel should not repeat in '67 what it did in 1948, because settler colonialism is a structure, it's a DNA, it's not a policy. And they had a serious discussion whether they had the capacity and the circumstances to expel millions of Palestinians so that the West Bank could be easily Judaized. They decided that in '67 you cannot do what you could do in '48, A, because the war was already over. Secondly, there was television. Thirdly, many of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were refugees from '48, and there was a fear that they would resist even strongly the second expulsion than they did resist the first expulsion. And they was even worried about the reactions of Syria and Jordan and Egypt, the countries where was supposed to receive these masses of refugees. So they decided not to expel the people. So if you keep the territory and you don't expel the people, what would be the status of the people? They— They discussed it. Surprisingly, the leader of the right-wing party, Menachem Begin, said, well, in that case we should grant them citizenship. That makes sense. And the Labor Party that was the dominant ideological power in '67 said, you're crazy. We cannot have a Jewish state if we don't have a demographic majority of Jews. A Jewish democratic state means you have to make sure all the time that the Jews are the majority. So if you grant them citizenship, you downsize the number of Jews in the Jewish state to dangerous levels. So Begin asked the Minister of Defense at the time, Moshe Dayan, so what do you suggest? And he said, well, you know, they would be without any citizenship. And Abba Eban, the Foreign Minister, asked, For how many years can people live without basic civil rights and human rights? And the chilling response from Moshe Dayan was, well, at least for 50 years. Today we are in the 50th years of this inhumanity that was devised in 1967. But where is the charade? And with this I would—

Jessica Desvarieux: Thank you.

Ilan Pappé: Come to a close. The charade was that the 13th government of Israel understood that it would have a problem with the international community if these 3 decisions would be the only decisions the government had been taking, even if there were secret decisions that at the time were not publicized. So they took a 4th decision, and that was to have a peace process, on the basis that Israel can never give up the West Bank, on the basis that the citizens of the West Bank, the inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would never be expelled, although they were massively expelled for various reasons, but not in the same way as in 1948, and on the basis that they would never be granted citizenship by the Israelis. But the peace process, as the Israelis understood very well, as Noam Chomsky once commented rightly, the important word is not peace. The important word is process. Process doesn't have to lead to anywhere. It goes on and on and on, and you can create the sense that it's temporary, that the reality is temporary, That you are waiting for something good to happen and you're doing all the bad things that you are doing because there's no peace. But there is a process. And as long as there's a process, you demand international immunity. Now, you can rely— and they knew it beforehand— you can rely on the fact that the kind of prison that you created for the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be resisted. You can also rely on the fact that if you, as the Israeli government, not someone on the extreme right, begin to send Jewish settlers to colonize the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, you will even make— you'll be even more confident that the people there would resist. Resistance allows you to retaliate and to be even more brutal. It's amazing how for 50 years— and it doesn't matter which government and which political party you were talking about— for 50 years, whenever Palestinian resistance emerged, the Israeli response was to build more settlements, to give the Palestinians less rights than they had, to install more checkpoints. To build a wall, to use the Air Force for the first time to carpet bomb the city of Jenin in 2002, to destroy the city of Gaza with scenes that we've only seen before in the Second World War. This was all done as a response, as retaliation for these Palestinian terrorists. They were not terrorists. There were people who resisted the 1967— and still resist— the 1967 creation of the biggest prison on earth, one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip. And they will continue to resist. And the Israelis would continue to say, well, if they continue to resist, we have to build more settlements. We have to extend the wall. We have to make it higher than it is.

Charlie Rose: And we have—

Ilan Pappé: And we have to build more settlements. We are entitled to use even more inhuman lethal weapons in Gaza. There is a direct line between the international legitimacy to Zionism and settler colonialism in Palestine and the international immunity and silence to the most recent Israeli atrocities. And you can take your pick, because it's very difficult to highlight which of the last Israeli policies in 2016 is worse than the other. And don't forget that this ideology of settler colonialism is not limited to the West Bank, is not limited to the Gaza Strip. There are Palestinian villages in the south of Israel that have been demolished for the 40th, if not the 50th time. Their crime? that they tried to build and maintain a village which was there for centuries. There are demolition of houses all over the Palestinian areas inside Israel in order to downsize both the space in which Palestinians live and the numbers of Palestinians. And there are legislation going on in Israel, which is the natural consequences of a settler-colonialist that does not allow the Palestinians to commemorate 1948 as a catastrophe, does not recognize them as part of the nation of the state, does not recognize their language as the language of the state. I'm sure that from the point of view of international law, almost 95% of the Israeli laws that were passed in the Knesset about the Palestinians and 100% of the practices on the ground would be regarded as severe violation of the most basic international law. And I'm not talking, again, about only what's happening in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also inside Israel itself, where by law you can declare a whole town a town for Jews alone. Imagine if a city in America would be declared only for Christians. What an outcry would it be there? In a law, not by practice, which is bad enough, by law. So we have to ask ourselves, how does Israel get away with this? So I come to the beginning of my talk, and with this I would end. It gets away with it because people do not know the history I was giving you today.

Speaker 3: Today.

Ilan Pappé: And when I and my friends are trying to tell this history, there— a huge effort is being made to undermine our scholarly credentials, our knowledge, but they're losing.

Speaker 2: They're losing.

Ilan Pappé: We are recognized by the international community as good scholars, as reliable scholars, as truthful scholars. The question is, can now that the truth is known, now that people know they cannot hide behind ignorance, would they have the courage to help us save the Palestinians from another 100 years of suffering? Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Now let me introduce our speaker to you, Professor Ilan Pappé. Ilan Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel. Prior to coming to the UK, he was a senior lecturer in Political Science at the University of Haifa and chair of the Emil Tuma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa. He founded and directed the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva, Israel, and was chair of the Emil Tuma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa between 2000 and 2006. He is now the professor of history and director of the European Center for Palestine Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. His research focuses on the modern Middle East, and in particular, the history of Israel and Palestine. He has also written on multiculturalism, critical discourse analysis, and on power and knowledge in general. He's the author of many books. Some of which are on the bookstore, including 10 Myths About Israel, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Biggest Prison on Earth: The History of the Israeli Occupation, and with Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis, which is the subject of this evening's presentation. Please welcome Professor Ilan Pappé.

Jessica Desvarieux: Thank you.

Ilan Pappé: Good evening. Can you hear me in the back?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Ilan Pappé: Good, excellent.

Speaker 2: It's a great pleasure to be here, and I hope that we will have constructive dialogue on a very contentious and A very troubling topic. According to a United Nations report, next year the 1,900,000 people who live in Gaza will live under conditions that the United Nations defined as unsustainable. Namely, what the United Nations expects is that people in the Gaza Strip would not be able to find enough food, get enough medical assistance, get enough— will have enough or an ample infrastructure that would allow them not only to continue normal life, but actually to exist. That this report, which anybody who visited Gaza knows is a very authentic description of the reality on the ground, has been totally ignored by the press in this country and has not been at all engaged with by any politician is not surprising. And in particular in this time, In this day and age when it seems that the local media is engaged with the question of anti-Semitism in Britain, the Semites who are really under the danger of existence do not get even one minute on the wavelengths, on air or in the printed media. And this has been the story of Palestine from the days of the Balfour Declaration. The suffering of the Palestinians were never acknowledged, whereas the suffering of the Jews were always brought up to justify the suffering of the Palestinians. It's a simplistic formula that I'm putting in front of you, but of course, if you go in depth into history, you can see that there is this kind of dialectical relationship between what the Palestinians are going through and what today people in this country feel is anti-Semitism or is how we should engage with the known and terrible suffering of Jews in this country and particularly particularly in the continent of Europe. We can go back a few years earlier to 2014 when a group of people who usually organize donation for children in need around the world and always get an open door from the BBC, for any kind of a campaign that asks people to donate money in order to help children who suffer from war, from hunger, from famine, or from natural or human disasters, when this particular group of people asked the BBC in 2014 to allow them some hours in the air to donate— to ask people to donate money for the children of Gaza, the BBC answered that this is a political action and refused to allow even 1 minute on the air for such a humanitarian, essential demand.

Ilan Pappé: This boggles the mind.

Speaker 2: This raises very interesting questions. Especially in Britain, because the history of Palestine is so closely connected to the history of Britain. The suffering of the Palestinians is so closely associated with British policies from the moment Britain, modern Britain, or the modern British Empire showed interest in Palestine. And yet in 2019, It seems that that history is irrelevant in the eyes of people. There's no sense of accountability. And there is a willingness to go along with ideas that were conceived by the Israeli government in order to stifle any debate or any discussion on the future of Palestine in this country. And we should do our utmost at least to demand the space to explain why is it such— why such a reality unfolds where the suffering of the Palestinian is not at all engaged with. And whenever it comes up, whenever someone tries to frame a discussion about this suffering, they are immediately branded as anti-Semitic. Sigmund, which actually, if you think about the logic behind this kind of accusation, it is entirely insidious and not very logical. If I am asking people to show solidarity to victims of racism and you blame me for being a racist for doing it, something is wrong in your line of argument. Not in my line of argument. And yet this line of argument seems so logical. I mean, you watch television, you read even the broadsheets, mainstream papers in this country, and somehow this logic pronounced by very intelligent people, people who usually are very sensitive of human suffering elsewhere in the world, Somehow they can make these illogical connections and claim that they are valid morally, logically, or factually.

Ilan Pappé: So I think what I would like to do tonight is to do something that the debate on Palestine in this country usually doesn't benefit from.

Speaker 2: And this is time to explain. And this is not just the fault of the media because it's anti-Palestinian. It's because the media doesn't have time to explain things. It's a media of soundbites. It's long gone, the days where the media was providing profound analysis. So there's a problem of the immediacy and the soundbite of the electronic media.

Ilan Pappé: Right.

Speaker 2: So we need to demand space like this, spaces like this, to explain a bit better, but also to demand something else, to historicize the question of Palestine, to put it within historical context. If you don't put it in historical context, the Palestine issue is marginalized in this country For instance, by events, horrific events, that took place in Syria and Iraq and Yemen and Libya since 2012. And what happened in those countries is far worse than what happened in Palestine in the last 4 years. But what happened in these countries pale in comparison to what happened in Palestine in the last 100 years. But you can see somehow not convince the people who produce knowledge about Palestine, whether academics or journalists or pundits, you somehow cannot convince them to put the historical context into the suffering of the Palestinians. And therefore it's very easy for an editor to say, well, I will talk about Syria, I will not talk about Palestine because of the sheer magnitude Of the human suffering in Syria, I don't care. I mean, compared to Syria, the daily suffering of the Palestinians are not very important. And it's not easy to demand this historical context, but we should insist on it. Otherwise, we will not have a genuine conversation on Palestine.

Ilan Pappé: And if we don't have a genuine conversation on Palestine, ladies and gentlemen—

Speaker 2: Thank you. We won't have a genuine conversation on what goes on in Syria, in Iraq, and the rest of the Arab world. And if we are not going to have a genuine conversation what goes in the Arab world, we won't have a genuine conversation on the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country.

Ilan Pappé: These things are interconnected.

Speaker 2: Palestine is not just a marginal place somewhere far away from great Malvern. Palestine is the conscience of the world. It is the place where injustice unfolded in a way that really outrages anyone with a modicum of decency. And this kind of outrage against injustice does not necessarily occur because the injustice is greater than other injustices. No. It occurs when you feel that there is hypocrisy about this injustice, that this injustice is not acknowledged. Committing a crime is bad enough. Denying a crime is worse than the crime itself. And Palestinians are victims of an ongoing crime that is constantly denied. In this country and elsewhere. And without dealing with that denial, you will not get very far in pushing towards peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land. And if you don't do it there, as I said, you have very little chance of bringing peace and stability elsewhere in the Middle East and by association into other parts of the world. I think now we know that these things are connected. Now, the most— the best way to historicize, to put a historical context that would bring us to understand better why Gaza is suffering, why the people of Gaza, according to the United Nations, are facing this kind of a doomsday scenario. In order to do this, we have sometimes to reframe the story, the narrative about Israel and Palestine, and we have to get used maybe to a different dictionary, a different kind of discussion. And the book that was mentioned in the context of the talk tonight, Gaza in Crisis, which I co-authored with Noam Chomsky, is a dialogue between us because I did not fully succeed in convincing him to change the dictionary. And then we wrote another book and I still didn't convince him. So probably there's a third book on its way. It's an important dialogue because Chomsky was an amazing intellectual, probably the intellectual of the 20th century. Even he finds it difficult to accept the historic— necessary historical context in which the issue of Palestine should be discussed. It's so deeply embedded in anyone who is Jewish, like Chomsky and myself, in anyone who is fearful of antisemitism, as both of us are, that it's very difficult for us to accept a reality seen from the point of view of the victims of Zionism. And to accept that Jews can be both victims and victimizers. If it's hard for us, not surprisingly, it's harder for other people as well. But we have to do it. If we don't do it, we betray our humanity, our Judaism.

Ilan Pappé: And our sense of justice.

Speaker 2: So in order to contextualize, there is one term that I would like to introduce to you. Maybe some of you have heard it before, but I think that particular term is very useful in order to have on the one hand a very kind of measured debate on the atrocities in Palestine, and on the other hand hopefully a profound understanding where— why evil is enacted on the ground without branding every Israeli Jew as evil or even the Israeli society as an evil society. The term I would like to use is the term of settler colonialism.

Ilan Pappé: It's a very important term. Settler colonialism.

Speaker 2: It's very different from classical colonialism. In classical colonialism, Britain sends people to colonize India, builds a colony in India.

Ilan Pappé: The people who are British in India see themselves as British, not as Indians.

Speaker 2: And when the British Empire collapses, the people, the British colonists go back because they have somewhere to go back to. So they go back home.

Ilan Pappé: Home is not India.

Speaker 2: Home is London, Great Malvern, or Exeter. So that's the classical colonialism. It had its own evil side, but we won't go into it. Settler colonialism is a different historical phenomenon. Settler colonialism is a movement of Europeans since the 16th century who are persecuted in the continent, sometimes because of religious persecution, Sometimes because of economic crisis or sometimes because of their culture or behavior. Doesn't matter. They feel unsafe in Europe and they feel that they have to leave Europe and never come back because Europe doesn't want them.

Ilan Pappé: Not—

Speaker 2: it's not only unsafe for them but doesn't want them. And then they go over outside of Europe wishing to recreate Europe in a different place because they still feel Europeans but they cannot be part of Europe. And the places that they choose in order to redefine themselves as Europeans or new nations and in which they want to feel safe because they're unsafe in Europe, the places that they choose are inhabited by another people, by indigenous people, by native people. There was a great scholar of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, who died unfortunately 2, 3 years ago, who said that at the moment that there is an encounter between the victims of persecution from Europe with the indigenous people who live in the space which they want to make their own space, the moment there is this encounter, there are 2 logics that are being activated.

Ilan Pappé: One is the logic of dehumanization.

Speaker 2: The victims cannot see the native indigenous people as victims, as human beings. They dehumanize them.

Ilan Pappé: And because they dehumanize them, another logic is being activated, the logic of the elimination of the native.

Speaker 2: Eliminating the native in order to make a place for yourself that would be safe and in which you could redefine yourself as Europeans because Europe doesn't want you.

Ilan Pappé: The elimination of the natives in some places was genocide, was physical elimination. That's what happened in North America.

Speaker 2: That's what happened in parts of South America. This is what happened in Australia and to a certain extent in New Zealand. But in some cases, such as in South Africa and in Palestine, the elimination of the native was not necessarily genocidal. There were other means used in order to have the place without the people. Now, the reasons— one of the reasons, by no means the only one— one of the reasons that they have chosen to use other methods in order to achieve their goal had to do a lot with historical timing. You could genocide Native American people in the 18th century. It was not easy to genocide people in the 20th century as European, even if you were European victims. In particularly in Palestine, a different kind of method was developed which I called in one of my books in 2007 ethnic cleansing. You try to take the land and kick out the people, in simple terms.

Ilan Pappé: And you are Jews who are victims of centuries of antisemitism.

Speaker 2: So you have to dehumanize the Palestinians.

Ilan Pappé: The dehumanization is— I don't have time to go into it, but the dehumanization is not merely by saying that they are not human beings.

Speaker 2: For instance, you would say they are nomads, they are not people who have really attachment to the land, although most of the Palestinians lived in their villages for more than 1,000 years when the Zionists came over to Palestine in the late 19th century.

Ilan Pappé: But you claim, no, these are not really people with true attachment to the land, they are not really a nation, they don't really have a collective will.

Speaker 2: And so on. So the kind of attempts to dehumanize, and then eventually when this doesn't help because the people are not moving out, you have to use force to expel them. Then the logic of the elimination of the native, in this case, in the case of Palestine, is driving them out of the homeland, not killing them massively, but driving them out. And that's the logic of apartheid.

Ilan Pappé: All their homelands.

Speaker 2: And the early Zionists came to Palestine in the late 19th century. And when they decided to come to Palestine, they had noble impulses behind this arrival. One should not deny this.

Ilan Pappé: They felt rightly that Europe was unsafe.

Speaker 2: And rightly— and nobody could deny them the right— they wanted, like many other national— I'm sorry, like other religious and ethnic groups in Europe to redefine themselves as modern nations.

Ilan Pappé: There's nothing wrong with that. If you want to define Judaism not as a religion but as a nationalism, you're entitled to do this.

Speaker 2: If you want to find a safe haven out of persecution, nobody should deny you that.

Ilan Pappé: And in fact, the—

Speaker 2: when these early Zionists thought about Palestine, of course they also thought about the religious dimension. They thought that this is the place to redefine Judaism because of the Bible, because of the Old Testament. It all made sense and there was nothing immoral about this line of thinking. The problem started when the leaders of the Zionist movement decided that in order to obtain a new connection to the land of the Bible, in order to create a safe haven for Jews from Europe, and in order to create a modern Jewish nation, you have to get rid of the native indigenous people of Palestine.

Ilan Pappé: And they did not—

Speaker 2: very few of them had moral qualms about this idea. Namely, their ideas of what they should do were far more important in their eyes than the interest, aspiration, and the very existence of the indigenous native people of Palestine. And when they arrived, it's even more ironic. Jews were not allowed to cultivate land in Europe, and they didn't know how to cultivate the few plots of land that they had bought under the Turkish rule. Palestine, as you may know, was under Ottoman rule until the end of the First World War, or Turkish rule. It was the Palestinians who taught them how to cultivate the land. And they came quite poor to Palestine and had nowhere to stay, so they used to spend the first night nights in Palestinian homes. But under the candlelight or the oil lamp, they would write the first letter back home saying, we are spending the night in the home of the aliens who took over our homeland. Already the narrative that the Palestinians are not only not the indigenous people of Palestine, But they are the aliens who are— they are hostile aliens who usurped, who took over the homeland from the Jewish people. Already at the very beginning of that encounter, these were the impressions, these were the perceptions in order to justify what would happen later on.

Ilan Pappé: And it was the British Empire that enabled the Zionist movement to build with—

Speaker 2: between 1918 to 1948, to build an infrastructure not only for a future state, but to build the infrastructure that would enable the Zionist movement in 1948 to inflict upon the Palestinian people a terrible human catastrophe that is still denied in this country, and especially the British role in that catastrophe is not fully acknowledged in this country. In 1948, within 9 months, within 9 months, half of Palestine's population was kicked out. Within 9 months. And don't think about a population only in absolute terms of how many there were. Think about it also in relative terms. Think about the country. That half of its people are being kicked out in a year like 1948 and are turned into refugees. Half of Palestine's villages, 500 villages, were wiped out. And on their ruins, immediately after the occupation, Israel planted forests or built Jewish colonies on the ruins of the Palestinian villages.

Ilan Pappé: Right.

Speaker 2: 11 Palestinian towns were demolished, and this all within 9 months. What, what is incredible about this crime is that at the time there were a lot of people whose job it was to report back home to Europe or the United States what was happening on the ground. Senior journalists, emissaries of the Red Cross, Representatives of the United Nations, and they wrote very authentic, truthful reports of the catastrophe.

Ilan Pappé: But in 1948, nobody published these reports.

Speaker 2: The newspapers' editors were too frightened to publish a report that condemns Jewish people for committing crimes against non-Jews.

Ilan Pappé: The same is true about the Red Cross. The same is true about the United Nations. Only if you are a historian like myself, you can find these reports.

Speaker 2: They're not lost.

Ilan Pappé: They are in the archives. And you can reconstruct what happened.

Speaker 2: But nobody dared to condemn the Jewish state for committing what today we will define only in one way: a crime against humanity. And that crime was denied at the moment that it was committed. It occurred. And one of the reasons—

Ilan Pappé: by no means I don't know all the reasons.

Speaker 2: I've written I think about 10 books trying to explain that kind of connection and I still don't think I did a good enough job because it's not that easy to explain that kind of connection. But one thing is very clear in '48 is that Europe doesn't want to deal with the Holocaust. He doesn't want to deal not only with Nazi Germany but also with the allies of Germany. And in order to allow Europe to move on quickly to a post-Holocaust reality, there is nothing better than having a Jewish state absolving Germany and Europe for any responsibility by declaring that there is a new Germany.

Ilan Pappé: The first country in the world that declared that there is a new Germany after the Second World War was the State of Israel.

Speaker 2: You would have expected at least to be the second, given the fact that they claimed to represent the ultimate victim, the victims of the Holocaust, not the first. But they were the first because that was the deal. You legitimize Germany. And then you get a carte blanche to do in Palestine whatever you want. And that's why you could commit that crime against the Palestinians and wipe out the villages and so on. Settler colonialism in Palestine and elsewhere, as long as it's incomplete, has a certain DNA that cannot allow even its best members of the society to humanize the indigenous, the native. Look at the American history, look at Australian history, look at South African history. You would see a lot of people who otherwise you would define as very moral, as very conscious of the other, when it comes to their own indigenous population, they dehumanized. And therefore, these 2 dimensions of a settler colonial movement Space and population continues to inform what Israel is doing after '48. In 1967, Israel was able to occupy parts of Palestine it was not able to occupy in 1948, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And therefore it had another indigenous population under its control, millions of people.

Ilan Pappé: And what they did in '67 is as criminal as what they did in 1948.

Speaker 3: I think it's important to note that And yet this is not acknowledged.

Speaker 2: Even that is not acknowledged. In '67, Israel created what I call in one of my latest books, The Biggest Prison on Earth, a system of mega prisons because they could not implement the same plan of ethnic cleansing of '48. They had to devise something new of how do you have the place without the people.

Ilan Pappé: And those of you who managed to visit the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would know exactly what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2: It's a mega prison that is run through 600 checkpoints, that is based on the power of the military to determine at any given moment anything in your life. And when I say the army, it's true about the lowest-ranked soldier who can decide whether to To close your business, to prevent you to go from school, to board a bus, or to kill you, or to imprison you without trial. Now, what I describe here is a daily occurrence in the last 52 years, a daily occurrence in the last 52 years. It has ups and downs. The ups and downs have to do with how much the local Palestinians resist or don't resist this incarceration that is imposed on them where their only crime is that they are Palestinians. So when they resist, as they did in 1987, as they did in 2000, as they did in the Gaza Strip in 2006, then Israel uses military weapons of mass destruction, not because they are nuclear weapons, because they are not meant to be used against a civilian population. They used tanks and aircraft and the same horrific scenes that you've seen today in Yemen, in Syria, you would have seen in Palestine in 2002, in Gaza in 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, and I have a very bad feeling that we might see it again next year.

Ilan Pappé: Thank you.

Speaker 2: This has a lot to do with the incompletion of the ethnic cleansing of 1948.

Ilan Pappé: Now, I don't want to sound too pessimistic because I'm optimistic. I really am.

Speaker 2: I'm an Israeli Jew. I was born in Israel. I was kicked out of Israel in 2007 because of my views. I was fired from my university. I was banished to exile in Exeter, which is not too bad, I have to admit.

Ilan Pappé: Some people were exiled to Siberia.

Speaker 2: Exeter has some things which remind you of Siberia, but it's not that bad. But I'm still going on, going back as much as I can. To continue with the struggle on the ground. And what is important for individuals in such a struggle is, I always say, is to be VIPs, is to visit if you can. And not everybody can visit now Israel. There is a new monitoring system that if you If you ever expressed in the internet or elsewhere something which Israelis would demand— deem too critical, you might be sent back from either Ben Gurion Airport or when you try to cross into the West Bank from Jordan. But if you can visit, because nothing I will tell you today compares to what you will see in a few minutes. I'm going to show you a few minutes of the I'm so confident about it because I know how much Israel is now trying to prevent people from seeing what goes on there in the occupied Palestine. Israel has a special program called Discovery. Discovery is a program by which Israel brings young American Jews to Israel to show them Israel with the hope that they will become That they would be so fascinated they will immigrate to Israel. Now, what happened was that quite a few of these young Jews, when they saw what was going on in Israel and Palestine, they became activists against Israel in the campuses after this trip. So Israel stopped the program. I think what they'll do now is just bring them to the airport, a short trip to Tel Aviv and back to the airport to make sure that they don't see see any of the evil that unfolds on the ground.

Ilan Pappé: So visiting is very important. The I for the VIP is informed.

Speaker 2: If you are knowledgeable enough about these places and if you are convinced, as I am convinced, that knowledge here is not just about what happened in Palestine in the last 70 years, what happens today in Palestine, if you are convinced that there is a connection between the injustice in Palestine to other cases of injustices in the world, not only political injustices but also social injustices and also other cases where our neoliberal society treats workers sometimes like indigenous people. I think if you are convinced that, you will understand the kind of phenomena that I saw in my traveling in the world. I saw people in Argentina, teachers demonstrating for better salaries donning themselves with the Palestinian flag without even knowing where Palestine is. I saw people in Norway who went on strike putting the Palestine flag because it's a symbol for not only injustice but also social injustice. The only people who don themselves in this country with the Israeli flag is the English Defense The IDL. So it also tells you something about the symbolic flags. So I think if you can inform yourself and others, it's very important.

Ilan Pappé: And the P for the VIP is the protest.

Speaker 2: We need you to protest to help us to redress an imbalance on the ground without which the people of Palestine might be wiped out of history, not just being ethnically cleansed, but wiped out.

Ilan Pappé: We need the solidarity.

Speaker 2: We need your support for actions of boycott and divestment and sanctions, because these are nonviolent means to achieve justice in Palestine. And without an international support for a nonviolent strategy, Young people in Palestine, and this is the youngest society in the world, young people in Palestine would believe that only violence is the way to change the reality on the ground. So we all have, I think, a moral obligation not just to, to know what's going on, but express our views and protest. And yes, in this century, In March 2019, such an act may bring on you the wrath of people who would immediately brand you as anti-Semites.

Ilan Pappé: So always remember 3 things.

Speaker 2: One is that the Palestinians are also Semites. The second thing is that most of the leading activists today asking for pressure on Israel are Jews themselves. And the third thing, which I think is the most important one, is that only you yourself know if you are a racist person or not.

Ilan Pappé: And if you know that you are not, nobody can make—

Speaker 2: can intimidate you into paralysis just because they called you a racist person.

Ilan Pappé: So I think I'll—

Speaker 2: I'll stop here, and maybe we'll warm up a little bit this chilly church with good provocative questions.

Ilan Pappé: Okay.

Jessica Desvarieux: Thank you very much. Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore. Early Tuesday, fuel tanks at Gaza's only power plant came under attack. With already limited electricity, this will certainly exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation. Israel carried out 76 strikes overnight, one of the biggest bombardments in the nearly month-long campaign. A coalition of water and sanitation organizations in the Palestinian territories recently released a statement saying, quote, since the start of the Israeli assault on Gaza on July 8th, 2014, the water and wastewater infrastructure in Gaza has been heavily affected by Israeli airstrikes. The targeting of civilian objects under situation of hostilities is prohibited according to international humanitarian law, and is considered a war crime. But with attacks ramping up instead of winding down, a ceasefire between both sides seems more and more elusive. Here to discuss the mainstream narrative around this crisis and how both sides can reach a ceasefire is our guest Ilan Pappé. He is a professor of history and the director of European Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. Ilan is also the author of several books, including his most recent book, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge. Thank you for joining us, Ilan.

Ilan Pappé: It's a pleasure to be on the show, Jessica.

Jessica Desvarieux: So Ilan, coming from an American perspective and what we're sort of hearing from the media and leaders is probably best exemplified in a statement made by former President Bill He said, quote, Hamas was perfectly well aware of what would happen if they started raining rockets on Israel. They fired 1,000 of them, and they have a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so the rest of the world will condemn them. So first of all, is this an accurate portrayal of the situation? And what context is missing here?

Ilan Pappé: No, it is not, really. I mean, it's a very narrow kind of context. That doesn't widen the picture. There are 2 kinds of context that one should point to in order to understand the situation. One refers to a more immediate past, and one to a more distant one. The more immediate past that is relevant for what goes on is— should take us back to just a month or 2 months ago, when Israel decided to use the pretext of an abduction and killing of 3 settlers in order to implement a plan that it already had in mind many years before, ago. And that is a plan to try and destroy Hamas as a political force in the West Bank, and if possible also as a military force in the Gaza Strip. The reason that Israel chose this particular timing for this initiative was the creation of a unity government. And the fact that the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank decided to try a new strategy with the help of the Hamas to go to the international community, especially to the United Nations, and demand an engagement with the 46-year-long Israeli occupation on the basis of a human rights and civil rights agenda, which Israel totally refuses. So the Hamas was keeping its It's a part of the deal back from 2012 for a long ceasefire. But Israel broke it, violated the ceasefire by arresting all the political leadership and activists in the West Bank, including those Israel was pledged to release under the prisoner exchange deal known as the Shalit exchange deal. So that's the immediate. Background. But there's far more important, probably, and deeper historical background. Since 2006, since the people of Gaza elected democratically the Hamas to try and take them out of the ghetto that Israel created to them long before the Hamas took over Gaza, already in 1994, because of the special location, geopolitical location of the Gaza Strip, Israel doesn't really know what to do with it. So, it ghettoized it already in 1994. The PA or the Fatah failed to salvage the people of Gaza from that situation. So, the people of Gaza gave a chance to the Hamas. And the Israeli reaction was even a fiercer, brutal military response to this election. And so, the whole issue of how the Hamas responds responded, namely through the launching of missiles, has to be seen in this context. It may, maybe there is another way. I'm not sure there is. But definitely this is a response to a policy of strangulation, of siege, of starvation. It's not, it's not coming out of the blue, as one would have thought that one can understand from the way Bill Clinton and others in the United States Describe the context of this crisis.

Jessica Desvarieux: I'm glad you mentioned Hamas because there's an interview that's actually picking up a lot of traction here in America. It's an exclusive interview with Hamas political leader Khalid Michelle. CBS anchor Charlie Rose, he basically asked the leader of Hamas, "What does Hamas want?" Take a listen to what he had to say.

Khalid Michelle: We are not fanatics. We are not fundamentalists. We do not. We do not actually fight the Jews because they are Jews per se. We do not fight any other races. We fight the occupiers. On the contrary, we actually respect the religious people. We ask for tolerance, for coexistence between the Buddhists, the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims. As you know, God created us as nations. We are different. And the Jews are different. The Quran says that in order for the nations to live together and coexist, without occupation and without any blockade.

Charlie Rose: I think I just heard you say, and this will close on this, you believe in the coexistence of peoples, and therefore you believe in the coexistence of Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East.

Ilan Pappé: أنا لا أتعايش مع الاحتلال.

Khalid Michelle: I cannot coexist with occupation.

Charlie Rose: Without occupation, you can coexist.

Speaker 2: أنا أطيكل أنا مستعد أتعايش مع اليهودي.

Khalid Michelle: I'm ready to coexist with the Jews, with the Christians, and with the Arabs and non-Arabs, and with those who agree with my ideas and those who disagree with them. However, I do not coexist with the occupiers, with the settlers, and the those who.

Charlie Rose: It's one thing to say you want to coexist with the Jews; it's another thing you want. Do you want to coexist with the state of Israel? Do you want to coexist with the state of Israel? Do you want to represent— do you want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state?

Jessica Desvarieux: No.

Khalid Michelle: I said I do not want to live with a state of occupiers. I do coexist with other religions.

Charlie Rose: I'm assuming they're no longer occupiers. At that point, do you want to coexist and recognize their right to exist, as they would recognize your right to exist?

Khalid Michelle: When we have a Palestinian state, then the Palestinian state will decide on its policies. You cannot actually ask me about the future. I answered you. But Palestinian people can have their say when they have their own state without occupation in.

Charlie Rose: Thank you.

Jessica Desvarieux: Ilan, you just heard that, a lot of back and forth going on between the Hamas leader and Charlie Rose there. So I'm trying to wrap my head around this, and I think a lot of us here in the United States, we don't get a sense of who Hamas is, what they represent. So I'll just ask you about their origins, 'cause I know you wrote a book about them. recently about sort of how Israel empowered Hamas to come about. Can you just explain that a bit?

Ilan Pappé: Yeah, definitely. First of all, I think, but before we do that, it's important to say that also the president of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Mazen, Mahmoud Abbas, does not, refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. So Charlie Rose's sort of allegation that Hamas is inflexible or unwilling to be a partner for reconciliation because it refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is a consensual Palestinian position shared by the leaders of the Palestinian Authority. So I think that's very important to understand. Secondly, one has to understand the Palestinian perspective on the Israeli colonization of Palestine that started in the late 19th century. I think 3 generations later, Palestinians understand that the Israelis are there to stay. I don't think there is any serious Palestinian leader, including in the Hamas, that really believes that they can make the Israelis go, or that even want the Israelis to go. It's a question of what kind of regime would reign between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Now, the secular Palestinian forces led by the Fatah in the '60s and the '70s were moving towards the idea of a 2-state solution with the hope that one day they will be able to live in one democratic state to which the Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948 could return. Israel rejected any of these ideas. Either a 2-state solution or a one-state solution, and the occupation continued, and the Judaization, colonization of the West Bank expanded, in fact, to such a degree that it's ridiculous today to talk about a 2-state solution. So what you are left with is an equal number of Jews and Palestinians living between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean under one regime that discriminates in various ways. Towards anyone who is a Palestinian. And there was a strategy, a secular strategy, if you want, a national strategy, to try and change it. Now, people were a bit fed up with the failure of that strategy and gave a chance to a more religious version of that strategy. Now, one of the reasons that version became more popular is because Israel believed that this should be enhanced and supported as a counterbalance to the secular leadership of the Palestinians, namely the Fatah. So they didn't invent the Hamas, but they definitely allowed it to emerge, to prosper, to become powerful, hoping that this would defeat the secular leadership of the Palestinians. This is not limited to Israeli policies. As you probably know, the United States did the same with the Taliban and the jihadists in Afghanistan when they wanted to defeat the Russian influence, or in those days the Soviet influence there. And they did a similar thing in Egypt and in Iraq. Israel follows them, the United States, in attempting to determine who would rule, who would be the leader, who would be the representative of the people of the Middle East under the discourse of democracy. And that's why we have this kind of crisis. So Hamas today is both democratically representing what some Palestinians feel, but is also representing an alternative to the policies that so far have not ended the occupation and the colonization. I still think the only way forward, and I think many people in Hamas now seem to agree, the only way forward for the Palestinians is in unity, a united leadership. And that kind of unity is what brought this present wave of violence from Israel's side. A united Palestinian leadership that bases the Palestinian demands on human rights and civil rights is something Israel will not be able to defeat. It's far more dangerous than any rocket the Qassam can launch into Israel.

Jessica Desvarieux: Okay. So basically, if I'm understanding you correctly, Israel essentially empowered their current enemy, as they deem it, Hamas. So how do you then resolve these issues? Can you just talk specifically about lifting the blockade? Is this even an option right now on the table?

Ilan Pappé: Well, if the blockade would not be relieved, if the ghetto of Gaza would continue to be sealed and Israel would continue to determine even the level of calories that people are entitled to have there in order not to but not to live too well. If this kind of abuse, collective abuse of the Palestinians who are incarcerated in the Gaza Strip will continue, then the Hamas will use any desperate means at its disposal to continue the struggle. And that could even lead to a 3rd intifada, namely the people in the West Bank, regardless whether they are Hamas or not, will join in, and maybe even the Hezbollah in the north. A continued Israeli policy of siege has the potential for a much wider and bloodier conflict. A removal of the siege, an ability to— of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including the political factions of the Hamas, to be reunited with their brothers and sisters in the West Bank, to be reunited with the world, and the end of the kind of boycott that America and the EU you imposed on the Hamas, will include them in a political process that can change the reality in Israel and Palestine for the better. But for that to happen, you have to change the basic attitude of Israel. Israel today is a political system that believes that it has the military power to dictate to the Palestinians how to live and where to live. Once this kind of an Israeli conviction would be weakened hopefully by international pressure, then there is a chance for a very painful but a more hopeful dialogue about a different legal regime, a different political regime all over what used to be historical Palestine.

Jessica Desvarieux: All right. Ilan Pappé, thank you so much for joining us.

Ilan Pappé: Thank you.

Jessica Desvarieux: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.