Ilan Pappé > Quotes

“Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“وعندما زارت غولدا مئير, وهي واحدة من الزعماء الصهيونيين الكبار, حيفا بعد أيام قليلة, وجدت من الصعب عليها في البداية أن تكبت إحساساً بالرعب عندما دخلت البيوت حيث كان الطعام المطبوخ ما زال على الطاولات, والألعاب والكتب التي تركها الأطفال (الفلسطينيون) على الأرض, وحيث بدا الأمر كأن الحياة تجمدت في لحظة واحدة. وكانت مئير جاءت فلسطين من الولايات المتحدة, التي هربت عائلتها إليها في إثر المذابح المنظمة في روسيا, وذكرتها المناظر التي شاهدتها ذلك اليوم بأسوأ القصص التي سمعتها من عائلتها عن الوحشية ضد اليهود قبل عقود. لكن ذلك لم يؤثر, كما يبدو, في عزمها أو عزم زملائها على المضي قدماً في التطهير العرقي لفلسطين.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Denying people the right of return to their homeland, and at the same time offering this right to others who have no connection to the land, is a model of undemocratic practice.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.’ David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 19381”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Zionism began as a European national movement but turned into a colonialist one once its leaders decided to implement their vision of national revival in the land of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

“This book is written with the deep conviction that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine must become rooted in our memory and consciousness as a crime against humanity and that it should be excluded from the list of alleged crimes.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“إذا ما سقت اليوم سيارتك في اتجاه الجنوب الشرقي من مدينة الرملة وقطعت مسافة 15 كم تقريباً, وخصوصاً في يوم شتائي عندما تخضّر شجيرات الرّتم الشائكة الصفر عادة, والتي تغطي سهول فلسطين الداخلية, فإنك ستصادف منظراً غريباً: صفوفاً طويلة من الأنقاض والحجارة في حقل مشكوف تحيط بساحة مربعة متخيلة كبيرة نسبياً؛ إنها أنقاض السياجات الحجرية لدير أيوب, وبينها أنقاض سور حجري منخفض بني سنة 1947 لأسباب جمالية أكثر منه لحماية القرية, التي كان يقطن فيها نحو 500 نسمة. وكان سكان هذه القرية يعيشون في بيوت حجرية أو طينية على شاكلة البيوت المنتشرة في المنطقة. وكانوا قبل الهجوم اليهودي مباشرة يحتفلون بافتتاح مدرسة جديدة تسجل فيها عدد لا يستهان به من التلاميذ, 51 تلميذاً, وتحقق ذلك بفضل الأموال التي جمعوها من بعضهم البعض, والتي كانت كافية أيضاً لدفع راتب المعلم. لكن ابتهاجهم سرعان ما تبدد عندما دخلت سرية مؤلفة من عشرين جندياً يهودياً القرية التي كانت, مثل كثير من القرى في كانون الأول-ديسمبر, لا تمتلك أية آلية للدفاع, وشرعوا في إطلاق النار عشوائياً على البيوت. وقد هوجمت القرية لاحقاً ثلاث مرات قبل ان يجري إخلاؤها بالقوة في نيسان-أبريا 1948, ومن ثم تدميرها كلياً.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“And therefore we should acknowledge that the Oslo process was not a fair and equal pursuit of peace, but a compromise agreed to by a defeated, colonized people.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Half of the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out, half of their villages and towns were destroyed, and only very few among them ever managed to return.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The third generation of inmates are still there waiting for the world to acknowledge their suffering and to realize that, as long as their oppression continues, it will be impossible to engage constructively with oppression elsewhere in the Middle East, and in particular in Syria. The immunity Israel has received over the last fifty years encourages others, regimes and oppositions alike, to believe that human and civil rights are irrelevant in the Middle East. The dismantling of the mega-prison in Palestine will send a different, and more hopeful, message to everyone living in this troubled part of the world.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The geographer Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, depicted Israel as an ethnocracy, a regime governing a mixed ethnic state with a legal and formal preference for one ethnic group over all the others. Others went further, labeling Israel an apartheid state or a settler colonial state. In short, whatever description these critical scholars offered, "democracy" was not among them.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“History lies at the core of every conflict.
A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace.
The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The Hashud (‘suspect’) came to refer to any Palestinian the Israeli disliked; he was the ‘bad Arab’. Being a ‘suspect’ already meant guilty until proven otherwise even in those early days, and therefore a ‘suspect’ was someone who was likely to be arrested without trial and then remain listed on a kind of ‘criminal’ register that would then bar him or her later on from working in Israel, passing through checkpoints, getting permits to open a business and all other normal aspects of life. The only way of avoiding this, or of being taken off the register, was by becoming an informer for the internal Israeli security service, the Shabak.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“I have no illusion that it will take more than this book to reverse a reality that demonises a people who have been colonised, expelled and occupied, and glorifies the very people who colonised, expelled and occupied them.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“ethnic cleansing is an effort to render an ethnically mixed country homogenous by expelling a particular group of people and turning them into refugees while demolishing the homes they were driven out from.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“as demanded in the famous UN Security Council Resolution 242 very shortly after the war ended. As readers probably know, a Security Council resolution is more binding than a resolution by the General Assembly. And this was one of the few Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel that was not vetoed by the United States.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Human Rights, adopted as General Assembly Resolution 217 A (III), 10 December 1948, the day before Resolution 194 declared the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The plan (Dalet) included the following clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of cleansing the (Palestinian) population:

'Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously... Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The Palestinians faced demolition of their houses (unlike before, this time without prior warning); the destruction of their rural infrastructure – the uprooting of olive trees and the ruination of crops; and probably the most sinister of all in this list of evils, the redirection of water away from their towns and villages, in many cases to the benefit of Jewish settlements (which, after the Intifada, sold that water for a higher price back to the Palestinians from whom the water had been stolen in the first place”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Ben-Gurion articulated clearly the place of expulsion in the future of the Zionist project in Palestine when he wrote that same year, "With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country.3 The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The world looks on as the strongest military power in the region, with its Apache helicopters, tanks and bulldozers, attacks an unarmed and defenseless population of civilians and impoverished refugees among whom small groups of poorly equipped militias try to make a brave but ineffective stand.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“…what the Palestinians are demanding and what for many of them has become a sine qua non is that they be recognized as the victims of an ongoing evil. Consciously perpetrated against them by Israel. For Israeli Jews to accept this would naturally mean undermining their own status of victimhood. This would have political implications on an international scale, but also, perhaps far more critically, would trigger a moral and existential repercussions for the Israeli Jewish psyche. Israeli Jews would have to recognize that they have become the mirror image of their own worst nightmare.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“How to have the cake and eat it, therefore, was the question. The answer was to decide on continued colonization while leaving the question of the status of the Palestinian residents open for a future meeting, which never happened.7
The colonization effort was a triple enterprise: the constant grabbing of land, moving Jewish settlers into new colonies and limiting by force any natural growth of the Palestinians inside the Occupied Territories.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Israelis enjoy telling Palestinians they should be happy they live in ‘the only democracy’ in the region where they have the right to vote, but no one is under any illusion that voting comes with any actual political power or influence.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The head of the Israeli military intelligence, Shlomo Gazit (whom we met as the first coordinator of the military rule after 1967), explained that this destruction of the infrastructure was intentional. Israel wanted the Palestinians to ‘face unemployment and a shortage of land and water and thus we can create the necessary conditions for the departure of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza’.32
On top of all of these measures during the period when the official mentality in Israel was that the occupied people had to be punished, there was yet more licence for the settlers’ violence and intimidation. In periods like this, the courts were particularly lenient in their attitude to the killing of Palestinians by settlers. Of the forty-eight cases concerning the killing of Palestinians between 1988 and 1992 by settlers only one culprit was charged with murder.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories