Pappe is part of a loosely defined group of Israeli historians referred to as the New Historians, who have challenged the widely accepted version of Israel’s establishment, as well as the history and nature of Zionist ideology. Pappe’s challenges to the Israeli establishment led to calls for his sacking by the Israeli minister for education. He left Israel in 2008 and is now a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.
The talk focused on the dispossession of around 700,000 Palestinian people in 1948 and experience of Palestinians still living within Israel’s borders. Drawing upon archival evidence made available in 1980, Pappe formulated his argument that this removal constituted an act of large-scale ethnic cleansing, and that the ongoing oppression of Palestinians inside Israel, as well as its ongoing expansion and destruction of Palestinian settlements, is the modern manifestation of this policy.
Central to his theory, and a central theme in his talks around Australia in September, is that the state of Israel is an apartheid, settler colonial state, not dissimilar to pre-1994 apartheid South Africa. He argues that a system of racial segregation means that Palestinians experience life in Israel as second-class citizens and that the existence of these “forgotten” Palestinians residing within Israel further precludes the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Pappe highlighted a shift in the discourse around Palestine from one around nationalism and sovereignty to one around human rights and democracy, attributing part recent burgeoning interest in his ideas to this shift. At the end of the talk, he responded at length to questions with his signature wit and impressive eloquence. He encouraged the audience to become active in the fight for Palestine and its people, asking Israeli people to pose the question to their children of “whether they want to be citizens of a free democratic state or of an apartheid Jewish state”.
