Ilan Pappe begins with declaring that to understand the situation today we need an accurate definition of Zionism since it was the leading ideology of the settler colonial movement that took over Palestine. Pappe compares the US history and the elimination of the Native inside what is now the US and the post 1948 conquest of Palestine.
There is now growing criticism of racism and land-grab by settlers in the US, while the world tends to excuse the Israeli settlers for their ongoing land-grabs. And expulsions did not stop with the 1948 war that established Israel. Pappe says that Israel removed 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza in the June 1967 war. And between 1967 and today almost 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Pappe quotes an American intellectual who declared that the Palestinians have to compensate the Jews for a thousand years of European and Christian antisemitism.
Pappe also gives a moving description of how Palestine was a multicultural and vibrant society before 1948 where Muslims and Jews and Christians lived side by side and co-existed.
Prior to coming to the University of Exeter in the UK in 2008, Pappe was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. (1984–2007) After publishing his book: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe was condemned in Israel’s parliament, and a minister of education called for him to be sacked.
Professor Ilan Pappe spoke at the University of California Berkeley on October 19, 2023. You can find the full lecture and Q/A period on YouTube under the title “Crisis in Zionism, Opportunity for Palestine?”
The moderator of the event was Dr. Ussama Makdisi, Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. The producer was Dr. Hatem Bazian, lecturer at the Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley.
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