Professor Ilan Pappe 17^th January 2024

Last week the Bristol Branch of the HA hosted a highly relevant and thoughtful lecture by Ilan Pappe. The focus was Palestine but the lecture was also about the duty of historians to uncover the truth and challenge the version of events they are given. Professor Pappe argued that many of the politicians and diplomats he had met despite their sincere aim to bring peace to the region knew so little of its history and did not know what they did not know. Professor Pappe a Jewish historian trained in Israel and Oxford who served in the Yom Kippur War worked through three examples of how Palestinian history had been distorted to create a particular narrative and justification.
The first was the way both Evangelical Christians and Zionists from the 19th century onwards had wiped the Palestinian community from the history of the region from the first century AD (CE) to 1900. They presented the region as a desert or black hole with no culture or society where nothing had happened for two thousand years except for the Crusades.
The second abuse is in the way Zionism and the creation of the Israeli state was presented and its links to the end of European colonialism in the 20th century which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. The role of European nations and the USA and the parallels between the displacement of other native people like South Africans and the Jews own experience in nationalist Europe were explored. A false history was developed of links between the Nazis and the Palestinians and a pastoral people were presented as terrorists involved in guerrilla warfare simply because this was their ‘culture’. The movement of communities turning Palestinians into refugees in 1948 (the Nakba) was re-written with no explanation for the motivation of the Palestinians.
Both these contradictory narratives of Palestine as an empty place and the Palestinians as Anti-Semitic terrorists who had made themselves refugees had already been challenged by scholars like Edward Sahid. The vibrant culture of Palestine with its own urban elite was now well documented.
Professor Pappe then linked his lecture to the third abuse of history with the most recent events by looking at what had happened in Israel, particularly in Gaza in the 21st century and the events of 7th October 2023. The origins of Hamas was linked to the Nakba of 1948 and the massive expulsion which had created the Gaza strip, the “largest refugee camp in the world” in what had been a seaside town while other Palestinians had taken refuge in Lebanon or the West Bank. The area around Gaza saw the destruction of eleven Palestinian towns and the building of eleven kibbutz. The bombing of Gaza in 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2014 by F16 bombers had increased the trauma of living in Gaza. This was the background to the terrible events of the last four months.
In the long-term Israel can be seen as yet another European colony on the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It is increasingly isolated and beleaguered.
This impressive lecture was followed by testimony from members of the audience with roots in the region and questions about the future of Israel.
After 90 minutes of lecture and Q&A our audience of well over a hundred were still asking questions until the building closed.