Undemocratic Israel

Ilan Pappe. Out of Frame: the struggle for academic freedom in Israel.

Pappe tells us of the intense “indoctrination” of academia by what he calls “Israeli ideology.”

“Powerful as the Zionist grip is on one’s thoughts and life, as an Israeli Jew, one hour have extracted yourself from its hold, you cannot understand how you could ever have been captivated by its lure, logic or vision.”

Mount Herzl in Israel sits on “two villages that were depopulated in July 1948 during Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine or in the local jargon “Israel’s War of Independence.” (3)

Young Israelis don’t know who Herzl was! (3)

Another village named after Herzl “was built on the ruins of several Palestinian villages.” (3)

Famed Jewish philosopher Martin Buber disagreed with the political, military Zionist goals and “sense of moral superiority” Israelis held. He believed that “an internal revolution” was needed to “heal our people of their murerous sickness and causeless hatred. . . . how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees  in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought from afar; whose gardens, orchids and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed, we put houses of education, charity and prayer while we babble and rave about being the ‘people of the book’ and the ‘light of the nations’.” (4-5)

Today, Israelis believe in “Herzl’s message: Zionism and the settlements of Israel was a miracle.” (8)

Herzl was “openly and proudly, a colonialist. . . . He often spoke of colonizing Palestine as the master plan of Zionism.” (9)

Herzl had no sympathy for the Arabs. They “should be expelled unnoticed and discreetly and circumspectly.” (10)

While expressing concern for the native inhabitants of Palestine he actually began the “double-talk” of future Zionist and Israeli leaders used to fool “the world for so many years.” Pappe cites Herzl’s diaries.” (10)

In the 1950s Haifa’s mayor eradicated what he could of the “Arab past.” (13)

British policy toward the Arabs was hostile. There was “a collusion between Israel, Jordan and Britain that almost wiped out the Palestinians.” (16)

Pappe cites his own book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951, to prove that Britain was not the enemy of Zionism and Israel.” (17)

Later, Pappe came to understand that the Palestinian version 1948 Arab-Zionist conflict was correct. (20)

Israel established a layer of “denial and distortion. The villages from which the Palestinian population was evicted in 1948 were renamed and resettled in a matter of months.” (22)

Pappe received death threats and was called a traitor following publication of his thesis as a book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. He did not have tenure and believes that many critics did not read his book. (23-24)

Benny Morris who was one of the first to question the Zionist narrative of the 1948 war “rejected . . . many Palestinian points, such as the depiction of Zionism as a colonialist movement or of the 1948 expulsion as an ethnic cleansing operation.” (38)

In the fall of 2000 there was another Intifada. “Within two years, critical voices in academia, in the electronic and printed media and in other sites of cultural and knowledge production were silenced.” Israelis had closed their minds and the “militarization of public space occurred.” (40)

Jewish identity now revolved around the military. It used the military requirement for young people to indoctrinate the society. (42)

Israelis media created “the mythology of Israeli heroism in the battlefield, even when the raw material was spun out of bloody reprisal operations against a civilian population in the 1950s. These heroes would become the core group from which many future leaders of Israel would emerge: Yitzhak Rabin, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Brak and Ariel Sharon.” (43)

During the Oslo Agreements the media began to assert itself against the military censorship. (44)

Nevertheless, “the number of former-generals in politics and the media grew, and with it their influence on the public space.” (44)

A myth created during the Intifadas was that they were terrorist acts and the media accepted the military’s belief. “The early demonstrations in the Intifada were therefore reported as assaults on soldiers and not as the peaceful protests and marches against the occupation that they really were.” (50)

The media also perpetrated the lie that the 13 Palestinians killed by Israel during the Intifada were terrorists. Israeli troops supposedly used their weapons when they were in danger. The fact that these and many more Palestinians killed by the Israeli military were unarmed was not revealed to the Israeli public. Another myth promoted was that the Palestine liberation Organization (PLO) was part of al-Qaeda. (51)

Foreign media became targets of the military and the Israeli media did nothing to protect them. (55)

In March 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, while attempting to show an Israeli army with a “human face” the Israeli media showed an Israeli army destroying walls and terrorizing women and children. (55)

Pappe has a subtitle of one of his chapters, The Intellectual Eunuchs and Tamed ‘Peaceniks’. He tells of Benny Morris joining the consensus of Israel’s founding and speaking against his original writings. (57)

After the Six Day War liberal Israeli activists accepted a two state solution to the conflict. After the Second Intifada these same activists “publicly and privately confessed how wrong they had been to trust the Palestinians.” (58)

Leaders of the Israeli left “warned long before the al-Asqa Intifada that if peace were not achieved in Camp David, war would reign instead. This was not an analytical statement, but a condescending threat to the Palestinians.” (60)

The Oslo Accords replaced “Israeli occupation with another form of control.” (61)

All political views in Israel believed that Israel was Palestine. The fewer Palestinians the better. “The argument was about tactics, not goals.” (61)

The right-wing settlers on the West Bank hated the Oslo Accords and the Israeli ‘peace camp’. They also “preferred to use force to impose the Zionist reality over all of Palestine.” (62)

Pappe struggled “against Nakbah denial in my homeland.” (63)

Israel successfully removed the issue of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, the Nakbah, to such an extent that they refused to allow their diplomats to discuss it or its consequences and causes for the contemporary conflict. (65) Things are different now. (66)

Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon the government “initiated the systematic removal of any textbook or school syllabus that referred to the Nakbah, even marginally.” (66)

“After 2000, the expulsion to many in the political centre to be an inevitable and justifiable consequence of the Zionist project in Palestine.  If there was any lament, it was that the expulsions not complete.” Even Benny Morris thought more Palestinians would have been expelled. This aided the “Israeli plans for further ethnic cleansing.” (67)

Teddy Katz lived on a kibbutz near Haifa and enrolled in Ilan Pappe’s class about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Haifa. He studied his kibbutz action in the 1948 war. (71) He found that the “Kibbutz was built on the ruins of an Arab village is called Zeyta.” The government evicted these people after the war “I because the site was coveted by the kibbutz movement for its fertile soil and convenient location.” However, the Arabs new location was also desired by the kibbutz because they didn’t like seeing “from their windows those who had been dispossessed in order to give them a home.” So, the Arabs moved again. (71)

Kzatz found that Jewish military units murdered “possibly up to 225” people at Tantura who were unarmed and had surrendered. The Alexandroni Brigade committed this act but they disagreed that they did commit this act. “The association of Alexandroni veterans decided to sue Katz for libel. . . . There were many Palestinian survivors, but there testimony did not count in Israel.” (73)

The University of Haifa erased Teddy Katz from its enrollment and he was threatened and harassed. (74)

Pappe learned that the “Alexandroni Brigade veterans were regularly meeting the managers of the university, I knew that normal academic procedures and ethics were not being followed in this case.” (75)

At this time Katz was in his mid-50s and consequently suffered a stroke. (76)

As a result, Katz signed an apology. Later, he would retract his retraction. (77)

Nevertheless, Pappe researched on his own and more than confirmed Katz’s conclusion. “The Alexandrondi veterans did not dare to sue me . . . they knew that I would not crack under the pressure of a trial.” (88)

As a result Pappe “became a pariah in my own university community. Old colleagues and friends canceled invitations to take part in seminars, symposia and conferences which had been sent to me before the affair broke out.” (90)

At this point in Israeli history McCarthyist tactics were used “in Israeli academia and the media.” Continuing this censorship, "the director of the library at Haifa University formally removed Katz’s dissertation from the shelf of MA and Phd theses.” (82)

Ephraim Karsh is a historian whose work is considered by too many as unreliable. He vilifies the “New Historians” as being “pro-Palestinian, and hence suspect as professionally inept.” (84)

Israelis turned the Palestinians into Nazis. (91)

In May 2002 Ilan Pappe was brought before an academic court in which the accusers demanded his dismissal from the university because of my position on the Katz affair. The accusers viewed “themselves as the guardians of national history. . . . Most important, the history of 1948, especially of the ethnic cleansing, is directly connected to the peace process today ad to the shape of any future solution.” (92)

For the 2002 to 2003 academic year Pappe proposed a course at the University of Haifa about the Nakbah. Palestinians as a subject had been “introduced only in the 1980s - not out of empathy for the plight of the Palestinians, but as part of an intelligence effort to ‘know the enemy.’” Pappe’s course, considered heresy, had many students. (93-94)

Pappe walks with Fatima who remembers the 1948 Nakbah. Her village is gone, replaced with a kibbutz “tourist bungalows,; the village graveyard is now a “car park.” (110) At the time of the Nakbah Fatima knew “that the British were leaving and that the Jews were occupying nearby villages at a frightening rate.” The Arab countries did not help despite “their rhetoric.” (113)

Fatima had hidden from the armed Jews who had Arab villagers pile bodies and who were then shot and piled on top of the bodies. (115) later the Israelis buried the bodies with bulldozers which in later years the area would be covered with pine trees. (121-122)

An Israeli man named Yaacov found old letters from his father-in-law who had been a Jewish officer in the 1948 war. “One of the entries detailed the frenzied events that ended with the slaughter of all the men and male teenagers in Fatima’s village.” Following a press release more soldiers came out of confess to “atrocities committed by the Israelis in the 1948 war. Massacres were revealed, tales of rape and loot were exposed, and the initially confident and condescending official Israeli responses soon replaced with indignation, panic, and in some more thoughtful Israeli circles, remorse.” (117-118)

The Battle for the Historiography of 1948 -

Pappe proposed a historiographical conference on 1948 a the University of Haifa. However, his desire to include Udi Adiv nixed the project. “In the early 1970s Adiv had been found guilty of spying for Syria and Palestinian groups and was sent to jail. After his release in the early 1980s, he completed a PhD thesis at the University of London under the supervision of Professor Sami Zubadia, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Middle East. Adiv’s thesis was on Zionist historiography and particularly that of 1948. Pappe believes “that Adiv was a victim of the regime’s ideology rather than” a traitor. (125-126)

Pappe would later present documents to a large group of people who met at his home. The first document recounts an Israeli commander in 1948 telling already expelled Arabs to move again. One Arab called it “racism.” (135-136)

In another case, Pappe recounts that Israeli soldiers looted and stole anything of value the Arabs had. (139)

Pappe finally broke with Zionism and the brutal policies of the Israeli state toward the Palestinians during the Lebanese War of 1982. Even some senior Israeli army officers abhorred the invasion of Lebanon. (144)

However, many Israeli generals wanted a big war not an incursion into Lebanon. They wanted this to maintain Israel’s deterrence and to prove to themselves that they could fight a war. (145)

In 2005 the Gaza’s resisted the “Israeli strategy of creating a prison camp” of Gaza. They launched missiles into the Negev desert which was also a response to the Israelis arresting Palestinians. (151)

Israel responded with massive airstrikes. The goal “was to weaken the community’s support for the rocket launchers.” As we learned from World War II bombing stiffens resistance to the bombers. Ugh! (151-152)

Zionism stiffens. (156)

The Israeli population wholeheartedly supports the army’s “carpet bombing of civilians.” All wanted more war. (159)

Gaza’s used to work in the homes and clean the streets of the people of Tel Aviv. (167)

Israeli hatred for the Gaza’s knows no limits. 100 Palestinians were killed by the Israelis in 2008-2009 “merely for getting to close to the fences.” From 2000-2009 they killed 3,000 Gaza’s. After the 1967 war Israelis stole Gaza’s water. (168)

Israeli academia portrayed the Palestinians as demons “if it was led my Hamas.” (171)

Zionism ceased to be about finding a safe place for Jews in Europe once they decided to colonize and dispossess Palestinians. (180)

Since the 1930s Zionist policy in Palestine has “been made by generals.” The entire Israelis society is “geared to service in the army. . . . Israel indeed became an army with a state.” (184)

“Atom bombs are still considered in Israel a doomsday weapon to be used only in case of imminent defeat of the Jewish state.” (189)