Sponsored by Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley; NorCal Sabeel; UC Berkeley Department of History; Law Students for Justice in Palestine; Institute of International Studies; Center for Middle Eastern Studies; Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project of the Center for Race and Gender
[Notes from UC Berkeley’s Hatem Bazian, Department of Ethnic Studies. “Ilan Pappé is the author of many books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which he documents that ethnic cleansing was the long-standing Zionist goal that was planned in detail by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first president, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and Chair of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Israel’s history included a much greater number of atrocities against Palestinians in the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s than Western establishments acknowledge. Pappé demonstrates that it was the start of a process of ethnic cleansing that continues to this day. He says that some of the kibbutzim that Hamas occupied on Oct. 7 were built over the ruins of former Palestinian villages, many of whose inhabitants were expelled to Gaza.”
About the The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Publisher’s Weekly wrote:
“Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappé offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East.”
Photo: Ilan Pappé speaking to UC Berkeley audience. Thursday, October 19, 2023 (YouTube Screenshot/Hatem Bazian)
[Editor’s note by Jeff Mackler, National Secretary, Socialist Action: It is rare indeed to hear the views of an exceptional former Israel scholar, fired by Israeli university officials for his views on Palestine. Today, Ilan Pappé is a professor at England’s Exeter University and, perhaps, the world’s leading critic of Zionist Israel’s genocidal policies. He reviews here in considerable detail the racist, colonial history of the 1948 formation of the Zionist Israeli entity, which he deems inherently racist. Pappe´ stresses to his UC Berkeley audience that without historical “contextualization,” the events of October 7 cannot be properly understood. He places the national liberation struggles of the Palestinian people over the past century as the just struggle of a colonized people in the same manner that all previous national liberation struggles in Africa and elsewhere have been recorded. Click on the photo below and patiently scroll forward until a UC Berkeley professor appears introducing Pappe´.]
