If I were PM, I would de-Zionize Israel and quit [View all]

[oberliner]

Deemed a persona non grata in Israel, Prof. Ilan Pappe (currently a professor of history at the University of Exeter in the UK, and co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies) minces no words in telling the real story of Zionist crimes against Palestinians. The price he paid: Effectively being forced out of his teaching post in the University of Haifa and ultimately out of the country of his birth. Up until 2007, he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Haifa but fearing for his and his family's safety, he felt impelled to leave Israel after he was bombarded with death threats.

Condemned by the Knesset, his picture had appeared in the country's biggest-selling newspaper at the center of a target. Next to it, a popular columnist addressed his readers thus: “I'm not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn't be surprised if someone did.”

Why all this? Well the road to his semi-voluntary exile in Britain started in 2000-2001 with the Katz affair when Pappe defended Teddy Katz and his thesis on the 1948 massacre and expulsion of Palestinians from villages in the vicinity of Haifa. As a result he was vilified and compared to a Nazi collaborator. When Pappe signed on to a boycott of Israeli universities in 2002, he was accused of “defamation” in a disciplinary hearing and called to stand for trial in his university. His intent to teach a course on the Nakbah (Catastrophe) as well as his support for boycott on Israel has led the university to the conclusion that he can only be stopped by expulsion, as Pappe wrote in a letter about his threatened dismissal.

In 2006, Pappe published his controversial book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” in which he explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously and painfully reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they initiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave. Pappe debunks the official line parroted in Israel and the West (and even by some misguided Arabs), maintaining that the refugee flight was not instigated by Arab leaders but rather caused by persecution, violence, expulsion.

http://arabnews.com/world/article619726.ece