“We live at a moment of populism… and war-mongering.”
This is how Ilan Pappé, Israel’s New Historian, described the global state of affairs, including Israel, “which is exceeding its previous chapters of oppression of the Palestinians” and could continue to do so “in a way that it has never done before” unless political leadership changes course worldwide.
Today, Palestinians are “victims of a global alliance that churches Israel and its policies for economic, ideological, and religious reasons,” he stated.
Pappé spoke during a seminar hosted earlier in the spring by Arab World Books, ahead of the release of his new book, Israel on the Brink, due out on 9 October.
According to the editor's advance note, Pappé's new volume starts with the argument that 7 October 2023 — Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — exposed Israel’s inability to protect its citizens, and laid bare the deep divide between the influential messianic theocrats and the selective liberals.
Israel's response, which included launching a bombing campaign on Gaza, “exceeded the worst atrocities of World War II and a spiralling humanitarian catastrophe.”
In the process, Pappé adds, Israel has become its own worst enemy – “not Hamas.”
Israel on the Brink argues that restorative justice and decolonization are the only paths Israel must follow.
In his talk with Arab World Books, Pappé explained that 7 October should have been a wake-up call—“for what happens when you oppress and terrorize people.” The reason it was not is due to the “combination of messianism and cynical politics that is dominating Israel…and that is so destructive.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not messianic but a cynical and savvy politician, using the zealots in his government to impose one of the most aggressive versions of Zionism since the late 19th century when anti-Palestinian attacks began.
In doing so, Israel has taken concepts like Greater Israel from the fringes of the Zionist project — where they had been for over a century and a half — into the mainstream of day-to-day politics, Pappé explained.
He predicted this would lead to aggressive Israeli attempts to annex territories from Palestinian Authority zones and empty Gaza.
One reason Israel can get away with this, Pappé said, is that the rise of the extreme right in Europe and the election of Donald Trump in the US have legitimized the concept of colonization, which is central to the policies of the current Israeli government.
Consequently, Pappé argued that in the short and perhaps medium term, one should not expect good news on the Israeli–Palestinian front—simply because the story was never the “Israeli–Palestinian conflict.”
From the beginning, he said, the creation of Israel on the lands of historic Palestine was “a European answer to a European problem.”
“For now, it is very hard to see where the pulse will come to stop Israel, or at least to tame it… We are at a moment of populism and war-mongering… Israel is exceeding its previous chapters in oppressing Palestinians,” Pappé said in the talk, which Egyptian writer and former diplomat Mohamed Tawfik moderated.
Speaking on 15 March, shortly after the appointment of Eyal Zamir as the new Israeli chief of staff, Pappé said that when “Zamir says that Israel will [always] live on the sword,” the forecast for Israeli policy is negative.
He added that Israelis who want a better future for their children should consider leaving Israel to spare them from being trapped in a prolonged state of conflict.
This, he said, comes from an army that, despite its vast might, has failed to firmly and finally defeat either Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
“Hopefully, in the more distant future, there will be a realization of the limits of [military] power,” he stated.
Pappé, a professor of history at the University of Exeter — where he moved after being forced to leave Israel over his revisionist views on the country’s history and its treatment of the Palestinians — said that, in history, the clock of change is always slower than the clock of destruction.
However, he added, the clock of change must start ticking soon because the current policy model is “simply inefficient.”
Until then, Pappé said, Israel is unlikely to negotiate with Palestinians and will instead continue to impose its will. At this point, he stressed, “The word peace is very misleading; we are [still] talking about justice and about equality.”
He added that international powers claiming to mediate peace must face the fact that “you just don’t mediate between the colonized and the colonizer; you just support decolonization.”
In the 21st century, he said, decolonization would mean different things than it did in previous centuries.
Pappé is an advocate of the one-state solution—but not in the form it currently exists, with Palestinians living under apartheid-like conditions in Israel.
Whatever the model for the future, he said, it must take into account that “the Jews in Israel are a minority — and not even the biggest minority — in the east of the Mediterranean.”
His argument for a one-state solution is elaborated in his 2007 book A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples.
Israel on the Brink will join a long list of titles Pappé has published on the Israeli–Palestinian struggle, including his most widely known work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), in which he argued that the creation of Israel as a “Jewish state” could not have occurred without the ethnic cleansing plan carried out under David Ben-Gurion.
Following the Israeli Cast Lead war on Gaza in 2010 and the Protective Edge war in 2015, Pappé co-authored two books with writer and Palestinian rights advocate Noam Chomsky: Gaza in Crisis and On Palestine. In both, they contextualized Israel’s wars on Gaza within broader Zionist ideology.
In 2017, Pappé published The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of Gaza and the Occupied Territories, using newly released archival material to explore political and military decision-making in Israel.
He is also the author of The Idea of Israel, Ten Myths About Israel, A Very Short History of the Israel–Palestine Conflict, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, and Israel.
A leading figure among the New Historians — a group offering alternative narratives of Israel’s founding and its wars — Pappé acknowledged in his talk with Arab World Books that moving away from the ideas he had been indoctrinated with was not easy.
It came at a personal cost, including strained family ties and threats to the safety of himself and his children.
He recalled being expelled from his teaching post in Israel, where he remains barred from teaching.
Restrictions on academic research and freedom are the subject of another of his key works, Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (2018).
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