‘Judaisation’

Ilan Pappe, 10 September 2009

Officially, no Palestinians live in the ‘Jewish’ city of Upper Nazareth. The city’s elegant website appears only in Hebrew and in Russian. When I was there recently, I called a spokesperson to ask about numbers but he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. ‘I am standing in front of a house with “There is no power but in God” written in Quranic Arabic...

Israel’s Message: Gaza

Ilan Pappe, 14 January 2009

In 2004, the Israeli army began building a dummy Arab city in the Negev desert. It’s the size of a real city, with streets (all of them given names), mosques, public buildings and cars. Built at a cost of $45 million, this phantom city became a dummy Gaza in the winter of 2006, after Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south.

Indefinite detentions in Israel

Ilan Pappe, 20 July 2006

Israel’s legal system – an important basis of its claim to be a liberal democracy – acts in concert with the government to support and enable the detention without trial of large numbers of Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Territories. As of January this year, according to figures provided by the Israel Defence Forces and the prison service (thanks to...

The Israeli election and the ‘demographic problem’

Ilan Pappe, 20 April 2006

From left to right, the manifestos of all the Zionist parties during the recent Israeli election campaign contained policies which they claimed would counter the ‘demographic problem’ posed by the Palestinian presence in Israel. Ariel Sharon proposed the pull-out from Gaza as the best solution to it; the leaders of the Labour Party endorsed the wall because they believed it was the best way of limiting the number of Palestinians inside Israel. Extra-parliamentary groups, too, such as the Geneva Accord movement, Peace Now, the Council for Peace and Security, Ami Ayalon’s Census group and the Mizrachi Democratic Rainbow all claim to know how to tackle it.

Will Peretz make a difference?

Ilan Pappe, 15 December 2005

Peretz, like the other members of the Eight, has become more ‘pragmatic’ – as we say in Israel – in an attempt to shift Israel’s Zionist politics towards the centre. In the 1990s, he chose the trade union congress, the Histadrut, as his main political arena and route to the top. In 1995 he became its chairman and in that capacity did nothing to limit the organisation’s extensive involvement in the occupation: in areas directly or indirectly controlled by Israel, the Histadrut granted the settlers union rights while denying them to Palestinians; as for Palestinian workers in industrial plants within the border zones (areas inside the Palestinian Territories under direct Israeli control), it ignored their situation entirely despite their having no basic human or workers’ rights.

De-Arabisation

Ilan Pappe, 19 May 2005

The right of the Palestinian refugees expelled in the 1948 war to return home was acknowledged by the UN General Assembly in December 1948. It is a right anchored in international law and in accordance with notions of universal justice. More surprisingly perhaps, it also makes sense in terms of realpolitik: unless Israel agrees to repatriate the refugees, all attempts to solve the...

Israel heads for disaster

Ilan Pappe, 6 May 2004

Sharon’s plane stood on the tarmac for three hours while, inside, Sharon refused to allow it to take off for Washington until he got American approval for his new plan . . . a Greater Israel without a Palestinian presence, with high walls separating it from the indigenous population of Palestine, who will be crammed into two huge prison camps in Gaza and what’s left of the West Bank. Palestinians inside Israel can either leave and join the millions of refugees languishing in the camps or submit to an apartheid system of discrimination and abuse.

The prehistory of the latest proposals

Ilan Pappe, 8 January 2004

“. . . the Geneva project would leave the refugees in exile. The small print says that the Palestinian refugees would be able to choose either to return to what’s left of their former country or stay in their camps . . . There is no acknowledgment of the cause of this conflict, the 1948 ethnic cleansing; there is no process of truth and reconciliation that will make Israel accountable for what it did either in 1948 or afterwards. Under these circumstances, neither the Palestinians nor the Arab world at large will feel able to accept a Jewish state.”

From The Blog

The Children’s Court

12 May 2011

Camp Ofer near Ramallah is an Israeli ‘incarceration facility’ for detaining and processing Palestinian prisoners, including children (there are currently more than 200 Palestinian children in Israeli detention; a fifth of them are under 16). A delegation of three British Labour MPs who visited Camp Ofer last December told Amira Hass in Haaretz what they saw. More than two-thirds of detained children said they had been beaten. They were all ‘better off pleading guilty regardless of whether they had done something, because if they were detained until the end of proceedings, this could be three times longer than their punishment’. One of the MPs was disturbed to hear from his escort that this was a relatively good day: the children’s hands were cuffed in front of them rather than behind their backs.

London Review of Books

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