Ten Myths About Israel Quotes

“Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The litmus test of any democracy is the level of tolerance it is willing to extend towards the minorities living in it. In this respect, Israel falls far short of being a true democracy.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Denying people the right of return to their homeland, and at the same time offering this right to others who have no connection to the land, is a model of undemocratic practice.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“And therefore we should acknowledge that the Oslo process was not a fair and equal pursuit of peace, but a compromise agreed to by a defeated, colonized people.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The geographer Oren Yiftachel from Ben-Gurion University, depicted Israel as an ethnocracy, a regime governing a mixed ethnic state with a legal and formal preference for one ethnic group over all the others. Others went further, labeling Israel an apartheid state or a settler colonial state. In short, whatever description these critical scholars offered, "democracy" was not among them.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“as demanded in the famous UN Security Council Resolution 242 very shortly after the war ended. As readers probably know, a Security Council resolution is more binding than a resolution by the General Assembly. And this was one of the few Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel that was not vetoed by the United States.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The plan (Dalet) included the following clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of cleansing the (Palestinian) population:

'Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously... Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Ben-Gurion articulated clearly the place of expulsion in the future of the Zionist project in Palestine when he wrote that same year, "With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“History lies at the core of every conflict.
A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace.
The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“When (Berl Katznelson) heard that the British government was considering the possibility of moving the Palestinians within Palestine, he was greatly disappointed: "The transfer to 'inside of Palestine' would mean the area of Shechem. I believe that their future lies in Syria and Iraq."
In those days, (Zionist) leaders like Katznelson hoped that the British would convince, or induce, the local population to leave.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Historically, the Palestinian liberation movement trended for many years toward the secular and leftist, and always contained a strong Christian component. The failure of secular forces to deliver liberation moved some people toward the political Islamic groups, some Christians as well, not necessarily in support of their dogma but simply in order to try a new approach.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Hamas is not part of that world of Jihadi terror with no clear vision or goals. The Palestinian liberation movement from its very inception had a political Islamic group within it. In fact, all the anticolonialist movements in the Arab and Muslim world included a vein of political Islam.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“We all deserve a better ending to the story of the Holocaust. This could involve a strong multicultural Germany showing the way to the rest of Europe; an American society dealing bravely with the racial crimes of its past that still resonate today; an Arab world that expunges its barbarism and inhumanity … Nothing like that could happen if we continue to fall into the trap of treating mythologies as truths. Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not “redeemed”; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“when you found a state—even one with a thriving culture, a successful high-tech industry, and a powerful military—on the basis of dispossessing another people, your moral legitimacy will always be questioned.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The Jewish settlers are now an organic and integral part of the land. They cannot, and will not, be removed. They should be part of the future, but not on the basis of the constant oppression and dispossession of the local Palestinians.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Palestine was always the land between the river and the sea. It still is. Its changing fortunes are characterized not by geography but by demography. The settler movement that arrived there in the late nineteenth century now accounts for half the population and controls the other half through a matrix of racist ideology and apartheid policies.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The most important item to go six feet under is the dictionary of illusion and deception with its famous entries such as “the peace process,” “the only democracy in the Middle East,” “a peace-loving nation,” “parity and reciprocity,” and “a humane solution to the refugee problem.” A replacement dictionary has been in the making for many years, redefining Zionism as colonialism, Israel as an apartheid state, and the Nakbah as ethnic cleansing.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The translation of these European notions of racial superiority into the Israeli context became evident as soon as the interviewer asked him about the government’s plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled as they agreed that the policy should involve the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership, that is all the members of the Palestinian Authority—about 40,000 people.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Imagine if in the UK or the United States, Jewish citizens, or Catholics for that matter, were barred by law from living in certain villages, neighborhoods, or maybe whole towns? How can such a situation be reconciled with the notion of democracy?”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Systematic cruelty does not only show its face in a major event like a massacre. The worst atrocities can also be found in the regime’s daily, mundane presence.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The final reason offered for the Zionist reclamation of the Holy Land, as determined by the Bible, was the need of Jews around the world to find a safe haven, especially after the Holocaust. However, even if this was true, it might have been possible to find a solution that was not restricted to the biblical map and that did not dispossess the Palestinians.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“It therefore represented a double gain: getting rid of the Jews in Europe, and at the same time fulfilling the divine scheme in which the Second Coming was to be precipitated by the return of the Jews to Palestine (and their subsequent conversion to Christianity or their roasting in Hell should they refuse).”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“What matters is not whether the present Jews in Israel are the authentic descendants of those who lived in the Roman era, but rather the state of Israel’s insistence that it represents all the Jews in the world and that everything it does is for their sake and on their behalf.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“People are entitled to invent themselves, as so many national movements have done in their moment of inception. But the problem becomes acute if the genesis narrative leads to political projects such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“For both Christians and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at the expense of the native people of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Their research shows that, over the centuries, Palestine, rather than being a desert, was a thriving Arab society—mostly Muslim, predominantly rural, but with vibrant urban centers.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Palestine is not entirely Jewish demographically, and although Israel controls all of it politically by various means, the state of Israel is still colonizing—building new colonies in the Galilee, the Negev, and the West Bank for the sake of increasing the number of Jews there—dispossessing Palestinians, and denying the right of the natives to their homeland.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“فلسطين لم تكن أرضاً خالية، والشعب اليهودي كانت لهم أوطانهم؛ وقد تم استعمار فلسطين لا "استردادها"؛ كما تم طرد شعبها في العام 1948 ولم يغادروا طواعية. إن الشعوب المستعَمرة، حتى وفق ميثاق الأمم المتحدة، لديها الحق كي تناضل من أجل التحرر، حتى مع جيش، وإن النهاية الناجحة لمثل هذا النضال تكمن في تأسيس دولة ديمقراطية تشمل كل سكانها”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel