Pappé, currently at the University of Exeter, having left the University of Haifa under pressure,[1] has devoted his career almost exclusively to demonizing Israel and Zionism; his newest book is no exception. It consists of a collection of anti-Israel articles and diatribes by both Arab and Israeli-Jewish haters of Israel who insist that Israel is guilty of just about everything.
Significantly, this reader belongs to Routledge’s “Rewriting History Series,” a hodgepodge of leftist, “anti-colonialist” volumes and historical revisionism. The second edition of The Israel/Palestine Question differs in interesting ways from the first, published in 1999. Benny Morris, an erstwhile New Historian who now denounces anti-Zionist New Historians while endorsing the “Zionist narrative,"[2] no longer appears as a contributor. (He had written the centerpiece of the first edition.)
Arabs represented include Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), who demands that the 1947 U.N. resolution creating Israel be revoked; Beshara Doumani (University of California, Berkeley), Butrus Abu-Manneh (Haifa), and Nur Massalha (University of Surrey). For “balance,” the book includes such Jews as Avi Shlaim (Oxford University), Uri Ram (Ben Gurion), and Gershon Shafir (University of California, San Diego).
None of the authoritative Israeli historians of the conflict, even those from the Left, are cited; rather, the footnotes refer to almost every pseudo-scholar who has made a career out of bashing Israel.
Every chapter but one reprints material that had appeared elsewhere, the exception being a chapter by As’ad Ghanem, the anti-Israel Arab political scientist from Pappé’s old haunt, the University of Haifa’s department of political science. (Ghanem is on record as favoring a so-called “one-state solution,"[3] in which Israel will cease to exist. The same solution is favored by most of the other contributors in the book.) Ghanem’s contribution claims that “Israeli Palestinians” (i.e., Israeli Arabs) are living under Israeli “ethnocracy.”
Rave reviews in Al-Ahram[4] and the PLO-controlled Journal of Palestine Studies[5] confirm that this book lacks scholarly objectivity or value.
[1] Neri Livneh, “Post-Zionism Only Rings Once,” Ha’aretz (Tel Aviv), accessed Dec. 12, 2008.
[2] Jonathan D. Tepperman, “An Isfaeli [sic] Who’s Got Everybody Outraged,” The New York Times, Apr. 17, 2004.
[3] “Challenging the Boundaries: A Single State in Israel/Palestine,” London, Nov. 17-18, 2007; CBSNews, May 9, 2008.
[4] Amina Elbendary, “Rewriting Palestine,” Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Dec. 14–20, 2000.
[5] Quoted on the jacket and inside of the book.
