Palestine: The Pendulum Is Shifting
For decades in political discourse and popular culture, Palestinians were often typecast as bloodthirsty killers. As the great Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said once ruefully observed, “Palestine is a thankless cause, one in which if you truly serve, you get nothing back but opprobrium, abuse, and ostracism. How many friends avoid the subject? How many colleagues want none of Palestine’s controversy? How many bien pensant liberals have time for Bosnia and Somalia, Rwanda and South Africa and Nicaragua and human and civil rights everywhere on earth, but not for Palestine and Palestinians?” There are signs that may be changing. A new generation of activists has breathed fresh energy into the question of Palestine. The BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, has attracted more and more adherents. The pendulum is shifting.
Interviewed by David Barsamian.
Recorded at KSFR.
Speaker
Ilan Pappe
Ilan Pappé is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa and chair of the Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa. He is the author of many books including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, On Palestine with Noam Chomsky and The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories. His work contextualizes the history of Palestine into a larger global context of settler colonialism. He challenges the dominant Israeli narrative. He writes, “Standing idle while the American-Israeli vision of strangling the Gaza Strip to death, cleansing half of the West Bank from its indigenous population and threatening the rest of the Palestinians—inside Israel and in the other parts of the West Bank—with transfer, is not an option. It is tantamount to ‘decent’ people’s silence during the Holocaust.”
Fred Nagel –
Very thought provoking interview. Pappe’s early academic career reveals the complete lack of intellectual freedom when it comes to the origin of Israel. He relates this to the death of the “liberal” parties in Israeli elections. They can’t advocate for a truthful interpretation of Israel’s history, and can’t deviate from the official position of Israel being a Jewish state. What can they run on? His comparison of Obama and Trump is surprising. Well worth listening to!