Condemned by the Knesset, his picture had appeared in the country's biggest-selling newspaper at the center of a target. Next to it, a popular columnist addressed his readers thus: “I'm not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn't be surprised if someone did.”

Why all this? Well the road to his semi-voluntary exile in Britain started in 2000-2001 with the Katz affair when Pappe defended Teddy Katz and his thesis on the 1948 massacre and expulsion of Palestinians from villages in the vicinity of Haifa. As a result he was vilified and compared to a Nazi collaborator. When Pappe signed on to a boycott of Israeli universities in 2002, he was accused of “defamation” in a disciplinary hearing and called to stand for trial in his university. His intent to teach a course on the Nakbah (Catastrophe) as well as his support for boycott on Israel has led the university to the conclusion that he can only be stopped by expulsion, as Pappe wrote in a letter about his threatened dismissal.

In 2006, Pappe published his controversial book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” in which he explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously and painfully reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they initiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave. Pappe debunks the official line parroted in Israel and the West (and even by some misguided Arabs), maintaining that the refugee flight was not instigated by Arab leaders but rather caused by persecution, violence, expulsion.

Israel's official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbors and that the Palestinians became refugees when they “voluntarily” fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a “second Holocaust” against Jews.

In his book, Pappe relies almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's “founding fathers” to deconstruct Israel's myths. These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population.

Pappé details how these Israeli “heroes” executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years. In his introduction, he writes that the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel has been erased almost totally from the global public memory.

His aim was to explore the mechanism of the 1948 ethnic cleansing , and the cognitive system that allowed the world to forget and enabled the perpetrators to deny their crimes. He emphasizes that when it created its nation-state, the Zionist movement did not wage a war that “tragically but inevitably” led to the expulsion of “parts of” the indigenous population, but the other way around: the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine. His latest books include “The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel” in which he examines how Israeli Palestinians fared under Jewish rule and what their lives tell us about both Israel's attitude toward minorities and Palestinians' attitudes toward the Jewish state. He focuses not only on official policies, but also on the complexity of the daily life of the Palestinians in a hegemonic Jewish state that insists on not seeing them. Pappe also wrote a memoir in 2010 titled “Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel” where he tells his story of conversion from an Israeli Zionist to an anti-Zionist.

Arab News spoke to Professor Ilan about the prospects of peace in Palestine, the exploitation of the Holocaust, falsification of history, and his plans as prime minister. The excerpts:
 
Q. Which side do you believe is blocking chances of peace: Israelis or Palestinians? What do you think are the prospects peace?

A. I think it is mainly the Israeli position, which is the main obstacle for peace and this has been the case for a very long time. It’s not that the successive Israeli governments oppose the concept of peace. What they mean by peace is a continuation of the occupation of the West Bank, the siege on Gaza, the discrimination against the Palestinians citizens in Israel and the prevention of the Palestinian refugees from returning. One can add to this a refusal to share Jerusalem. When this is ‘peace’ — there will never be reconciliation.
 
Q. The frequent claim by Israeli officials is that Israel is a democracy, what is your view?

A. Israel is a democracy only for the Jews living in it. It has a large Palestinian minority (nearly 20 percent of the population) it regards as citizens and even larger Palestinian population under occupation, (almost equal number to the Jewish population) they are not part of that democracy. A regime that provides a democracy to only half of the population it is ruling over and for which it is responsible, cannot be defined as democracy.
 
Q. Any criticism of Israeli policies is immediately branded as anti-Semitism , or even self-hate in your case as well as other Jewish personalities, how do you see this tactic? And why isn’t it properly challenged in American and European discourse?

A. I think that such tactics abuse the term anti-Semitism and in fact have the potential of increasing anti-Semitism as it blurs the difference between Judaism, which is a religion, and Zionism, which is an ideology.

This false allegation is not challenged in Europe mainly because of the Holocaust. Not all the European nations, and not all the European peoples, have come to terms with what happened in the continent. And therefore, there is hesitation to condemn what Israel does to the Palestinians. Israel in a way absolved Europe and in return received immunity for its actions in Palestine.

The inaction in the US stems from other reasons. The unconditional support in the US for Israel rest on a triangle made of three legs: the Zionist lobby, the Christian Zionists and the military-industrial complex. Each of these factors supports Israel for a different reason but together they form a very formidable coalition.
 
Q. It has become a taboo to research the Nazi Holocaust providing alternative narratives? How do you see this? And how do you see the way the Holocaust is handled in Israeli and Western discourse?

A. I think there is such a campaign, for political reasons, to deny the Holocaust. The Nazis wanted to eliminate the Jews of Europe and almost succeeded in doing it.

Narratives differ not about that Nazi intent and plan, but about how to understand that atrocity. Official Israel, with many of its allies in the West, claims that this atrocity absolves it from any criticism and licenses it to do whatever it wishes to the Palestinians (including massive killings and transfers). This should be and can be challenged. There are Jews like myself who believe that because of the Holocaust, Jewish settlers who found refuge in Palestine should have asked to be accepted by the native population, not dispossess them.

There is also a Zionist tendency to claim that there were no other Holocausts for the same political reasons — this too can and should be challenged. Holocausts appeared before and unfortunately can reappear.
 
Q. As an independent historian, do you believe history was falsified for the benefit of the Israeli occupation? How was that possible?

A. I think that a narrative was spanned with the help of very important American academics, which denied the existence of the people of Palestine and fabricated the story so as to hide one hundred years of colonization, occupation and dispossession. This is possible because the production of knowledge goes hand in hand with power. The story told is quite often seen as truthful not because it is so, but because those who tell it have the power.
 
Q. How do you view Israel’s “power of deterrence” and its image in the world after the 2006 war and the Gaza war? What does that mean for the future of the occupation?

A. On a certain level one can notice a fatigue on the ground where before there was a willingness of small units such as the Hezbollah and Hamas to carry out an armed resistance to the occupation. But this may also be, especially in the case of the Hamas, not just a fear of another massive Israeli attack on Gaza but also a change of strategy and opting for a more popular resistance.

The Arab states in any case gave up on an armed struggle any way and the only regional power that is still considered to have the will and the ability to face Israeli hegemony, Iran, is in any case not influenced by the Israeli deterrence policy. So I think the sheer power employed in 2006 and 2009 was not to deter Lebanon and the Palestinians respectively but to punish and give vent for the lack of any other ideas of how to proceed out of the Palestine deadlock.
 
Q. How do you view the “Breaking the Silence” movement in Israel? Do you believe this is a rising trend in the IDF?

A. I think this is a very important grass-root movement of assertive young Israeli Jews who know precisely what goes on in the occupation. They grow in numbers but the vast majority of young Israelis who go to the army, do not share their point of view.
 
Q. The inception of the settler occupational state of Israel bears similarity to the start of the settler state of America including the denial of the ethnic cleansing that made the two states possible... Do you agree? How does that reflect on American support for Israel, or is it just about the leverage of the Israeli lobby, AIPAC, and such institutions?

A. I think you are right about the similarity, although in the case of the US they carried out the genocide of the indigenous population. The US is a model for Israel in many respects, and this may be one of them. And you maybe right, maybe this too contributes to the special relationship.
 
Q. Do you believe it is possible that the Israelis (as a people), Americans, and Europeans recognize what happened in 1948 and rectify the prevalent narrative of history? What would facilitate that?

A. I think that Europeans and Americas will eventually get there and I think many of them are already there. The problem with the Israeli Jews is that they are either deniers of the Nakbah or justifiers of it. This may also change but it will take more time.
 
Q. What sort of harassments do you face as a price for your writings and stances? What do you think that means for freedom of speech and academic freedom? And why did you choose to take on this task, difficult as it is?

A. It was mainly the impossibility to continue and teach as part of the society’s in general and in particular the academia’s lack of tolerance to dissenting views so I lost my job and was exposed to death threats. The price is not very high compared to what the Palestinians are paying.

I felt from very early on, coming from a family, which suffered considerably in the Holocaust, that I have to be committed to a struggle against human abuses, especially those done in my name.
 
Q. Would you say there are significant numbers of free Jewish intellectuals such as yourself?

A. I think there are far more than were before, but it is still not enough.
 
Q. Hypothetically, if you were to be prime minister in Israel: How would you run the country politically and strategically?

A. I would do all I can to de-Zionize the state and try and make it a normal place beginning by acknowledging the dispossession of the Palestinians, accepting their right of return and building a new constitutional framework for a one state solution and then I will quit.