Ilan Pappe

I have been teaching in the Israeli universities for 25 years. Several of my students were high ranking officers in the army. I could see their growing frustration since the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987. They detested this kind of confrontation, called euphemistically by the gurus of the American discipline of International Relations: ‘low intensity conflict’. It was too low to their taste. Even when the army used tanks and F-16s, it was a far cry from the war games the officers played in the Israeli Matkal – headquarters – and for which they bought, with American tax payer money – the most sophisticated and updated weaponry existing in the market.

Today (25 September 2004) is the first anniversary of Edward Said’s death. Time passes by so quickly and hence it seems as if only yesterday we were all reading those touching and insightful obituaries of the man and his philosophy. From brilliant long expositions to short but genuine eulogies, it seems that everything that could be said was candidly presented to those who knew him and the millions who have only heard of him. Such a litany of words should have enabled us to resign to his death, but his absence seems to me still incomprehensible. What would have happened if we still had Edward with us in this last year? Ilan Pappe ponders the question.

In a 17 March 2004 article, “Politics by Other Means”, Benny Morris offered a “review” of Ilan Pappe’s new book, A History of Modern Palestine; one land, two peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which tells the history of Palestine from the point of view of its workers, peasants, children, women and all the subaltern groups that make the society and not its political elite. Morris’ “review” consisted of a series of ad hominem attacks and outright factual distortions. Ilan Pappe sent the following reply to the New Republic, who refused to publish it.

We, who supported the Palestinian cause, have been orphaned with the untimely death of Edward Said. For Israeli Jews, like myself, he was the lighthouse that navigated us out of the darkness and confusion of growing in a Zionist state onto a safer coast of reason, morality and consciousness. Israeli academic Ilan Pappe remembers Edward Said.

“On May 22, at 2 P.M., the lectures and the audience arrived at hall 715 in the university. The doors were locked. In the corridor stood the university’s chief of security forces and ten of his henchmen, all armed with pistols and walkie-talkies. I was pushed into a side room by the chief and his lieutenant and handed a personal letter from the president, Yehuda Hayut. This was done in front of my wife and my colleagues, who watched helplessly as the macabre scene unfolded. Outside the corridor, my wife heard two other lieutenants of the chief informing the president over their walkie-talkies, ‘We caught him!’ They also said to each other, ‘High time! They should do the same to all the leftist lectures in the university!’” Dr. Ilan Pappe, a professor at Haifa University, prevents a chilling account in clinical detail of heavy-handed repression of academic speech at his university.