Ilan Pappé: A Plausible Polemicist, Partisan Provocateur

Remember this name. I suspect Ilan Pappé will eventually be remembered not simply as a fierce critic of Israel, but as one of the intellectual arsonists who helped carry a dangerous fire far beyond it. Israel will survive Ilan Pappé. My greater concern is the damage done when arguments such as his migrate from the seminar room into the moral vocabulary of Western institutions.

That the West has a serious problem within parts of higher education is increasingly difficult to contest. I proffer Pappé as one face of that problem: an accomplished, Oxford-trained academic whose scholarship and political activism have become almost impossible to separate. The University of Exeter’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, which he co-directs, explicitly describes its approach in terms of “scholar-activism,” decolonisation and research connected to transformative change. That is a revealing description of what has happened in sections of the modern academy: scholarship is no longer always expected merely to discover, test and explain. Increasingly, it is expected to change the world in a predetermined direction.

Pappé was born in Haifa Israel in 1954, studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his doctorate at Oxford. He taught at the University of Haifa until 2006 and moved to Britain in 2007. Pappé himself said he had become unable to function comfortably within Israeli academia, describing professional ostracism, threats and hostility following, among other things, his support for an academic boycott of Israel. Fear for his family was also cited at the time. He settled near Exeter and joined the University of Exeter, where he remains Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies and a senior academic figure.

His bibliography is substantial: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine, The Idea of Israel, Ten Myths About Israel, The Biggest Prison on Earth, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic and, most recently, Israel on the Brink. His central argument has become progressively unmistakable: Zionism is, in his telling, fundamentally a settler-colonial enterprise; the two-state solution is inadequate; and Palestine requires “decolonisation” and ultimately a single political order rather than a continuing Jewish nation-state alongside a Palestinian one.

There is a reason his work remains deeply controversial even among historians prepared to criticise Israel. Benny Morris—himself one of Israel’s best-known revisionist “New Historians”—has accused Pappé of serious factual errors, distortions and allowing ideology to overwhelm historical method. Historian Mordechai Bar-On likewise subjected The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine to sustained methodological criticism, while other reviewers have accused Pappé of selecting evidence to support a predetermined thesis. There are scholars who defend him and regard his work as courageous revisionist history; that disagreement should be acknowledged. But precisely because Pappé possesses academic credentials and writes with the language of scholarship, his claims carry a plausibility and authority that a street-corner propagandist could never command.

That he has spent decades throwing intellectual matches at the foundations of Israel is readily apparent. What is less appreciated is that Israel is not a detached cottage sitting alone in a field. It is one house in a long row of terraced houses. Britain is there. Australia is there. France, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States are there. The party walls are thinner than many comfortable Westerners imagine. Delegitimise national identity, historical continuity, borders, liberal institutions and the legitimacy of defending a democratic state strongly enough in one house, and eventually the smoke begins appearing beneath the doors of the others.

I cannot know whether Pappé desires chaos, and it would be unfair to claim that he does. What can be said is that his politics belong comfortably within a radical socialist and decolonial tradition that regards established structures not principally as inheritances to be improved but as systems of domination to be dismantled. Pappé himself advocates “decolonisation,” BDS and the replacement of the existing Zionist political order rather than its incremental reform. That is revolutionary politics in the literal sense. The critical question is always the one revolutionaries find easiest to evade: what exactly replaces the structure once you have successfully pulled it down?

A 2009 profile reported that Pappé was living in England with his partner and two sons. They should be left out of the argument; they are not responsible for his ideas. But the broader principle matters. Pappé is entitled to stake his own reputation, political inheritance and conception of Jewish collective security on his convictions. Ideas propagated from prestigious Western universities, however, do not remain private property. They shape students, journalists, activists, institutions and eventually governments. When those ideas contribute to weakening societies in which my children and unborn descendants must live, I acquire an interest in challenging them.

That is why this debate is larger than Ilan Pappé and larger even than Israel. Western civilisation does not require intellectual conformity. Quite the opposite: it survives through disagreement, scrutiny and criticism. But criticism worthy of a university should illuminate complexity rather than burn it away. It should test ideology rather than become its servant.

Less throwing matches into tinder. More work with the fire hose please, Professor Pappé. There is quite enough burning already.

Colonel Michael Scott CSC Ret’d is a former Australian army officer and the founder of The 2023 Foundation, an initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism.