Ilan Pappe: Criticized as an anti-Zionist communist
Ilan Pappe is an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for. In his view, expressed with obsession and a degree of paranoia, Jewish nationalism, that is to say Zionism, has been from its outset a deliberate tool for dispossessing the Palestinians; and therefore it is to be condemned root and branch. He reserves the Palestinian term of Nakba, meaning catastrophe, for describing what to Israelis is their war of independence of 1948. To him, Israeli politicians and soldiers, one and all, are so many murderers. Forests have been planted only to cover up the past. Houses are ‘monstrous villas and palaces for rich American Jews’. Everything Israeli is ugly, everything Palestinian is beautiful. One day, he supposes, the Israelis may well consummate their original crime with something even worse. The only possible alternative lies in the immediate return of every Palestinian to his original home, and that will mean the end of the state whose existence so offends Pappe. This, of course, is exactly the inflexible position taken by Hamas and the PLO.
The reader’s initial reaction must be one of pity. Poor man! What a strain it must be to belong to a nation whose members are so overwhelmingly unbearable that he longs for them to be overpowered by others. Yet there is more to it than that. Sad and creepy though it is, Pappe’s anger is open to rational analysis.
The doctrinal element pushing Pappe into anti-Zionism is his prominent involvement in the Israeli Communist Party, known as Hadash. An outcrop of pure Stalinism and always a marginal movement, Communism in Israel rejected Zionism in favour of internationalism, according to which Jews and Arabs were to form a state together. Events, indeed the whole thrust of history, have proven this to be a complete illusion, but Pappe remains one of a minute handful still in its grip.
The further emotional element pushing Pappe towards his hatred of Zionism is best elucidated by J L Talmon in his profound book, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution. Among the ‘horribly charged and tormenting questions’ Talmon asks is why so many Jews have adopted identities that seemingly allow them to deny their Jewishness. Uncountable numbers of Jews have followed the example of the Karl Marxes, Trotskys and Rosa Luxemburgs who sought identities as Communists and revolutionaries in the hope that this would allow them to merge with those who otherwise would be their persecutors. Some Communists – like Lazar Kaganovich, and many in the KGB as well as leaders in the Soviet satellites – set about the deliberate destruction of the Jewish religion and culture. Talmon speaks openly of the neurosis and ‘morbid masochism’ motivating such unhappy people....
Read entire article at David Pryce-Jones in the Literary Review (UK)
The reader’s initial reaction must be one of pity. Poor man! What a strain it must be to belong to a nation whose members are so overwhelmingly unbearable that he longs for them to be overpowered by others. Yet there is more to it than that. Sad and creepy though it is, Pappe’s anger is open to rational analysis.
The doctrinal element pushing Pappe into anti-Zionism is his prominent involvement in the Israeli Communist Party, known as Hadash. An outcrop of pure Stalinism and always a marginal movement, Communism in Israel rejected Zionism in favour of internationalism, according to which Jews and Arabs were to form a state together. Events, indeed the whole thrust of history, have proven this to be a complete illusion, but Pappe remains one of a minute handful still in its grip.
The further emotional element pushing Pappe towards his hatred of Zionism is best elucidated by J L Talmon in his profound book, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution. Among the ‘horribly charged and tormenting questions’ Talmon asks is why so many Jews have adopted identities that seemingly allow them to deny their Jewishness. Uncountable numbers of Jews have followed the example of the Karl Marxes, Trotskys and Rosa Luxemburgs who sought identities as Communists and revolutionaries in the hope that this would allow them to merge with those who otherwise would be their persecutors. Some Communists – like Lazar Kaganovich, and many in the KGB as well as leaders in the Soviet satellites – set about the deliberate destruction of the Jewish religion and culture. Talmon speaks openly of the neurosis and ‘morbid masochism’ motivating such unhappy people....