Numéro 60--- ÉTÉ 2007 - Vho

GAZETTE DU GOLFE ET DES BANLIEUES / 60 / ÉTÉ 2007
Le dernier livre de Norman Finkelstein est Beyond Chutzpah : On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of
history (Au-delà du culot : du mésusage de laccusation dantisémitisme et de la distorsion de lhistoire)-
(University of California Press).
Adresse URL de son site : http://www.NormanFinkelstein.com]
Publié sur Counterpunch le 12 septembre 2006 En français sur le site de Michel Collon
http://www.info-palestine.net/article.php3?id_article=544
LA SOIF DE RÉVISION
A Shared History, a Different Conclusion
Scott Wilson
HAIFA,-- Ilan Pappe, one of the revisionist scholars known in Israel as the "new historians,"
began his career in some of the same wartime archives as Benny Morris. But his own ideological
journey has taken him to the far shore of Israel's political gulf and nearly complete isolation.
The two disagree not on the facts about Israel's founding that they helped uncover but on what
lessons they hold nearly six decades later. Morris maintains the rise of radical Islam is largely
responsible for the region's strife; Pappe is virtually alone among Jewish Israelis in blaming the
Zionist project to create a Jewish state in the Arab Middle East for the lack of peace. "Zionism far
more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam," Pappe says.
The 52-year-old historian is a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa, which overlooks the
thriving port where Pappe's parents arrived from Germany seven decades ago. Many of the relatives
who stayed behind perished in the Holocaust. Pappe's family was apolitical. He served in the Golan
Heights during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.
What Pappe calls his "journey to the margins and beyond" began at Oxford University, where
under the guidance of the renowned Arab historian Albert Hourani he wrote a doctoral thesis that
became his first book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. He mixed with Palestinian intellectuals
when the Palestine Liberation Organization was outlawed in Israel. "My research debunked all of the
lessons about Israel's creation that I had been raised on," Pappe says.
In his view, Israeli professors were not criticizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land with
the same stridency in academic conferences abroad as they did in the op-ed pages back home. He
increasingly believed that land included all of Israel, not just the territories Israel seized in the 1967
Middle East War.
In 1996, Pappe joined Hadash, the mostly Arab anti-Zionist communist party and ran
unsuccessfully for parliament. His work two years later organizing campus events to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of "the catastrophe," as Palestinians call the 1948-49 war, placed him at odds
with the university's politically powerful Land of Israel Studies department. The university president
began calling for his resignation.
"The debate that year prepared the way for the big battle -- the second intifada," Pappe says. "I
looked around and I was alone." Relatives stopped speaking to him over his rejection of the Jewish
state in the dedication of his 2003 book, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. He
dedicated it to his sons: "may they live not only in a modern Palestine but in a peaceful one."
"When I was struggling against public denial of what occurred in 1948, I was still hopeful,"
Pappe says. "But the fact that denial has disappeared is even more worrying. It means that my
outlook and theirs is unbridgeable. This is a basic problem of morality and ethics now."
Israel's war with the radical Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah last summer convinced Pappe of
something he suspected for years: His views are irrelevant inside Israel. Both Kiryat Tivon, the
upper-middle class enclave in the Galilee where he lives, and his university were within Hezbollah
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