THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE
By Ilan Pappe
Oneworld. 314 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978-1-85168-467-0
In Israel they say ‘it’s easier to throw mud than to clean it up’ and it is far beyond the capability of a brief review to clear up the mess created by Ilan Pappe’s latest barrage. This review must content itself with supplying guidelines to enable potential readers to judge the reliability or otherwise of Pappe’s indictment of Israel.
Pappe is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at Exeter University and a co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. He is one of a small but influential group of revisionist historians who since the early 90s have challenged the conventional account of the birth of the modern state of Israel, portraying the Zionists as colonialist aggressors and the Palestinian Arabs as their victims. Pappe, however, is so extreme that some of his fellow revisionists have condemned both his methods of doing history and his conclusions. Pappe’s anti-Israel bias is so extreme that he recently gave an in-depth interview to the German anti-Semitic neo-Nazi paper National Zeitung, in which he repeated his charges against Israel.
