Mechanisms of denial
ILAN PAPPE and JUSTIN PODUR
ZNet, 20 February 2005
Ilan Pappe is a professor of history at Haifa University in Israel. He is an activist for Palestinian rights. He was in Toronto in February to give the keynote speech at "Israeli Apartheid Week" at the University of Toronto. He was interviewed by telephone on February 5, 2005.
Justin Podur, Znet: In your book, A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2004), you use what you identify as a "humanist" approach. You contrast the humanist version of history with the different "nationalist" versions of history that exist. What's the difference and why does it matter?
Ilan Pappe: The official histories of Israel and Palestine have been loyal either to the Zionist narrative or to the Palestinian nationalist perspective. This is a view from the top: generals, politicians, elites. This history doesn't deal with the majority, the majority of the people who are not part of this political and military game. But when you try to approach history from the perspective of the majority, the excluded, you see this political game in a different light. You see how manipulative and deliberately deceptive political elites can be. You see the conflict is not the natural result of some collision of peoples, but the result of deliberate human engineering and policy. If you can really understand the past, as I try to, if you can look at it honestly, that's the only solid basis for trying to build a future.
Podur: You say that you take a humanist approach, but you also admit that you end up telling a story much closer to the Palestinian version of events.
Pappe: As a humanist my sympathy is with the victims. If I had written about Jews in Europe, or African Americans under slavery or Jim Crow, I would be accused of being pro-Jewish or pro-African. Since I am writing about modern Palestine, I am accused of being pro-Palestinian. What amazes me is that people who claim to be humanists that don't come to the same conclusions as I do, people who don't conclude that Palestinians have been victims of colonization and expulsion, people who don't have sympathy with them.
Podur: You explained how this can happen last night in your talk. You talked about what you called "mechanisms of denial". Can you explain this?
Pappe: The Palestinian case is paradoxical. The people who live there can see the results of 56 years of continuous ethnic cleansing, discrimination, a whole legal and practical apparatus that is the definition of apartheid. And yet within the media, the academy, and even the public consciousness, Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East'. Nothing of this reality seems to reach journalists, academics, and therefore the public. The reason is that our society is very well protected by these mechanisms of denial. Even very good-hearted Israelis who consider themselves to be part of the peace camp live in denial. There are various mechanisms, going back historically.
One of them is physical and has to do with place names. In the original ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that took place in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled, the names of towns were changed. Towns were physically wiped out and reduced to rubble, and then planted over with European pine trees. The idea was at once to wipe out the past, to make it like it never existed, and simultaneously to change a Mediterrenean, Arab village into a European forest.
Israeli archaeologists were consulted to select names from the Bible that would correspond to the sites. But the names were selected even more deliberately, and even more vindictively, than that. So the Palestinian village of Lubia became the Israeli village of Levi. The names are similar, and they were made that way on purpose. So that children growing up would think only of Levi, but the Palestinians who were expelled would know. They would know, and the name would be close enough to the old name that it would be a reminder.
It was the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that planted these pine trees, to wipe out the memory of the place and Europeanize it. I was bewildered in Toronto, seeing signs for the JNF, asking for support for the JNF as if it was some kind of ecological organization dedicated to protecting whales. It is not. It is a colonialist agency of ethnic cleansing.
And the mechanisms of denial are not only about 1948. They were and are used and re-used to prevent seeing Palestinians. There were Palestinians living in Israel under military rule until 1967. These were the people who experienced the arbitrary rule of the whim of a military officer, whose lives were in the hands of someone who knew or cared nothing about them, long before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. After that, the denial simply extended to the occupied territories.
An even greater paradox is the denial that has gone alongside the exposure of crimes in the past four years. For the past four years things have gotten ever more horrendous. Daily killings of children, demolition of houses, confiscation of land, the denial of the most basic rights and freedoms. How is it possible that Israel succeeded in concealing that from its own society and from the rest of the world?
Podur: It hasn't been concealed, but even when it is presented there is no impact.
Pappe: There are incredible examples. Here is one. There is a music show that is on Israeli television, called Taverna. It is Israeli music, which means it is Greek music with Hebrew lyrics. After the Israeli Army committed the massacre in Jenin in April 2002, the producer