Jewish historian Ilan Pappé has said that since force was not able to bring a solution to the Middle East crisis the alternative would be a free democratic and Zionist-free Palestine from the river to the sea.
He advocated “a Palestine that will welcome refugees and build a society that does not discriminate over culture religion or race one that will fix the mistakes of the past like the stealing of properties and the denial of rights which will mark the beginning of a new era for the entire Middle East region.”
Shifting to the current situation Ilan Pappé said that “Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu might walk out of this war weaker than before.”
He further pointed out that he is concerned about the internal Israeli Jewish community which is unwilling to change its stand when it comes to Palestine and the Palestinians.
He adds in an interview with Al Jazeera a couple of days ago: “I think that the internal Israeli struggle will continue it is definite that Netanyahu will walk out of this war weaker than before but we must not forget that he still has a strong supporters’ base inside Israel that might still be supporting him he might or might not lose the next elections there is nothing guaranteed with this man”.
However he says that “the main issue is not Netanyahu it is the fact that we have a Jewish-Israeli community that would not change their positions towards the Palestinians which is very concerning.”
“In order to change this reality we cannot expect change from the inside I have said this previously and will repeat it over and over: we need a big pressure to be done through the region and the international community if we really want to end the suffering caused by the settler colonialism” adds the academician who left the University of Haifa during the year 2006 because of his opinions.
As the Israeli war on Gaza started the historian Pappé wrote an article for the Palestine Chronicle website titled “My Israeli Friends: This is Why I Support Palestinians” where he explains that one should be terrified by the colonialist policies Israel is implementing on Palestinians even if he/she was a Jewish citizen of Israel.
Pappé who is currently the Head of the European Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter considers -in his article published in both English and French- that the bigger picture in this situation is the story of occupied people who have been fighting for survival especially at a time where the elected government in Israel wants to urge the process of the eradication of Palestinians whom they don’t even recognize.
Pappé the author of the book: “The Bureaucracy of Evil: The History of the Israeli Occupation” (Oxford 2012) notes that the Israelis -even liberal Israelis- have taken the operation done by Hamas as a green light for all the crimes that Israel has been committing against the Palestinians since the Nakba (catastrophe) and a justification for the genocide currently happening in the Gaza Strip.
