<nettime> new history in the courts

["Robert Lucas" <staedlerjr@hotmail.com>]

Hi,

I received this from a cognitive history mailing list, but I believe it
will be of interest to you nettimers, and I'm sure the widest distribution
possible will be in the interests of Prof. Pappe.

Cheers,

Rob.


>Subject: [CognitiveHistory] Prof. Pappe:  new history in the courts

>Professor Ilan Pappe (Ph.D., Oxford University; B.A., Hebrew
>University of Jerusalem) teaches in the Department of History of the
>Middle East at the University of Haifa.
>
>This contains the following:
>
>Dr. Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa
>University and the Academic Director of the Research Institute for
>Peace at Givat Haviva. His recent books include:
>
>The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (New York, 1992).
>
>The Israel/Palestine Question (London, 1999).
>
>A recent paper is "Bi-National Realities versus National Mythologies:
>The Death of the Two-States Solution", In the book Israel and a
>Palestinian State: Zero Sum Game?, 2001.
>
>2) -------cut here for Pappe's letter-------
>
>Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 10:13:06 +0100
>From: Ilan Pappe
>Subject: The expulsion of Pappe
> 
>Dear Friends,
> 
>I have received today an invitation to stand for a trial in my
>university, the university of Haifa. The prosecution, represented by
>Haifa Dean's of humanities demands my expulsion from the university
>due
>to the positions I have taken on the Katz affair. It calls upon the
>court 'to judge Dr. Pappe on the offences he has committed and to use
>to
>the full the court's legal authority to expel him from the
>university".
>These offences are in a nutshell my past critique of the university's
>conduct in the Katz affair, the MA student who discovered the Tantura
>massacre in 1948 and was disqualified for that. The reason the
>university waited so long is that now the time is ripe in Israel for
>any
>act of silencing academic freedom. My intent to teach a course on the
>Nakbah next year and my support for boycott on Israel has led the
>university to the conclusion that I can only be stopped by expulsion.
> 
>Judging by past procedures this is not a request, but already a
>verdict,
>given the position of the person in question in the university and the
>way things had been done in the past. The ostensible procedure of a
>'fair trial' does not exist and hence I do not even intend to
>participate in a McCarthyist charade.
> 
>I do not appeal to you for my own sake. I ask you at this stage
>before a
>final decision has been taken to voice your opinion in whatever form
>you
>can and to whatever stage you have access to, not in order to prevent
>my
>expulsion (in many ways in the present atmosphere in Israel it will
>come
>now, and if not now later on, as the Israeli academia has deiced
>almost
>unanimously to support the government and to help silence any
>criticism). I ask those who are willing to do so, to take this case as
>part of your overall appreciation of, and attitude to, the preset
>situation in Israel. This should shed light also on the debate whether
>or not to boycott Israeli academia.
> 
>This is not, I stress, and an appeal for personal help – my situation
>is far better than that of my colleagues in the occupied territories
>living under the daily harassment and brutal abuses of the Israeli
>army.
>It is an opening gambit and many of colleagues, especially my
>Palestinian Israeli colleagues, can be next. A testimony to the tragic
>circumstances of my own university is that I know there is no use in
>distributing this letter on its internal web-site, as all of my
>colleagues in the past when it came to the crucial moment - for
>understandable reasons - felt they could do very little to help me,
>without risking their own position in the university.
> 
>I know many of you have access to world media and can help to expose
>the
>already dismal picture and false pretense of Israel of being the 'only
>democracy in the Middle East'.
> 
>Yours
>Ilan Pappe
>
>3) ------------cut here for explanation of case-------
>
>http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2001/jan/BTL_Teddy_Katz.htm
>
>Thou Shall Not Inquire About the Nakba
>Between the Lines
>January 2001
>
>After two days of hearings in the Tel Aviv District Court (December
>13th and 14th), the libel suit initiated by former fighters of the
>Alexandroni Brigade against historian Teddy Katz has come to a halt.
>Katz, in an M.A. thesis written under the auspices of the University
>of Haifa, presented evidence of a large-scale massacre committed by
>members of the Brigade in the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura
>in May 1948. The following is the final conclusion of the thesis
>which appeared in the press in January 2000 and which caused the
>libel suit:
>
>"On the night of 22 May 1948 and during the following morning,
>Battalion 33 of the Alexandroni division attacked the village of
>Tantura. The village was occupied after several hours of skirmishes,
>some of which were quite fierce. However by early morning the IDF had
>total control of the village. According to testimonies of 20 of
>Tantura survivors and some of the division soldiers, the troops then
>hunted down the village's men for several hours and killed them.
>First, they shot them in daylight in houses, open yards and even in
>the streets, and then concentrated their efforts in the village
>cemetery."
>
>On December 19th, Katz, under tremendous pressure, in deteriorating
>health (fearful of a relapse of the stroke he suffered a year ago
>when the story of the massacre first hit the press), and behind the
>back of three of his lawyers, signed a compromise agreement with
>members of the Brigade in which he denied that a massacre had taken
>place. Almost immediately upon signing the agreement Katz regretted
>his action, which was taken without consultation with his defense
>lawyers Avigdor Feldman, Hasan Jabarin and Orna Cohen of Adalah. His
>decision for retraction was largely based upon consultation from
>family lawyers who pushed him to end the case. When the court
>hearings resumed on December 21st, Katz informed the court that the
>agreement he had signed did not represent his true opinions. He said
>he had been under pressure from his family to reach a quick agreement
>because the legal proceedings were proving bad for his health. He
>added that he was upset that he signed the agreements, saying that he
>had done so in a moment of weakness. He requested the court to cancel
>the agreement.
>
>In her ruling of the same day, Judge Drora Pilpel rejected Katz's
>request, granted the compromise agreement the status of a judicial
>ruling, and thus brought the trial to a close. The legal arguments
>employed equated the agreement between Katz and the Alexandroni
>veterans with that of a commercial agreement in which regret is not a
>sufficient reason for annulment.
>
>However, as Dr. Ilan Pappe emphasizes (ALEF website, 24/12), the
>important thing is that only a few hours after signing the agreement
>Katz regretted his decision and realized that he was manipulated by
>his family lawyers. Pappe added that "Only in the legal world is
>retraction a problem. In any other personal sphere of interaction,
>second thoughts are less important than the final decision. Judge
>Pilpel wanted to close the case as soon as possible and Katz gave her
>a chance. There is nothing there [in the whole story of Katz's
>retraction] about the Nakba, Tantura, or even Katz's ability as a
>scholar."
>
>However, as Prof. Baruch Kimmerling warned (Ha'aretz 26/12), the
>court decision has quickly become a second judgment of the Professor
>who gave Katz a grade of 97% on his thesis. According to Dr. Ilan
>Pappe (open letter, ALEF website 1/1/2001), the University of Haifa
>is seriously considering re-examining the thesis and maybe even
>taking Katz's degree away - as is now demanded from the Alexandroni
>Brigade lawyer to the university. He adds: "I have listened to 60
>hours of tapes [of personal testimony on the massacres] which I have
>and which are available to anyone who wishes to listen to them. […] I
>can say to those who are interested in my opinion that the above
>paragraph [Teddy Katz conclusion as appeared in the press] stands
>valid and unchanged after one listens to the tapes. […]
>Dr. Ilan Pappe concludes: "There is no reason in the world why the
>University of Haifa would even consider reexamining the work or
>retracting Katz's degree. It should stick to its shameful policy of
>non-interference in the case of Teddy Katz. […] I hope some of you
>[readers of this open letter on this list serve] agree with me. I
>need your support. Do not fear: this is not a dictatorship. It is the
>bastion of free speech in Israel."
>
>Katz is currently considering appealing the ruling.
>
>(Information compiled from The Committee for the Teddy Katz report,
>Ha'aretz daily and the ALEF site)
>
>4)-----cut here for interview with Professor Pappe--------------------
>---------
>
>http://msanews.mynet.net/MSANEWS/199912/19991205.0.html
>An Interview of Ilan Pappe
>By Baudouin Loos
>Brussels, 29 November 1999
>
>Ilan Pappe in not an ordinary Israeli citizen. "I am the most hated
>Israeli in Israel", he says of himself without any pride. Pappe, with
>several others, leads the "new historians' school" which took off in
>the eighties as a result of the new availability of state archives
>concerning the "Independence War". The new historians have done a lot
>to dismantle the Israeli myths of the foundation of the country. Now
>they are working on other issues: no Israeli sacred cows will have
>the opportunity to escape!
>
>Unlike other new historians, Pappe makes no secret of his political,
>or ideological agenda. "We are all political", he argues. "There is
>no historian in the world who is objective. I am not as interested in
>what happened as in how people see what's happened".
>
>Pappe's most known book is "The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
>1947-1951" I.B. Tauris, London & New York, published in 1992.
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>----------
>
>Q. With people like Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Simha
>Flappan and others, you are a prominent (and the most controversial)
>member of the school of "new historians" in Israel. Could you
>summarize the major trends of the contribution of the new Israeli
>historians to the Israeli narrative?
>
>
>A. It is an intellectual movement that started ten years ago, not
>only of historians, but also of people who deal with culture,
>academicians, journalists, artists, novelists, etc, who looked
>critically at Israel's past. I would say they adopted major chapters
>in the Palestinian interpretation, narrative, of the past. The
>particular aspect of the historians' work is that they did it with
>the help of archives and with their professional expertise, and that
>added a certain validity in the eyes of the public to these
>interpretations. Because, in the past, you could have heard the same
>arguments made by Palestinians or by very extreme Israeli leftists,
>but this time the very same things were substantiated by historic
>research works.
>
>There are several topics that those new academics, intellectuals,
>researchers dealt with. The major chapter in 1948. It's what they are
>known for. They undermined some of the major foundation's myths of
>Israel. First, they didn't accept that there was a war between a
>Jewish David and an Arab Goliath. "The few against the many". They
>claimed there was a parity on the battlefields and even, as the war
>progressed, there was an advantage to the Jewish and then Israeli
>forces. Additionally, they found out that the most efficient Arab
>army -- the Jordanian Army -- had a secret agreement with the
>Jews/Israelis prior to the war. "Collusion across the Jordan", as Avi
>Shlaim put it (the title of his famous book). That understanding -- a
>division of Palestine between the Jordanians and the Jews, instead of
>between the Jews and the Palestinians -- to a large extent determined
>the fate of the war. Then they undermined the myth of the Arabs
>voluntary flight. They claimed with various degrees of conviction
>that the Arabs were expelled, that mass expulsions took place in
>1948, and then Israel did everything to prevent the return of the
>refugees.
>
>And, lastly, they undermined the myth of "Israel the peace-seeker".
>They said that there was a chance to peace after 1948 but that was
>missed because of Israel's intransigence and inflexibility, rather
>than because of the Arab inflexibility. (That was my major
>contribution.)
>
>The new history, now in Israel, doesn't only deal with 48. It
>analyzes Zionism as a colonialist phenomenon from the late 19th
>century. It goes on to revisit the fifties: they are very critical on
>both domestic and foreign security policy of Israel in those years.
>The myth till 1967 was that Israel was a small isolated country
>surrounded by hostile enemies. It was also undermined: they claimed
>that Israel was quite aggressive, capable of leading powerful
>policies. And, domestically, Israel discriminated against its Arab
>citizens as it did, on similar ground, discriminate against the Jews
>it absorbed from Arab countries.
>
>So far, the last topic is the attitude of the Jewish community in
>Palestine during the mandatory years toward the Holocaust. It's a
>very touchy subject. The Zionist leadership came out as very
>pragmatic and it put the interest of the Jewish community in
>Palestine above that of the Jewish community in Europe even in the
>time of absolute danger as happened during WWII.
>
>How do you see the answer given to the new historians by the "old"
>historians like Shabtai Tevet, Anita Shapira, Efraim Karsh or Itamar
>Rabinovich?
>
>The first reaction was rather derogatory, claiming that this work is
>not professional, shouldn't be taken notice of. Then the second wave
>of reactions said that the work is indeed important but it rejected
>its findings. I can understand these historians, not so much Ephraim
>Karsh who was the most vicious of all in his attacks. In my case, for
>example, they dispute everything! They seem to accept Benny Morris
>more easily than me. I am not surprised: Benny Morris' conclusion is
>more relieving. For example, when he says about the fate of
>Palestinians in 48 "à la guerre comme à la guerre", I claim that it
>was more like an ethnic cleansing.
>
>It is precisely because of that very conclusion that you appear to be
>so controversial in your country, isn't it? Because you say "There
>was a unwritten Zionist plan to expel the Arabs of Palestine in
>48"...
>
>Absolutely. They were cautious enough not to write it although there
>was this "plan D" (Dalet), that reveals enough of the systematic
>expulsion. The idea was prepared by the Jewish military forces in
>March 1948. In that plan, they defined a very important principle:
>any Arab village or neighborhood that would not surrender to the
>Jewish forces, that would not raise the white flag, would be
>uprooted, destroyed and the people expelled. I think they knew well
>that there was very little chances for more than five or six villages
>to surrender. Why should they surrender, especially after (the
>massacre of) Deir Yassin in April and the big fright in the Arab
>community? In fact, only four villages rose the white flag. All the
>rest were potentially an object of expulsion. I must add that a few
>other neighborhoods rose the white flag but it didn't help them...
>All this is very clear. We have to remember that the UN partition
>plan of November 1947 would have left an equal number of Jews and
>Arabs in the Jewish state. This contradicted the idea of a Jewish
>state. So they had to make sure that as few Arabs as possible were
>still there. And that's what happened.
>
>Back to the old historians, I would say they are more suspicious of
>my ideological trappings than that of Benny Morris, also because I am
>more relativist. I admit that my ideology influences my historical
>writings, but so what? I mean it is the case for everybody.
>
>Both Morris and you worked on the same issues, established the same
>facts and yet you failed to draw the same conclusions (Morris keeps
>on claiming that even though there was expulsion of thousands Arabs,
>one cannot say that there was ever a master-plan of mass
>expulsion)...
>
>Morris is more positivist: if it is only implicit, not written, he
>doesn't want to raise it in his books. I think historians should go
>further than that. The nature of the discussion is that: Morris says
>that even if someone says he wants to expulse you from your house and
>you run away because you know that it is what he wants to do, this is
>not called expulsion. I regard it as expulsion. I regard the transfer
>of people from one neighborhood in Haifa to another as transfer, not
>as dislocation: it is an experience of refugeehood which is more
>difficult sometimes than leaving your town altogether for you to see
>daily the people who took your house.
>
>So these are the kinds of disagreement. I claim that they also stem
>from ideological positions, not just from facts. I am more anti-
>Zionist if you want, and Morris still regards himself as Zionist, may
>be this is where the difference lies.
>
>You said somewhere that you were "non-Zionist"...
>
>No, I meant "post-Zionist". Because, to be really anti-Zionist would
>mean leaving Israel altogether: if you want to serve the
>Palestinians, you have to leave. If you help them from inside Israel,
>then you do allow Jews to fulfill their dream on a homeland. This is
>an important message to the Palestinians as well: there are five
>millions Jews there, you cannot return the clock backwards, you must
>take them into account. Whether they came there as a result of an act
>of injustice or not, they are part of the reality.
>
>Most of the Palestinians seem now ready to accept the two-state
>solution...
>
>Yes. But it is more difficult for Israel because 20% of the Israelis
>are Palestinian, so it's a bi-national state. On the other hand one
>will have another bi-national state, Palestine, because I don't see
>any Israeli government ever evicting the settlers, a large and very
>hostile Jewish population. In the long run, it will affect the two-
>state solution, and we will have to have only one state.
>
>But this is still very unpopular in Israel...
>
>Of course! They have a vision of a peace plan that doesn't include a
>genuine sovereign Palestinian state, but bantustans while no single
>settlement would be dismantled, the whole of Jerusalem for
>themselves, no dealing with the refugees problem: in that case, why
>should they oppose the idea of partition? But tell them that the
>partition means full sovereign Palestinian state with an army and so
>on, eviction of the settlements, partitioning Jerusalem, some right
>of return for the refugees, and you will see what they think of the
>partition!
>
>Let's go back to 1948. Mr David Bar-Ilan recently wrote, as many
>conservatives think, that the responsibility of what happened must be
>put on the Palestinian shoulders because they refused the UN
>partition plan...
>
>This is an amazing accusation. Because, in 1947, the UN proposed a
>solution which was accepted only by one side, the Jewish one. And, in
>the history of the United Nations, usually, if you don't have an
>agreement of both sides, you don't implement that solution. There,
>the story began to turn bad. The fact is that you force the solution
>on a majority of the people living in Palestine who oppose that
>solution, then you shouldn't be surprised that they opposed even by
>force. This has nothing to do with the expulsion of the Palestinians,
>which was not the result of the rejection of the partition plan but
>the result of the Jewish leadership exploiting that situation to
>implement an ideology of transfer. It was clear to the Zionist
>leadership that without the uprooting of the local population it
>would be impossible to implement the dream of a Jewish nation-state.
>The policy toward the partition plan has very little to do with
>policy of the expulsion: one did not lead to the other. What happened
>is that the Jewish community waited for the right moment and
>exploited the right moment to the full.
>
>The Israeli argument goes on by saying that the Palestinian
>leadership missed a historic opportunity when it rejected the
>partition plan...
>
>May be they did. But even if it is a viable argument -- and I don't
>think so -- you don't expel an entire population because it has a
>stupid leadership. But we don't even have the right to say they were
>wrong to refuse the partition. They viewed Zionism as a colonialist
>movement. And there are very little reasons not to understand that
>point of view. Just imagine the Algerian national movement agreeing
>in the fifties to divide Algeria into two states, between them and
>the white settlers ("les pieds-noirs")! Who would have said to the
>Algerian leadership "Don't miss the historic chance!"? Of course, the
>Palestinians had other problems, they had patriarchal, feudal
>structures, familial loyalties above national ones. But it has very
>little to do with Israel which deliberately expelled the local
>population. And, if you want a solution today, Israel has to take
>into account that act, in terms of compensation and in terms of
>return. Without that, there will be no just solution for the
>Palestine problem. This is a very simple truism which Israelis refuse
>to accept.
>
>Israelis in general or mostly the leadership?
>
>Israelis in general because of the leadership. But I think it will
>change. The other day, a prominent member of the Labor party, Moshe
>Katz, leading the Palestinian committee of the Labor party, raised
>the idea of the return of 100,000 Palestinians. Was it a trial
>balloon of (Prime minister) Barak? I hope it was, but I doubt it
>[Katz initiative was rapidly and strongly rebuked by his party,
>B.L.]. Barak says it is only a humanitarian problem to which Israel
>has nothing to contribute. Katz' proposal has something to do with
>the new kind of post-Zionist taking which takes place also in the
>Labor party. It's a good sign.
>
>Three new textbooks were recently introduced in the Israeli schools.
>Some people are very angry, saying that those books would "undermine
>the feeling of justice of the Zionist project, going to the point
>that they question the Jewish right to the Land of Israel" (novelist
>Aharon Megged said this is "a moral suicide leaving our children
>without all what made us proud of Israel")...
>
>I read the books. They indicate a willingness among educators in the
>ministry of Education in Israel to rewrite the past. It is also a
>good sign, that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. It still
>remains to be seen how the teachers will use the books in classrooms,
>we don't know yet. The move is part of the dissemination of the views
>of the new historians and other sections of the society. Another
>example is the "T'kuma" TV documentary program (1998). Of course I
>would have written it differently but still you can see the impact of
>our work. And the new textbooks are very different from the textbooks
>that I grew on! It also arose quiet a row in the Israeli public
>opinion.
>
>You recently wrote in "Haaretz" that without an Israeli recognition
>of acts of past injustice, there will be no permanent solution with
>the Palestinians. Do you think Israel is going in that direction?
>
>Not yet because the political system has not absorbed this solution.
>And unfortunately I think what we are going into now is a period in
>which everybody would talk about peace but on the ground this peace
>would be a substitution of one form of occupation by another. And it
>will take several years -- I don't know how many -- for people in the
>Palestinian side to realize that they were taken for a ride, and God
>knows how they will react.
>
>The peace process is supposed to end within less than a year...
>
>It is not a peace process. It is one of the reasons I am in Brussels:
>the Barak 's government got an international recognition as a peace-
>government. On the ground, it does not perform a peace policy. If
>people like me succeed in convincing that there is a problem with the
>peace process, that all the issues should be reopened for
>negotiation, may be we could prevent the next catastrophe. If we
>don't, it will take time but people will find out that declaring a
>permanent solution for the Palestine question in which only 60 % of
>the West Bank and of the Gaza strip are in Palestinian hands, in
>which all Jerusalem remains in Jewish hands, with no eviction of one
>Jewish settlement, with Israeli control of borders, water and economy
>in Palestine, and no solution for the refugee problem, all this
>cannot be called peace. I think there is a public illusion in the
>West that you have two opening positions here: the Israeli opening
>position, that I just described, and the Palestinian one, full
>independent and sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza, but this
>is not true. There is no Palestinian peace plan. The Americans,
>unfortunately the key here, understand the final stage of the peace
>process is how to convince the Palestinians to accept the Israeli
>dictate. This is what we call now "peace". And at the same time,
>Jewish settlements go on, silent transfer of Palestinians of
>Jerusalem goes on, the Palestinians are offered natural reserves
>instead of populated areas in the interim stages, Israel has just
>completed the plan today to build a ring road in East Jerusalem to
>complete Greater Jerusalem which is 10 % of the West Bank. And they
>would give Arafat another medal, so had the kings of bantustans in
>South Africa.
>
>
>Arafat's kind of leadership is disputed but his reaction is to put
>the critics in jail as he did on the 27th of November to nine people
>who had signed a harsh petition against him...
>
>Yes there is a problem. The Palestinian Authority, under pressure,
>does two bad things. One is to totally neglect the democratization
>and the building of a civic society, using the negociation with
>Israel as an excuse. Secondly, and probably more important, because
>it is frustrated by the balance of power, it plays a double game
>which is not working too well. On the one hand they try, courageously
>in a way, to put forwards some counterproposals to Israeli proposals,
>but on the other hand they play according to the Americans' tune
>because they've no one else's to play to. It gives a very ambivalent
>picture of their ability to rule. They use more often power than
>persuasion to deal with opposition and they may inflict a lasting
>damage on the Palestinian political life in the future that will not
>be easy to reverse.
>
>
>In September, Mr Barak expressed regret in the name of the Israeli
>government for the suffering of the Palestinian people but at the
>same time he denied any sense of guilt or responsibility. That
>prompted Gideon Levy to answer in "Haaretz": "Are we not responsible
>for expulsing people, torturing people, erasing hundreds of villages,
>arresting ten of thousands without trial?..."
>
>Gideon Levy was very right. But Barak didn't "regret", he only
>said "sorry" for them. He dissociated the suffering from the Israeli
>policy. But we are not only talking about policy in the past, we are
>talking about policy in the present. Israelis continue to inflict
>suffering on the Palestinians! They do it in Lebanon, in the West
>Bank, in the Gaza Strip. The only place where they almost stop doing
>it is in Israel itself, where the minority of Palestinian Israelis
>are now experiencing much better conditions than they did before.
>
>
>It seems that, although they are generally well educated, Jewish
>Israelis don't really realize (or don't want to realize) what they
>did and still do to the Palestinian people. How do you explain that?
>
>It is the fruits of a very long process of indoctrination starting in
>the kindergarten, accompanying all Jewish boys and girls throughout
>their life. You don't uproot easily such an attitude which was
>planted there by very powerful indoctrination machine, giving a
>racist perception of the other, who is described as primitive, almost
>non-existing, hostile -- he is hostile, but the explanation given is
>that he was born primitive, Islamic, anti-Semite, not that someone
>has taken his land. Add to this the experience of the young soldiers
>in the West Bank and Gaza, where they have learnt to treat, like the
>first Zionist settlers, the Palestinians as part of the scenery, not
>as human beings. Palestinians are like desert, mosquitos: things you
>have to conquer by vision, energy, improvisation. The attitude to the
>Palestinians is the other coin of the Zionist success. We were so
>successful like those in the wild West. Otherwise, you would have had
>moral problems throughout the story! You can't have it. You solve
>that moral problem by saying these are not equal human beings who
>were uprooted, just savages part of the native population which we
>conquered as we conquered poverty, as we conquered hostile mosquitos.
>This is the main reason. The second reason is that much of the
>political capital of the Jewish state is based on moral superiority
>which is demanded by the name of the Holocaust. I am hated in Israel
>more than everyone else because I claim that I have a universal and
>not a Zionist lesson from the Holocaust. In the name of the
>Holocaust, I claim that Israel should be ashamed. If you lived in
>Israel, you would understand that it is really doing too much and may
>be I should be more cautious when I do it because this may be a U-
>turn for too many people. But this is exactly the problem. Although
>many things had been done to the Palestinians before the Holocaust,
>the Holocaust justifies everything, what has been done before or
>after it. Even someone great intellectual like Martin Buber could
>have said the most stupid sentence of all: "We had to do a small
>injustice in order to rectify a big injustice". How could you say
>this! Why should the one be connected to the other?
>
>
>Did you first become communist or "new historian"?
>
>I have to correct something: I like life too much to be communist! I
>am socialist. True I am member of Hadash which is a front where you
>find the communist party to which I don't belong. You also find the
>non-Zionist Arab-Jewish group to which I belong. I think both my
>political commitment and historian known position developed
>simultaneously. And one supported the other. Because of my ideology I
>understood documents I saw in the archives the way I understood them,
>and because of the documents in the archives I became more convinced
>in the ideological way I took. A complicated process! Some colleague
>told me I ruined our cause by admitting my ideological platform. Why?
>Everybody in Israel and Palestine has an ideological platform. Indeed
>the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts
>are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our
>interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because
>of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers.
>
>
>I suppose you would agree with many Arabs who say a Jewish state
>cannot be a democratic state?
>
>It can't. If the identity of people is connected to religion or
>ethnic group and not to citizenship, it means that any citizen who
>does not belong to that nationalism, religion or ethni

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