05.06.2018

Gastvortrag: 70 Years After the 'Nakba' – What are the Perspectives?

Ilan Pappé (Exeter): Friday, 15th June 2018 10:00 a.m. (c.t.), Kupferbau (HS 22), Hölderlinstraße 5

While the ongoing Israeli settlement policy has shrunk the Westbank and Gaza territories to 22 percent of historical Palestine, the US have recognized Jerusalem, including its annexed Eastern part which Israel conquered in 1967 and where by now 200’000 settlers live, as the capital of Israel. Simultaneously, Palestinian citizens of Israel living in the Negev are forced out of their villages where exclusive Jewish settlements are planned. As a result, possible political solutions to the conflict seem distant, and the long-standing global diplomatic demand for a “two-state solution” seems less and less a realistic possibility. Renewed violence has accompanied the US’s official move of their embassy to Jerusalem. In his Tübingen lecture, Ilan Pappé will critically re-examine the current situation and offer some tentative perspectives for a future coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians.

Ilan Pappé is a prolific writer and the most prominent Israeli historian and social scientist alive. Born in Haifa to German Jewish parents who fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s, Pappé served in the Israeli Defense Forces on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He earned his PhD from Oxford University with Albert Hourani and Roger Owen and, in 1984, became Professor of Political Science at Haifa University. He served as founding director of the Research Institute of Peace, Givat Haviva (1993-2000), and as Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies (until 2006). In 2007, he was forced to leave Haifa University because of his critical perspectives on Israel’s history and took on a professorship at Exeter University where he directs the university‘s European Center for Palestine Studies and is co-director of Exeter‘s Center for Ethno-Political Studies.
Among his many works are, i.a., the books On Palestine (2015, Haymarket Books, with Noam Chomsky); Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid (2015; University of Chicago Press); The Idea of Israel (2014; Verso Press); The Forgotten Palestinians (2011; Yale UP); The Modern Middle East (2005; I.B.Tauris) and A History of Modern Palestine (2004; Cambridge UP).
Pappé figures among the so-called “New Historians”, Israeli historians critical of the Zionist project and its representation in the Isreali narrative. His most famous work focuses on the forced expulsion of Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.