Cleveland-Area Faculty Defend Hosting Ilan Pappe in City

Cleveland-Area Faculty Defend Hosting Ilan Pappe in City

Cleveland-Area Faculty Defend Hosting Ilan Pappe in City

[The following statement was issued on 12 September 2018 by a network of Cleveland-area faculty responding to the Cleveland Jewish Federation’s criticisms of The City Club and various university’s hosting of a series of lectures by Ilan Pappe.]

We invited Professor Ilan Pappé of Exeter University to speak in Cleveland. We did so because thus far the debate over Israel in the region’s college communities has been too one-sided—dominated by former Israeli generals, Washington think tank lobbyists, and others regurgitating Israeli state perspectives. We asked the City Club to host Pappé for similar reasons. We hope the visit will show that the driving force behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is neither religious (i.e., Islam vs. Judaism) nor ethnic (Jews vs. Arabs), but political.

A recent statement from the Cleveland Jewish Federation (CJF) asserted that Pappé was an antisemite trucking in hate speech. An opinion piece in the Cleveland Jewish Newscherry-picked details around a supposedly salacious event in Pappé’s academic career and then implied that he is an antisemite. These are false charges meant to distract from Pappé’s ideas, and, indeed, ideas that are critical of Israeli state policies. 

The CJF has a history of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism in order to discredit the ideas of people with whom they disagree. This is foolish, anti-intellectual, and immoral and these people should know better. Of course there are others in the Jewish community of Cleveland who do know better.  

We challenge the name callers to show up at Professor Pappé’s lectures and to debate him using logic and evidence. 

The CJF accuses Professor Pappé of being a poor historian who manipulates the evidence. No scholar is above criticism and without flaws. But let us be clear that Professor Pappé is a legitimate and prolific scholar. He was a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa from 1984 to 2007 and the author of numerous academic books and journal articles. The CJF cites a piece in which Professor Pappé explains his position on the status of Jerusalem. To call this hate speech is absurd and there is no evidence his position or public role has incited anyone. His reputation is being tarnished today mainly because of his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, the global nonviolent campaign to force Israel to obey international law. We reject the view that political advocacy discredits one’s arguments and evidence. In our view, Pappé is a brave scholar who has evidence to support his position that the state of Israel and its political leadership are responsible for the expulsion of the Palestinians, turning them into the oldest and one of the largest refugee populations in modern history. 

Signatories

Timothy Black, Co-Director Social Justice Institute, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University

John Broich, Associate Professor, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University

Stephen C. Cory, Professor, Departments of History and Philosophy/Comparative Religion, Cleveland State University

Ananya Dasgupta, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University

Mary Erdmans, Professor, Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University

John Flores, Co-Director of the Social Justice Institute, Associate Professor, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University

Paul Iversen, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics, Case Western Reserve University

Douglas Kerr, MD, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics, Case Western Reserve University

Pete W. Moore, M.A. Hanna Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Case Western Reserve University

Joshua Stacher, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Kent State University

Ted Steinberg, The Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History, Case Western Reserve University

Abed el-Rahman Tayyara, Associate Professor, Director of Middle East Studies, Cleveland State University

Martha Woodmansee, Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University 

PDF of this Statement

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412