By Gilad Atzmon
Ilan Pappe is
an important voice. One of those courageous historians, brave enough to
open the Pandora box of 1948. Back in the 1990s Pappe, amongst a few
other Israeli post-Zionists, reminded Israelis of their original sin -
the orchestrated, racially-driven ethnic cleansing of the indigenous
people of Palestine - the Nakba.
But like many historians,
Pappe, though familiar with the facts of history, seems either unable to
grasp or reluctant to address the ideological and cultural meaning of
those facts.
In his recent article, When Israeli Denial of Palestinian Existence Becomes Genocidal, Pappe
attempts to explain the ongoing Israeli dismissal of the Palestinian
plight. Like Shlomo Sand, Pappe points out that Israeli President Shimon
Peres’ take on history is a “fabricated narrative.”
So far so good, but Pappe
then misses the point. For some reason, he believes that Peres’ denial
of the Palestinian’s suffering is a result of a ‘cognitive dissonance.’
i.e. a discomfort experienced when two or more conflicting ideas, values
or beliefs are held at the same time.
But what are those
conflicting ideas or values upheld by Israelis and their President which
cause them so much ‘discomfort’? Pappe does not tell us. Nor does he
explain how Peres has sustained such ‘discomfort’ for more than six
decades. Now, I agree that Peres, Netanyahu and many Israelis often
exhibit clear psychotic symptoms, but one thing I cannot detect in
Peres’ utterances or behavior is any ‘discomfort’.
I obviously believe that Pappe is wrong here – expulsion, ethnic cleansing as well as the ongoing abuse of human right in Palestine, are actually consistent with Jewish nationalist supremacist culture and also with a strict interpretation of Jewish Biblical heritage.
Pappe writes, “The
perpetrators of the 1948 ethnic cleansing were the Zionist settlers who
came to Palestine, like Polish-born Shimon Peres, before the Second
World War. They denied the existence of the native people they
encountered, who lived there for hundreds of years, if not more.” Here Pappe is correct, but then he continues: “The
Zionists did not possess the power at the time to settle the cognitive
dissonance they experienced: their conviction that the land was
people-less despite the presence of so many native people there.”
But Pappe fails to point at any symptom of such a dissonance. Could it
be that the Director of the Palestine Studies at the University of
Exeter is just ignorant?
Certainly not, Pappe
is far from being ignorant. Pappe knows the history of Zionism and
Israel better than most people. He knows that ‘Zionist settlers’ like
‘Polish-born Shimon Peres’ were ideologically and culturally driven. But
then why would a professor of history attempt to turn a blind eye to
the ‘ideology’ and the ‘culture’ of those early Zionists?
The early
Zionists, were neither blind nor were they stupid. They saw the Arabs in
the land of Palestine – in the fields, in the villages and in the towns
– but, being driven by a racial, supremacist and expansionist
philosophy, they probably regarded the Arab as sub-human and so easily
dismissed their rights, their culture, their heritage and indeed, their
humanity.[1]
But, even though a
cultural and ideological analysis resolves the proposed alleged
‘dissonance’ and illuminates the historical complexity, Ilan Pappe
avoids elaborating on those issues. I have a good reason to believe that the truth is just too offensive for Pappe’s audience to digest. So instead, Pappe continues with his psychological model: “They
(the Zionist) almost solved the dissonance when they expelled as many
Palestinians as they could in 1948 — and were left with only a small
minority of Palestinians within the Jewish state.”
Yet again, it could be
helpful if Pappe provided the necessary ‘historical’ evidence that would
prove that the Nakba, was indeed an attempt to ‘resolve an internal
Zionist collective cognitive dissonance’. I assume that Pappe knows very
well that it is actually that lack of such a "cognitive
dissonance" that drives a few Israeli individuals such as Uri Avnery,
Gideon Levy and Pappe himself towards universalism, humanism and
pro-Palestinian activism.
I guess that
Pappe’s new cognitive analytical model is telling us very little about
Zionism, Israel or Shimon Peres but it actually tells us a lot about
Pappe and the grave state of the Palestinian solidarity intellectual
discourse. The discomfort he talks about is in fact his own: the clash
between known and accepted facts and logical conclusions and the task he
has accepted of squaring the circle, of wrapping up a racist,
supremacist project in psychobabble wrapping and presenting it as
nothing less than a pandemic of ‘cognitive dissonance.’
For some reason
many of us insist on producing ‘inoffensive’ chronicles of Israeli
barbarism and Jewish nationalism that attempt to mask and deflect from
rather than pointing to the obvious cultural and ideological kernel of
the problem.
Yet, the question
that bothers me is how is it possible that a leading academic exhibits
such a problematic understanding of a conflict after studying it for
three decades.
The answer is pretty embarrassing. Pappe is actually a serious scholar and a gracious human being. However,
in the current intellectual climate, Pappe, like many others cannot
freely explore the truth of Zionism and the Jewish State. The shocking
truth is that Pappe was much more provocative and intellectually
intriguing while teaching in Haifa University than now when he directs
the institute of Palestinian Studies at Exeter University. It
is a fair assumption that telling the truth about the culture that
drives the Jewish State would cost Pappe his UK academic career and
obviously the support within the Jewish so-called ‘left’, let alone the
Soros funded Palestinian collaborators.
So instead of
searching for the truth, Pappe and others end up searching for some
‘inoffensive’ models – anything to sustain the image of ‘solidarity.’
I do not have any doubt
that Pappe knows by now that Israelis are far from being tormented by
the Palestinian plight. They are not exactly regretting the Nakba
either, they certainly do not sob over their past racist assault on the
people of the land of Palestine. And as Israeli polls reveal time after
time, most Israelis would support a second Nakba as much as they supported the
criminal carpet bombardment of civilian population at the time of
operation Cast Lead. Pappe knows very well that Israeli racist policies
and collective attitudes are culturally and ideologically, rather than
politically driven. Israel is the Jewish State and its politics is
dictated by a new Hebraic interpretation of Jewish culture and Judaic
heritage.
Pappe is a humanist and I
want to believe that in the small hours, he himself feels some
discomfort. Deep down, Pappe must know the truth. He knows what drives
Zionism and Israeli militarism. He knows it all but, for obvious
reasons, he must keep silent and wraps the conflict up with faulty
terminology and ‘inoffensive’ cognitive models.
Instead of engaging in an
open discourse and digging into the truth of the conflict, we see our
leading scholars actively engaged in concealment of the truth.
This is actually a tragedy, for the Palestinian Solidarity discourse is
now an intellectual desert. We have murdered and buried our most
inspirational thinkers[2] and poets. We replaced them with rigid slogans and banal Herem[3] culture.
Interestingly enough, by
the time Pappe finished writing his paper, he himself was no longer so
convinced by his own model. He writes, “It is bewildering to learn
that the early Zionists denied the existence of Palestinians in 1882
when they arrived; it is even more shocking to find out that they deny
their existence — beyond sporadic ghettoized communities — in 2013.”
The meaning of this is
clear: we are dealing here with a total and categorical dismissal of
otherness. This is not a symptom of ‘cognitive dissonance’ but rather a
historical continuum of a psychopathological condition that is inherent
to the politics of the chosen. It is the direct outcome of Judeocentric
supremacy - the very domain Pappe and others prefer not to tackle.
At the end of his paper, Pappe claims that Peres is a ‘madman’ who ignores “millions
and millions of people, many of them under his military or apartheid
rule while he actively and ruthlessly disallows the return of the rest
to their homeland.” But if Peres is a ‘madman’, he is unlikely to
be riddled with discomfort. If Peres is mad he is not in a state of
‘dissonance’, struggling to integrate conflicting ideas. On the
contrary, Peres is, in his awfulness, entirely at peace with himself.
As far as I am concerned,
Shimon Peres is not mad at all. He is evil, coherent and consistent. He
is the president of the Jewish State and it’s high time that Ilan Pappe
openly faced up to this - and to what it means.
[1] Interestingly enough, it was actually the notorious right-winger Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky who
was amongst the first to deal with the necessity to address the
complexity of dealing with the indigenous population within the context
of the Zionist dream. It was the rabid ultra-nationalist Jabotinsky,
rather than the Zionist ‘left’ who regarded the Arabs as proud, highly
cultural people that must be confronted militarily. In that regard, I
would recommend reading Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall.
[2] Just in the last year we
have seen the BDS campaigning against Prof Norman Finkelstein, Greta
Berlin, MP George Galloway and many others.
[3] Hebrew word for Excommunication and Boycott
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/pappes-discomfort.html
Wednesday 1 May 2013
Pappe's Discomfort
Posted @ 14:32
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