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Israel’s Message

Ilan Pappe, London Review of Books, 14 January 2009

In 2004, the Israeli army began building a dummy Arab city in the Negev desert. It’s the size of a real city, with streets (all of them given names), mosques, public buildings and cars. Built at a cost of $45 million, this phantom city became a dummy Gaza in the winter of 2006, after Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south.

When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense neighbourhood of Gaza City’. A week into the bombardment of Gaza, Ehud Barak attended a rehearsal for the ground war. Foreign television crews filmed him as he watched ground troops conquer the dummy city, storming the empty houses and no doubt killing the ‘terrorists’ hiding in them. Continue →

Latest Article

Israel’s Message

Ilan Pappe, London Review of Books, 14 January 2009

In 2004, the Israeli army began building a dummy Arab city in the Negev desert. It’s the size of a real city, with streets (all of them given names), mosques, public buildings and cars. Built at a cost of $45 million, this phantom city became a dummy Gaza in the winter of 2006, after Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south.

When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense neighbourhood of Gaza City’. A week into the bombardment of Gaza, Ehud Barak attended a rehearsal for the ground war. Foreign television crews filmed him as he watched ground troops conquer the dummy city, storming the empty houses and no doubt killing the ‘terrorists’ hiding in them. Continue →

Latest Interview

“Occupiers cannot also be liberal”: An interview with Ilan Pappe

Apostolis Fotiadis, The Electronic Intifada, 21 June 2008

ATHENS (IPS) - Support for an academic boycott of Israeli universities exposed Ilan Pappe to death threats last year, forced him to resign as senior lecturer of political science at the University of Haifa, and leave the country.

His argument that the creation of Israel in 1948 was followed by a policy of cleansing Israeli territory of Palestinians, his support to Hamas resistance despite rejecting its political ideology, and the denouncement of Israeli academia for justifying the occupation of Palestine have made him an unwanted person in Israel. But still he remains a firm believer that the only way to improve this reality is by exposing its worst aspects.

Pappe now teaches history at the University of Exeter in Britain.

In an interview with Inter Press Service correspondent Apostolis Fotiadis, Pappe discusses the situation in Palestine today, and the Arab-Israeli conflict 60 years after it began. Continue →

Latest News Item

Who cares they’re only Palestinians

11 July 2008

by Greg Barns

If you are an Israeli citizen living in the West bank towns of Samaria and Judea and you beat up a Palestinian, even kill him or her, there’s a 90 percent chance you will get away with it.

The latest Data Sheet (attached) from Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, confirms what many have long suspected to be the case – that the system of law enforcement in Israel treats Palestinians in much the same way as black South Africans were treated by that country’s police force when the apartheid regime was in place.

Yesh Din has tracked police 205 investigation files opened in recent years.  81 of these files relate to attacks on Palestinians by Israeli civilians and this includes 2 cases of shooting that led to death, and 9 cases of serious injury.  The remainder deal with incidents where Palestinians were assaulted with sticks, knives, rifle butts, as well as attacks on their houses and vehicles. Continue →