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Intervention d'Ilan Pappe lors de la deuxième conférence annuelle à Bil’in : “Time is running out”
19/05/2007
Ilan Pappe
Ilan Pappe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Haifa University in Israel. The is also the President of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies
He was born in 1954 in Haifa. He received his D. Phil from Oxford University, 1984 and has been teaching at the University of Haifa since that time, where he also lives.
His books include Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1947-1951 (Macmillan/St. Antony’s Series, London and New York 1988); The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (I. B. Tauris: London and New York 1992); The Aristocracy of the Land: the Biography of the Husaynis, (Jerusalem 2003 in Hebrew; currently considered by Princeton University Press); The Modern History of Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York 2003), The Modern Middle East (Routledge: London and New York 2005) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications: Oxford 2006).
He edited Islam and Peace (Givat Haviva in Hebrew 1992), Arab-Jewish Relations in Mandatory Palestine (Givat Haviva 1992 in Hebrew), Jordan: The Making of a Pivotal State with J. Nevo (Frank Cass: London and New York, 1994, History from Within: Politics and Ideas in the Middle East, with M. Maoz, (I.B. Tauris London and New York 1997), Seven Ways to Peace (with Asad Ghanem and Sara Ozacky-Lazar, Givat Haviva in Hebew, 1999), The IsraelPalestine Question (Routledge: London and New York, 1999) and Across the Wall: The Israeli/Palestinian Academic Dialogue Group Enemy (with Jamil Hilal, forthcoming in I. B. Tauris).
Time is running out (version texte)
Time is running out, as we reach the 40th year of the occupation and the 60th year of the Nakba. And one of the main reasons that time is running out is that we are still stuck in the same discourse that the moderators of peace in this area have brought to us ten or fifteen years ago. We are still talking about a two-state solution where we should talk about a one-state solution. We are still talking about the possibility that the refugees will give up their right of return, as we should insist that the refugees should have the right to return. And we are still talking about partial agreements, as we should talk about the comprehensive solution for the Palestine question. We are doing all these things because some of us would think that this is a practical, a sensible position that would advance the chances of peace, as if anything that happened in the last twenty years indicates that this is the right way forward. Instead, we should talk in a different language, we should establish different objectives, and we should start doing it today before it will be too late.
Our departure point, whether we live under occupation, whether we live in exile, whether we live inside Israel, or whether we live around the world and we care about Palestine—our departure point is that this land is already a one-state land ruled by one regime that subscribes to an ideology that does not allow the Palestinians any part in this land whether they are in exile, whether they live in Bil’in, or whether they live in Nazareth. From this perspective, we are all under the rule of an ideological regime that strives to impose Jewish rule over the whole of the land of Palestine and is willing, for the time being, to be content with different tactics and means of occupying and controlling the land. But the strategy is the same and the ideology is the same, and what we should attack, what we should confront is the ideological infrastructure of the Jewish state, the Zionist ideological infrastructure. This is the source for all the policies: the policy of 1948 that ended in the ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of Palestinians; this is the ideology that produced the policies ever since 1967 and until today; and this is the ideology that will produce the policies in the future against the people who live across the apartheid wall, against the people who live in the greater Jerusalem area, and also against the Palestinians who are now citizens of the State of Israel, as the latest indications tell us that something very basic is changing in the policy towards that minority, as we speak.
And this ideology is very clear and, in fact, unlike many years ago, the official Israeli political elite talks very clearly now about this ideology. The Israeli political elite is tired of navigating between the game of democracy and the actual policy of ethnic, racist dispossession. Something has happened in the last year. They have lost the inertia; they have lost the capacity to navigate and to the whole world, as if there is a real debate inside Israel between a democratic impulse and an ethnic, racist urge. So it’s actually now on the table. There’s no need for a sophisticated deconstruction to understand that at this very point, the political elite of Israel is not playing anymore the democratic game. It’s about to implement the last chapters in its ideology of making Palestine a Jewish state with as few Palestinians as possible in it. If we accept that this is the ideological infrastructure of the Jewish state, and if we accept that this ideological infrastructure produced the policies of ethnic cleansing in the past and produces the ethnic policies in the present and in the future, we should not talk about a dialogue with the Jewish state. We should not talk about a Roadmap. We should not talk about a Geneva Initiative. We should talk about how to defeat this ideological regime by putting on it the same pressure that we have put on another despicable ideological regime, that of South Africa. Whoever suggested a dialogue in apartheid South Africa between soft apartheidists and hardcore apartheidists. Rightly so, there was no distinction between soft apartheid people and hardcore apartheid people. There should be no distinction between soft Zionists and hardcore Zionists. They all think the same about the future. It is time for the world to send a message—and if the political elites of the world cannot do it, let the civil societies do it—send a message to this state: “In the 21st Century, a state that subscribes to such an ideology is not accepted as a member in the community of civilized nations.”
And there are so many ways that are not violent to send this message strongly and forcefully to the State of Israel. Let us all preach and advocate for using boycott, divestment, and sanctions as the best means of sending the Israelis the message that we recognize the ideological infrastructure of the state, that we know that it is not a matter of that or other policy, that we know that it is a matter of the nature of the state, its ideological charter, and that we will not accept such an ideological charter among us in the 21st century. And I think there are already very strong undercurrents in the West, in Britain, in the United States, and elsewhere, of many many people—who do not necessarily belong to the political classes in those places—who say “enough is enough,” who are willing to put forward the notion that they, from a humanist point of view, recruit themselves to the struggle as they recruited themselves to the struggle against South Africa, against Argentina, Chile, against United States—when these countries pursued policies and subscribed to ideologies which they did not accept.
The people are there; the historical experience is there; the historical examples are there. Probably the only obstacle that stands between these energies and a very effective operation is the fear and the hesitation of some certain very important organizations and individuals in the West of being depicted as anti-Semitic because of such an action. And I think it’s high time that we ? all leave behind us this fear, this hesitation. I particularly expect people in Germany to come out and say very strongly that—exactly because of the Holocaust, exactly because of what happened in Nazi Germany—I want to hear the moral voices in Germany say “We cannot tolerate what Israel is doing to the Palestinians,” and as the strongest country in Europe, lead Europe to boycott Israel until it changes its policies.
It’s a shameful legacy to allow the Israelis to do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews. This is a very shameful legacy of the German people if they stand aside and don’t do anything about it. And a similar accusation can be easily directed against other sections of European society. So I think that we should, from here, encourage people to understand—and with this I will : I think people should understand that there is a connection between the apartheid wall and fence that Israel is building near Bil’in and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the present persecution measures that are taken against the Palestinians inside Israel and the Israeli objection to the return of the refugees—these are all part and parcel of the same policy and the same ideology. And I beseech my Palestinian friends who do not see it, and allow the Israelis to distinguish between different groups of Palestinians as if there is a different Israeli policy against different groups of Palestinians, not to play into the hands of the people who want to dispossess them from Palestine, whether they live in Bil’in or whether they used to live in Jaffa or whether they live Sakhnin in the Galilee. Believe me, I was born in this country.
I am a product of the educational system—although not a very successful product of this educational system—but I know it from within. Israelis do not distinguish between different groups of Palestinians: The Israelis do not distinguish between “good” and “bad” Palestinians. The Israelis would not allow a two-state solution; they would not allow a one-state solution. They would not stop the occupation, and they would not allow the Right of Return; and nothing that you do will convince them to do the one or the others. They will do none of these things if you leave it to them, but if you pressure them as you pressured South Africa, they will do everything; and for the benefit not only of the Palestinians, but for the benefit of the Jews who live in this country, and especially for the benefit of the Jews around the world who for years shamefully were the ambassadors and the ambassadresses of Israel—for the sake of their fate as well—such a pressure will enable all of us to live in reconciliation and peace in this holy land. Thank you very much.
