Ilan Pappe

Pappé is an Israeli historian, one of the group who went into the declassified 1948 archives in the late nineteen eighties and came out disagreeing with the story Israel told about its own founding. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine argues that the expulsion of roughly seven hundred thousand Palestinians was a deliberate plan rather than a consequence of war, and it is the most contested book in that literature: Benny Morris, who opened the same archives, rejects both the framing and the handling of sources, while Pappé's readers treat it as the honest version. He taught at Haifa for years under sustained pressure, including calls for his dismissal after he backed a graduate thesis on killings at Tantura and then supported an academic boycott of his own country, and he moved to Exeter in 2007. He argues for one state rather than two.