Known in academia for his controversial work on Israel and Palestine, historian Ilan Pappé lectured on his perceived failures of the Middle East Peace Process Wednesday.
Prefacing his perspective by affirming it to be strictly his own, Pappé focused on how the process is understood. To him, the lack of progress in negotiations stems from the continual portrayal of Palestine as an equal partner in peace.
He argued that Israel’s political and economic policies undermine the Palestinian state and make parity—and finding an eventual solution to peace—between the two impossible, and have done so since the process first began.
“I believe that however you formulate it, [understandings] in the formative period of a process have a lasting effect and impact of the nature of the process in years to come,” he said. “The only way to change the course of the so-called peace process is to redesign it.”
In Pappé’s controversial 2006 book, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” he argues that the Israeli government’s objective in the 1948 war was to systematically drive Arab Palestinians out of their villages in order to make Israel a exclusively Jewish state. His work has been called both brave and dishonest.
Following the heavily criticized book’s release, Pappé was condemned by Israel’s Parliament and the Israeli Minister of Education. He left Israel for the United Kingdom soon after and has taught at the University of Exeter since 2007.
Pappé’s lecture failed to take in to account different perspectives on the peace process, according to UW-Madison student and president of the Madison-Israel Public Affairs Committee Leah Hakimian.
“[Pappé] only covered how Israel has hindered peace and didn’t really give any examples of how Palestinians might need to do more to create peace as well,” she said. “He never mentioned terrorist attacks on Israel and suicide bombing as things that have hindered peace.”
“Squaring the Circle: The Failure of the Middle East Peace Process” was the second installment of a three-part lecture series sponsored by the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change in UW-Madison’s Sociology Department.
