A dreamer of nightmares: Ilan Pappe’s foolish plan to dismantle Israel

What, I wonder, does Ilan Pappe imagine he is doing in Australia?

And what good do his local sponsors think he might be able to accomplish by urging here in our midst the voluntary self-dissolution of Israel, its excision from the global network of sovereign states that constitutes international political society?

Pappe’s position is confused but his purpose is clear. While other nations are entitled to express their common historical identity through the political vehicle and public life of a state, for Pappe and his champions Israel and the Jewish people uniquely are not

The reason for this special disqualification is never made fully clear. All that is clear is that these dreamers of nightmares would make Israel a Chosen Nation, one singularly chosen for delegitimation and dismantling.

Let us be clear.

There has been a continuing and unbroken Jewish connection to the land of Israel since biblical times.

The ancient Jewish connection is not simply the defining presence of the land of Israel in the historical consciousness — in language, culture and religion — of the Jews. It is a matter of the unbroken historical presence, physical and demographic, of Jews in the land of Israel since late biblical times, despite the Romans’ attempts at diasporic expulsion.

That unbroken connection to the land long predates the birth of Muhammad and the rise of Islam. As all of Islam’s own classical sources record, when the Byzantine Patriarch Sophronius handed the keys of Jerusalem to the Caliph Omar in 638, there was a substantial Jewish population in the city and land.

After the Roman dispersion the Jewish presence waxed and waned but it persisted. The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 prompted a significant Jewish return to the Holy Land and an augmentation of its Jewish population, notably to the northern city of Safed, home of the mystics and Kabbalists, but also to Jerusalem.

The idea that the land was “empty of Jews” until, motivated by so-called “post-Holocaust guilt”, the world suddenly “gave” Palestine to them, and that the newly intruding Jews then acquired it from the Palestinians by theft, is an historical absurdity. But that fatuous claim is basic to the political position of those who think like and follow Pappe. This fantasy has even become the “standard received knowledge”, the “default position” of the uninformed.

In “Israel/Palestine” both sides now have strong historical claims of substantial connection to the land. But these deeply rooted claims, if asserted absolutely, are mutually exclusive. So some process of conciliation and mutual recognition of entitlements is necessary.

The essential problem remains how to realise the right of national self-determination of two peoples claiming the same land. The failure yet to achieve that outcome of “two states for two peoples” is a sad fact for which each side in its own way is partly responsible, since each is ultimately part of the problem.

Some compromise is essential. The claims of the two sides are not just incompatible but mutually incommensurable. It is not easy to say, or find any basis on which to declare authoritatively, that one of them is stronger than the other.

Yet the claims of each are incomparably stronger, and far more deeply grounded, than are the late-comer, appropriating claims of all and any non-aboriginal Australians to Sydney Cove, Toorak, Canberra or any other part of Australia whose well-meaning, and more naïve, citizens Pappe now seeks to enlighten.

Not only his audiences but Pappe himself and his claque must also either recognise this — in which case he is a dangerously disingenuous advocate of Israel’s self-dissolution and Islamist hegemony in the name of Middle Eastern “peace” — or else he is simply obtuse, intellectually and morally and historically, a political bungler to whom we ought not to give any serious hearing or any credence.

Non-indigenous Australians are not about “to go back to where we all came from”. Nor is Pappe urging that course. That is not why he has come to Sydney. He wants, rather, to enlist as many of us as he can to support the equally quixotic project of Israeli self-abnegation.

Pappe seeks to recruit his listeners to his insight that, if only there were no Jews in the picture to complicate things for others, the world would be a simpler place; and to his ensuing action plan of voluntary or enforced Jewish disappearance in order to make things easier for everybody else.

Pappe and his friends claim to hold the key to peace in the Middle East. But they are dreamers of a silly dream, captives of the naïve wish-fulfilling fantasy of an end to “the Jewish problem”, theirs and the world’s.

Who are Pappe’s local supporters here in Australia? Some of them claim to speak as Jews. In a sense they do, a very weak sense. They may be Jews by origin, by fate of birth. They may even purport to be guided in some sense by “Jewish values”, even though those values are grounded in traditions of which they know and care little. 

But they are not really any part of Australian Jewish life. They contribute nothing to the Jewish community’s diversified network of social welfare, educational and religious institutions. Nor are they other than marginal participants in that living community’s range of socio-cultural activities centred upon the exploration and development of a broad and evolving sense of Jewish identity.

That is just not who they are. They simply voice a view from and for the periphery, remote from the many currents of the mainstream, whom they ineptly address and for whom they absurdly presume to speak.

Pappe’s local champions sometimes claim, although on a much narrower and less passionately committed basis than Jews who are broadly engaged in the mainstream, to be part of the Jewish tradition. Yet they are happy to “sell off”, and to be widely praised for their “principled” readiness to sell off, the greater part of that ancestral tradition, including any notion that in the age of modern nationalism (which has seen so many ancient identities similarly reconfigured) being Jewish is, for most Jews, a modern cultural and national political identity.

Pappe’s tiny band of Jewish supporters are entitled to their views. Yet, choosing to stand largely outside Jewish tradition, they cannot plausibly claim to speak in its name or for most other Jews, nor may they appropriate the mantle of any deeply-rooted Jewish legitimacy.

Theirs is the kind of Jewish “authenticity” that finds favour, and an honoured place, in those captive academic bastions of the new Islamist triumphalism where amenable sophists and doctrinaire casuists such as Pappe have found a home. And from where, should their efforts ever succeed, the dismantling of Israel might be contemplated in detached, risk-free tranquillity.

Yet we are now to give Pappe a hearing and platform at Bennelong Point. A poignant irony. Land rights as a political entitlement for all, except Israel and its Jews. A splendid renunciation! Caring so little for what most Israelis and Jews treasure, how generously, in the name of “Jewish principles”, Pappe and his admirers would give away what is not his, or theirs, to cede.

What is worn lightly, a flimsy surface garment, is easily cast off. What is worn closer to the heart less so. And casting off what others value far more than oneself and cling to dearly is not generosity of spirit or exemplary political courage but farcical self-delusion.

Those “other Jewish voices” get a “good hearing” because there are so many non-Jews who, for their often confused and ignorant reasons, want to hear that capitulation voiced, especially when it is voiced by some Jews ostensibly for all Jews. There are many who like to think that if only there were no difficult and ever-awkward Jews to be acknowledged, the world would be a far simpler place, one more amenable to their own designs and congenial to their own preconceptions.

A way forward is needed, one that acknowledges, on Israel’s side, both the ancient connection, unbroken over the centuries, of the Jewish people to their land and also the modern political transformation of Jewish identity and public life.

Pappe’s is not it.