Chris Hedges Interviews Ilan Pappe Who Tells HALF the Truth
Read the other half--the KEY half--here
You can learn a lot about the history of Israel by listening to this interview of Israeli historian and anti-Zionist, Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
And you will learn from Ilan Pappe that Israel is not a democracy in the sense that half the people the Israeli government rules in all of Palestine cannot even vote for a representative in that government because they are not Jewish and therefore cannot move to inside the part of Palestine, namely the part now called Israel, in which one must live in order to be able to vote.
What you do NOT learn from Ilan Pappe
But you will not learn from Ilan Pappe that even for the people (about 80% Jews, 20% non-Jews) who live inside Israel and who can vote, there is not a genuine democracy, not anything even close. For example, Section 7A(1) of the Basic Law of Israel explicitly prevents Israeli citizens – Arab or Jewish – from using the "democratic" system of Israeli elections to challenge the inferior status of Arabs under the law; it restricts who can run for political office with this language: "A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if among its goals or deeds, either expressly or impliedly, are one of the following: (1) The negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish People. …" In a 1989 Israeli Supreme Court ruling (reported in the 1991 Israel Law Review, Vol. 25, p. 219, published by the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Justice S. Levine, speaking for the majority, ruled that this law meant that a political party could not run candidates if it intended to achieve the cancellation of one of the fundamental tenets of the State – namely "the existence of a Jewish majority, the granting of preference to Jews in matters of immigration, and the existence of close and reciprocal relations between the State and the Jews of the Diaspora." [References for this are online here. ]
You will not learn from Ilan Pappe that the values and aims of the great majority of people inside Israel are not the values and aims that shape governmental policies; on the contrary, as I prove in my article “Israel’s Government Attacks Ordinary Jews As Well As Palestinians.” (Also in a shorter form but with nice graphics here.) You will not learn that the values and aims that shape Israeli governmental policies are those of a ruling billionaire plutocracy and generals and politicians beholden to it.
Nor will you learn from Ilan Pappe that the aim of the early Zionist leaders from the days of the Holocaust was never about any concern for the welfare and safety of ordinary Jews but rather it was to obtain a “state of their own,” meaning a working class of their own that they would be able to control and get rich off of, just like other non-Jewish ruling classes did. This is the reason early Zionist leaders opposed efforts to rescue Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust if—as was always the case—they did not entail sending the Jews to Palestine. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was clearly not concerned with the welfare of ordinary Jews when he said:
"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [26] —David Ben-Gurion, 1938
"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 [Jewish] orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20] The reason for this cruelty? To send the children to Palestine to fight Palestinians so that people like David Ben-Gurion could have a “state of their own” to rule over. [from Baruch Kimmerling’s review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II [20]
Read all about this in my article, “Why, Really, Zionist Leaders Have Always Wanted a State of Their Own.”
What DO You Learn From Ilan Pappe?
If you go to time point 16:16 in the video interview of Ilan Pappe you will hear him explain the various ideas that Zionist leaders have had about how to make Israel be a Jewish state, meaning one with a large majority Jewish population, and also be as large a state geographically as possible, in a region that had a large non-Jewish population inside it. You will learn about the different view these Zionist leaders had about the pros and cons of ethnic cleansing, about where to do the ethnic cleansing and where not to do it, and so on.
What more do you NOT learn from Ilan Pappe?
But you will not learn about WHY these Zionist leaders needed this Jewish state. It had nothing to do with any religious motivation; most of these leaders were atheists or agnostics. As even Ilan Pappe has said in other talks, the religious view of these leaders could be best characterized this way: “God does not exist, and He gave the land to the Jews.”
Zionist leaders need a Jewish state because that is how they control the Jewish working class. Zionist leaders need a state based on legal discrimination against non-Jews in the name of making the state a Jewish state (nothing except such discrimination makes the state a Jewish state.) Here’s WHY they need this discrimination. The discrimination—severe violent ethnic cleansing and humiliating military rule and apartheid laws—is for the purpose of making Palestinians as angry as possible at the “Jewish state” so that they will be the bogeyman enemy that the billionaire rulers of Israel pretend to protect ordinary Israeli Jews from. This is how the billionaire rulers get away with severely economically oppressing and getting rich off of the Israeli working class. In order to make the Palestinian bogeyman enemy maximally frightening, Israel’s government for decades has funded Hamas and worked to keep it in power precisely because Hamas is a terrorist organization that deliberately kills non-combatant Israeli civilians and aims explicitly to make Islam sovereign in all of Palestine.
Ilan Pappe does not talk about this fundamental REASON why the Zionist leaders all agreed—and currently still agree—on the need for a Jewish state with a guaranteed majority Jewish population even while disagreeing on exactly how to make that happen.
The so-called “democracy” of Israel only lets people vote for politicians who support, one way or another, the basic Zionist strategy of ensuring that the billionaires stay in control of the Israeli Jewish working class with a Palestinian bogeyman enemy.
What would happen if Ilan Pappe told the FULL truth?
What would happen if Ilan Pappe told the full truth, the fact that Zionism is a means of oppressing not only the Palestinians but also the Israeli Jewish working class, that—in other words—the conflict is a CLASS conflict and that the enemy is not merely the rulers of Israel but the ruling billionaire plutocracies everywhere including the United State and Great Britain and the rest of the world?
The answer is that he’d very likely be fired from his job as a professor at Exeter College in Great Britain. He would probably not be able to get his books published by publishers who could get them read by lots of people. He would probably be smeared as a Communist or a Terrorist or some such evil. He would be made to suffer.
As Julian Assange learned, (with apologies to the playwright William Congreve) hell hath no fury like the ruling class seeing its key lies exposed.