The modern Middle East / Ilan Pappé.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 335-349) and index.Book Fair 2013.xv, 366 p.

Everyday Evil in Palestine: the View From Lucifer's Hill

This article is an attempt to cast content into the popular phrase used by activists in the Palestine solidary movement that in order to understand and be moved by the nature of colonization in Palestine all that is needed is a short presence on the ground. I chose to visit a hill in the South Hebron mountains to illustrate this point. From this vantage point, the matrix of modern-day colonialism becomes visible to the naked eye but only unfolds in full when it is contextualized historically. As such, it also gives a new meaning to the Palestinian phrase, “al-Nakba al-Mustamera,” the ongoing Nakba, and becomes another place and chapter in the geography of disaster since 1948

Colonization in Zionist and Israeli History

In this article the Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé discusses the historical and Jewish Israeli contemporary colonisation of Palestine and the resultant ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Pappé is one of the so-called New (Israeli) Historians who questioned the Israeli official Zionist narrative and present alternatives to its presentations of history and of the image of the state of Israel

Global Circulation and Some Problems in Liberalism, Liberalization, and Neoliberalism

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Stanford University via the URL in this record

Thinking the past politically: Palestine, power and pedagogy

This article explores the socio-political, economic and legal implications of what counts as historical knowledge. Academic history has long been practiced as if its value and authority reside in its ability to produce truth, but pretending that that history occupies an epistemologically foundational position is an illusion that needs to be abandoned. History is a discourse whose sources of cultural power is ultimately social and institutional. By examining narrations of the Nakba, the article focuses attention back on to the political dimensions of historical practices and how hegemonic historical interpretations of Israel’s establishment in 1948 are closely intertwined with questions of identity and legitimisation. The second half of the article considers a number of reflexive, vernacular narratives on the subject of Palestinian and Israeli pasts that seek to make a direct ethical or political intervention and challenge the dominant discourse. In many ways, these works foreground how traditional academic histories tend to function as a representative of hegemonic discourses. They are more effective in making clear the issues, framing the arguments, engaging with broader, non-academic audiences and stimulating ethical discussion and political action. The focus on how broader mnemonic and cultural orientations towards ‘pastness’ have been mobilised effectively as cultural and rhetorical resources in tactical campaigns for socio-political justice culminates with an analysis of the case of the American-Palestinian Rasmea Odeh. This example shows how historicising praxis can be used to both reinforce and challenge state power as manifested by the judiciary