I believe the status quo in Israel cannot persist because the “peace process” has failed to deliver any kind of resolution. Most people date the beginning of the Israel-Palestine conflict to the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. But the conflict had been brewing for much longer.[1]
– Ilan Pappé
On March 14, noted Israeli historian Ilan Pappé spoke to concerned citizens at the Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock, Arkansas. The event was sponsored by Little Rock Peace for Palestine, a local human rights advocacy group.
Ilan Pappé has devoted his academic career to studying the experiences of Palestinian civilians during the “Israeli War of Independence” eight decades ago. Among the 1980s generation of so-called “New Historians,” Pappé made it his business to study the dark side of the founding of the State of Israel. The author or co-author of more than 20 books, he is now a professor at the University of Exeter where he is co-director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies.
Not able to leave his home in Haifa due to war-time conditions, Dr. Pappé spoke to a rapt audience for over an hour by means of a Zoom connection. While summarizing the main points of his latest book, Israel on the Brink, Pappé touched on broad themes about Israeli society.
Little Rock Peace for Palestine was formed in October 2023. The group’s founders are Ebrahim Abunasrah and Hadeel Abuelhaja, owners of a local Palestinian restaurant, and Stephanie Gray, a Jewish American professor and activist.
Dr. Gray is spiritual leader of Taste of Olam Haba, the only non-Zionist Jewish congregation in Arkansas. The event itself was facilitated by Ali Khan, a gastroenterologist at a local hospital. Copies of Pappé’s book were given away for free to all who came to hear him speak.
Dr. Pappé began his presentation by acknowledging that there is still a popular perception that Israel is “more invincible than it ever was.” However, he added, “there are very significant cracks in the building…called the State of Israel” that will lead to its collapse sooner or later. What he termed “the Zionist project” not only determined the structure of Israeli society since its formation but has been instrumental in Israel’s coming “implosion.”
As Pappé observed, Zionism was a form of nationalism born in late 19th century Europe. The “European Jewish state” created by Zionist colonists in Ottoman Palestine came about through “coercion” at the expense of the Palestinian people.
Although early Zionist settlers wanted to develop a “secular democratic state” in Palestine, it was a contradiction in terms because the Zionist appeal to “Jewish” identity stressed a religious component. Liberal Zionist “founders” also thought Palestinians would be passive subjects. All of this combined to fashion a racist form of “socialism.” This is why the State of Israel eventually became the de facto theocracy it is today.
To Pappé, several factors bear on Israel’s collapse:
- International Jewish communities are no longer unqualified sources of support for Israel. Many young Jews abroad are even active in pro-Palestinian movements.
- Young dissidents in other societies, Jewish and otherwise, are increasingly identifying the injustices they deal with at home with analogous ones in Israel. In other words, they are seeing global connections.
- An economic slump, due to military spending, is undermining the Israeli welfare state.
- The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) do not have enough reserve soldiers to hold down the Occupied Territories and conduct foreign wars from a position of superiority.
- Although there is no “proper left” in Israel, the young Palestinian resistance is unified.
The solidarity and fortitude of Palestinian youth give Pappé hope that Israel can experience “decolonization and liberation.”
Dr. Pappé, nevertheless, balanced hope with sobering reality. He claimed domestic polls put Israeli Jewish support for the war against Iran at more than 90%. So-called “liberals” share the consensus with the right wing that Israel is at war and must be defended at all costs.
A major contradiction is that Orthodox Jews are exempted from having to work in the Israeli armed forces. This is why the IDF is having a personnel shortage.
The first right-wing government came to power less than 30 years after the establishment of the State of Israel. Except for sketchy details lacking context, there has been little in-depth coverage of the Israeli “far right” in U.S. corporate media. Given our ignorance of problems within Israel’s dominant society, Dr. Pappé’s commentary on the Orthodox right was very enlightening. He stated that self-described theocratic parties took a majority of Knesset seats in the 2022 parliamentary elections; this resulted in Benjamin Netanyahu’s current governing cabinet.
The other matter is that theocratic Zionists have been hollowing out state institutions. Prime Minister Netanyahu is positioning himself as this movement’s champion.
Consequently, an unsettling combination of apocalypticism paired with the existence of nuclear weapons exists today. This situation does not bode well for regional or global peace (incidentally, Labour Party leader David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s “George Washington,” authorized fair means and foul to start a nuclear weapons program in the 1950s).
As for the Palestinians, Dr. Pappé characterized the situation in zones of Israeli control this way:
- Apartheid inside the State of Israel proper;
- Ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank; and
- Genocide in Gaza.
Before October 7, 2023, Gaza was generally known as an open-air prison. For years, we thought the situation could not get any worse. We were wrong.
Dr. Pappé supports the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) because it will give Israelis a sense of “orientation” or solidarity with oppressed Palestinians. It will also open a path to true justice without resort to violence.
Pappé conceded that the U.S.-led “peace process” views the situation as a mere “business problem” in which the Palestinians rightfully have no input as they are child-like. In what he calls “the orthodoxy of peace,” U.S. planners and Israeli colonialists alike have embraced an inherently wrong-headed perception that the Palestinians lack a historical consciousness.
Dr. Pappé was born in Haifa in 1954. As a young man, he took all the established notions for granted. He was an IDF conscript during the 1973 War. His eyes started to open when he studied the 1948 War as a graduate student. As one of the New Historians in the 1990s, he helped to expose Zionist mythology for what it is (much as revisionist historians in our country debunk myths about the “Founding Fathers”). It was also at that time that he ran for political office with Hadesh, a coalition of several left-wing groups in Israel.
This reviewer suspects Pappé is an internationalist. The fact that his own parents were victims of ethnic cleansing in the 1930s—they were expelled along with other Jews from their homes in Germany—might have something to do with why he empathizes with oppressed people. He speaks from “the belly of the beast” as it were, a “race traitor” who has seen the inner workings of a particular colonial system close-up.
In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Pappé examined Plan D. Known as “Plan Dalet” in Hebrew, Plan D was the Hagana’s scheme for how some 800,000 Palestinian natives were expelled from the British Mandate area (the original population was almost two million). This is what Palestinians call al-Nakba, “the catastrophe.”
At one time classified, Plan Dalet was comprehensive.[2] Here is an excerpt:
…[O]perations can be carried out…by destroying…population centers which are difficult to control continuously….In case of resistance, [enemy] armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.[3]
Not even a decade after the Nazi Holocaust, what were Ben-Gurion and his generals thinking? For U.S. Americans, Plan Dalet has disturbing parallels with our own Manifest Destiny.
Dr. Pappé admitted during his talk that it is not easy being an anti-Zionist in Israel. In response to a question from the audience, he discussed his detention at Detroit International Airport in 2024. He explained that two Homeland Security officials confiscated his cell phone and asked for the names of Arab Americans he knew. He refused to comply and was eventually released. In Pappé’s opinion, “the lobby” may have been attempting to slow his progress in a speaking tour he was on at the time.
According to Pappé, this sort of encounter is becoming common with the rise of a radical right-wing atmosphere in the United States. Even so, the chances for positive change are better in the United States than in Israel.
A question for Pappé was offered by Wendell Griffen, a retired state circuit court judge who also leads a Christian congregation in Little Rock. Identifying himself as a “Black Liberation theologian,” Judge Griffen asked about the fundamental importance of BDS.
When the genocide of Indigenous people and Jim Crow apartheid—both marked by violent force and more long-lasting cultural effects—are considered, it occurs to this reviewer that there are disturbing parallels in U.S. and Israeli history. Dr. Pappé acknowledged that the United States and Israel are settler-colonial projects maintained by forms of institutionalized racism.
Dr. Pappé hoped for positive change in U.S. policy concerning Israel. He attributed this in part to differences in size and “global presence.” While he correctly claimed the “United States,” that is, elite institutions of power within U.S. society, are able to stop, or at least alter, this disastrous course, this reviewer wonders if they would ever do such a thing without prodding. Hasn’t history proved that our political and economic leaders are fundamentally self-interested? Won’t another injustice be created to replace the current one? For instance, didn’t the U.S. government react to the fall of friendly dictatorships in Cuba, South Vietnam and Iran by placing embargoes against those countries? Isn’t this the sort of thing a collapsing empire does?
It might be too late for U.S. elites to stop events from taking their course, anyway.
But if Dr. Pappé means it is up to common U.S. citizens to put pressure on political and economic leaders, this means we have an awesome responsibility. Leaving phone messages for congressional representatives already controlled by special interests will not be enough. We must pressure all powers at every level in our society in the political, economic and cultural fields.
The meeting with Dr. Pappé was, nevertheless, very relevant, occurring two full weeks after the start of Operation Epic Fury against Iran and the latest Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon. Pappé also gave his lecture after Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish American political scientist who specializes in Zionist theory and practice, spoke at a local church in August. The son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein is an outspoken left-wing supporter of Palestinian self-determination. Driven out of U.S. academia two decades ago, he remains an active independent scholar.
There is full agreement with the contention that the U.S.-led “peace process,” which anticipated the Trump administration’s (seemingly) in-your-face diplomatic deal-making by decades, has not been helpful to Israel. It must also be remembered that the terrible events which began on October 7, 2023, have not ended just because a “cease-fire” was cobbled together by Trump representatives, Persian Gulf monarchies, and the Netanyahu regime this past October.
Nor should it be forgotten that U.S. planning in this region of the world since World War II has been nothing if not consistent in opposing national self-determination under both Republican and Democratic administrations. This is a simple fact.
One might object, “wasn’t Israel an independent nation supported at its foundation by the United States?” Although complicated, the answer to this question can be boiled down into three points:
- The State of Israel was established as a Western “beachhead” in Southwest Asia, not as a refuge for Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.
- The Zionists were amenable to European imperialism even before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Even after it, like when the Ben-Gurion regime teamed up with Britain and France to invade newly independent Egypt in 1956. President Eisenhower was enraged since they did not receive permission from him first, not for ethical reasons or because he supported Arab nationalism.[4]
- The “special relationship” with the United States dates to the 1960s when the Johnson administration abandoned attempts to rein in the Israeli nuclear weapons program and its lobbying activities in the United States.[5] Johnson also covered up the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt during the Six-Day War.
There are many other matters closer to home and more recent in vintage related to Israel. Take the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, popularly known as Cop City. What does this police and fire department training facility have to do with the State of Israel? The Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), run out of Georgia State University, provides training assistance at Cop City and is a conduit for its funding. Coincidentally, techniques used by the IDF are taught at Cop City and Zionist billionaires fund GILEE and U.S. police training centers.
There is nothing unusual about any of this. In fact, an important place for police training in the Western world during the 1960s and 1970s was the Office of Public Safety, then a “secret” part of the U.S. Agency for International Development.[6]
Georgia is not the only Southern state with an Israeli footprint. It may come as a shock to learn that Arkansas has had a supporting role backing Israeli aggression for years.[7]
Two days before Dr. Pappé’s speaking event, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders—she was press spokesperson during the first Trump administration—held a press conference to announce official backing for “Club America” chapters in high schools across The Natural State. This is a blatantly unconstitutional move to inject the Trumpian brand of politics into high schools. Club America is the youth section of Turning Point USA, the organization that conservative ideologue Charlie Kirk led before his assassination in September.
Governor Sanders also used the press conference to show solidarity with the Zionist Project. How so? It appears that Kirk was changing his stance about unqualified support for Israel last year. He opposed U.S. involvement in war with Iran. In the months before his death, he was facing down Turning Point USA’s enraged Zionist donors. All that changed after his death when a new board of directors took over.
Governor Sanders is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, former state governor and current U.S. Ambassador to Israel. He is an outspoken Christian Zionist.
But that is not all. Munitions produced in Arkansas have been sent to Israel; this became apparent during IDF incursions into Lebanon after October 7. Components for the defective Iron Dome missile defense system operated in Israel also come from Arkansas.
Another significant matter concerning The Natural State has to do with Israel Bonds. Ostensibly an independent company incorporated in the United States in 1951, the Development Corporation for Israel raises loans for the Israeli government. Last year, the directors of the Arkansas Public Employee Retirement System authorized an investment of $25 to $50 million; the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System authorized investments of up to $50 million. As of this March, the state treasury has $60 million invested in Israel Bonds. Some attention has been paid to these matters in local media.
Finally, nothing makes sense about the present war. We have claims about a nuclear weapons program about which U.S. authorities can’t seem to agree. As U.S. installations across the region are blown to smithereens, a “Secretary of War” sporting arcane tattoos claims victory. Former Trump supporters resign in protest. Hoping people have short memories, Persian Gulf tyrants feign shock that installations on their soil are under attack. Mass murder and air quality in Iran receive little coverage in U.S. corporate media. The downright implausibility of the mess is capped off by an inconsistent U.S. sanctions policy—again, little-covered in corporate media.
None of this should be surprising in the fog of war. Yet, curiously, accurate information about the situation on the ground in Israel is being censored.
Ilan Pappé made a positive impression on his audience in Little Rock. Among other things, his lecture lends perspective on why the Israeli state is mired in the events now unfolding across the Middle East. Anyone with accurate information about the world we live in should be valued by U.S. Americans. It is in our interest to listen to people like Ilan Pappé if we wish to break with self-destructive world views that look down on the entire Global South. We should do this if we want to start building a truly democratic and safe world for everyone, ourselves included.
Ilan Pappé, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2025), 3. ↑
Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld Publications, 2025), 86-126. ↑
Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 39. ↑
Lloyd C. Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East After World War II (New York: The New Press, 2009), 171-74. ↑
Gardner, Three Kings, 202-204; Douglas Little, “The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and Israel, 1957-68,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993), 563-85. ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 1-16. ↑
Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (London: Oneworld Publications, 2024), 246-51. See also Arlene Lazarowitz, “A Southern Senator and Israel: Senator J. William Fulbright’s Accusations of Undue Influence over American Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” Southern Jewish History, 14 (2011), 119-54. ↑
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About the Author
Anthony Newkirk teaches social studies at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Besides teaching in secondary schools in Mexico City and Kuwait, he has taught on the college level in Little Rock and Philadelphia.
Anthony has written for American Communist History, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Counterpunch, Foreign Policy in Focus, Global Research, Labour/Le Travail, and The Hill.
Anthony can be reached at newkirk1938@hotmail.com.
