"Pappé places Zionism under an uncompromising lens." - The Idea of Israel reviewed by Avi Shlaim in the Guardian
Ilan Pappe’s The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge is lauded in this Guardian review for placing "Zionism under an uncompromising lens”. In his review, Avi Shlaim, author of Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations and professor emeritus at Oxford University, contextualizes the book into the contemporary debate around Zionism and the state of Israel:
“Pappé places Zionism under an uncompromising lens. In his reading it was not a national liberation movement but a settler colonial project imposed on the Palestinians by force with the support of the west. From this premise it follows that the state of Israel is not legitimate even in its original borders, much less so within its post-1967 borders. To correct the injustice, Pappé advocates a peaceful, humanist and socialist alternative to the Zionist idea in the form of a binational state with equal rights for all its citizens.”
Naming Pappé as “one of the most prominent Israeli political dissidents living in exile”, Shlaim continues:
“Pappé has published a large number of books on the history of Arab-Israeli conflict of which the most widely read and most controversial is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The Idea of Israel is not a history book but a close study of the role of Zionist ideology in the making of modern Israel and of the continuing relevance of this ideology today in politics, the education system, the media, the cinema and Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations. The book thus offers a broad survey of the main critical schools of thought on Israel. Two chapters deal directly with the Palestine question: the historiography of the first Arab-Israeli war, and the uses and misuses of the Holocaust.”
Read the article in full, here.
The Idea of Israel is now available to buy direct from our website, at 50% discount off the ebook edition and a 30% discount off the hardback and free postage & packing.