Blog post

More Facebook Resistance: Ilan Pappe to publish The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in Hebrew on his Facebook page

Hélène Barthélemy22 November 2013

Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine was translated into fifteen languages, but never in Hebrew. Never taken on by any Israeli publisher, the book has been tragically unavailable to its Hebrew-speaking audience as the truth on the treatment of Palestinians in Israel is deliberately being silenced. Using social media to resist the suppression of his work, Ilan Pappe will be posting the Hebrew version of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, bit by bit, on his Facebook page! 

He revealed his intention in the statement below, posted on his Facebook wall:

Dear friends,

Since the initiation of the FB, it was used by many good people, but not by me. I intend to use it as a regular stage for announcing lectures, sharing interviews and articles, and thoughts of the week at the beginning of every week. This will hopefully happen from December 1st.

I also intend to use this stage for Hebrew readers to post bit by bit, my book the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that was published in 2006 and was translated into 15 languages but not to Hebrew. No publisher is willing to publish it and no website, even the most progressive one, is willing to publish it in sequences. The only stage i had in Hebrew was in Yitzhak Laor's excellent journal Mitaam that was closed down due to financial difficulties. 

I think it is time that Israelis will face the crimes of the past. Even Zochrot, a very energetic and important NGO, still sticks to the Benny Morris version of the refugees of 1948 as victims of the war and not of a policy. The evidence proves that the leadership of the new state of Israel systematically and intentionally expelled as many Palestinians it could from as much as Palestine it was able to occupy in 1948. This act was a crime against humanity and in many ways still continue today. 

So with permission from my publishers I will sent sequences in Hebrew of the book and would ask anyone who has friends who read Hebrew to make sure they have access to this vital information. 

Israel is a state of denial and in a state of denial, but this does not mean that the Israelis should not have access to the truth about the worst crime their state committed in their name.

Pappe will analyze the lack of an Israeli stage for critical scholarship on Israel in The Idea of Israel, an upcoming book where he considers the evolution of anti- or post-Zionist sentiment (a term he takes issue with) in Israel as well as the reaction to it.