Ilan Pappé

Ilan Pappé was born in Haifa in 1954 and educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Oxford. Part of the generation of Israel’s “New Historians” who revised the founding myths of 1948 using declassified archives, he taught at the University of Haifa for more than two decades before moving to the United Kingdom, where he is a professor at the University of Exeter and directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies.

His best-known book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), argues that the expulsion of roughly 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 was a deliberate, planned operation rather than a byproduct of war. The book made him one of the most cited — and most contested — historians of the conflict. His later work has ranged across the history of Palestinians inside Israel, the role of knowledge and power in Zionism, and the pro-Israel lobby.

Key works

• A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2004)
• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)
• The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (2011)
• Ten Myths About Israel (2017)

Sources

• Ilan Pappé — University of Exeter research profile
• Ilan Pappé — Palestine Book Awards