Ilan Pappe's dishonesty shines through

In Electronic Intifada, anti-Israel historian Ilan Pappe - who has been proven a liar and a fraud more than once - gets hot and bothered by a quote by Shimon Peres:

In a regal interview he gave the Israeli press on the eve of the state’s ” Independence Day,” Shimon Peres, the current president of Israel, said the following:

“I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world? This is a miracle: a land built by people” (Maariv, 14 April 2013).

This fabricated narrative, voiced by Israel’s number one citizen and spokesman, highlights how much the historical narrative is part of the present reality. ...Peres’ denial of the native Palestinians and his reselling in 2013 of the landless people mythology exposes the cognitive dissonance in which he lives: he denies the existence of approximately twelve million people living in and near to the country to which they belong.

The entire rest of the article rails against Peres' supposed denial of the existence of Arabs in British Mandate Palestine.

Is Peres denying the existence of Arabs in Palestine before 1948?

Of course not. He was talking about natural resources, nothing else. After all, would anyone interpret Peres' statement "There was nothing" to mean that Jerusalem or Jaffa didn't exist? Isn't that what "nothing here" means - if you are a narrow-minded idiot who chooses to interpret the words without context?

This is the state of the art in Israel criticism today. A celebrated author and historian, writing in the premiere showcase for anti-Israel literature, makes stuff up - and no one in the anti-Israel community has a trace of integrity to call him on it, or to demand that EI pull the article based on a lie. There is no pushback in the "progressive" community against this transparent falsehood.

Nothing.

Because hating Israel is a religion to these fanatics, and far more important than mere honesty.

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The Forward's jihad against Touro College and JOU

Naomi Zeveloff at The Jewish Daily Forward wrote an article entitled "Is Jerusalem Online U. a Real College"?

The article is trying to create a controversy about how an Israel education and advocacy website has had some of its materials used by Touro College for a small number of students to gain credit.

The headline itself is proof of how little interest the Forward has in telling the truth, because buried in the eighth paragraph the founder of JOU says quite clearly that the website is an education portal, not a university.

Zeveloff's ire seems to be that JOU "boasts an explicitly pro-Israel mission that seems distinctly at odds with academic principles."

Only two classes from JOU can gain credits at Touro, and only one of them, "Israel Inside/Out", is what is making Zeveloff so upset - so much so that she has a follow-up article where she attempts to marshal academic experts to agree with her that such a class should be considered problematic.

I have not taken the course myself, but the list of people giving lectures - while they may be biased - hardly exhibits the fluff that Zeveloff implies. They include Sir Martin Gilbert, Professor Bernard Lewis and Dr. Daniel Pipes, Professor Alan Dershowitz, and Bassem Eid, the executive director for The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group along with others who are without a doubt staunchly pro-Israel like Caroline Glick.

It seems that being angry at a single course in a college that offers hundreds of courses - and the implication that somehow because of that course one should question the academic strength of the entire college - shows far more about the reporter than it does about Touro.

For example, one person that Zeveloff quotes in each of the two articles is Zachary Lockman, NYU professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, who said that the syllabus for this course strikes him as "tendentious."

Perhaps. But a quick look at NYU's Middle East courses* reveals one called The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, taught this term by Nahid Mozaffari. In that course, only one book is recommended that discusses Israel specifically - and that book is "A History of Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" by Ilan Pappe. In the introduction to that very book Pappe writes:

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

Which means that according to NYU, the only book worth reading in this course that talks about Israel is written by a pseudo-historian who freely admits that he is not interested in even the pretense of bias and who is against the very idea of Israel.

To me, the idea that a course on Israel in a Jewish school is biased towards Israel, where the contents and goals of the course are open for everyone to see, is far less offensive than the idea that students at a multi-cultural school are force-fed a biased version of history in their courses under the guise of being fair and balanced.

And this is only a tiny example. Who can expect that Joseph Massad's classes at Columbia have anything good to say about Israel, when he states ad nauseum that Israel is racist and colonialist? Indeed, Columbia's new Center for Palestine Studies is apparently a way to bash Israel under the guise of academia.

JOU, on the other hand, does not try to hide its agenda. Zeveloff spends quite a bit of time finding nefarious-sounding connections between JOU and Aish HaTorah and other pro-Israel organizations and funders, all in an attempt to give the reader the impression that something is really rotten there, without quite finding anything substantial.

I am not saying that "Israel: Inside/Out" is a fantastic college course, or that it represents the pinnacle of academic standards. But in a world when students at even Ivy League schools can find dozens of classes that teach nothing and hand out A's as if they were candy, it hardly seems controversial that a Jewish college gives credit for a pro-Israel course.

I would argue that Zeveloff is far guiltier posing as an objective journalist while writing these two hit pieces than Touro or JOU are in openly offering a single for-credit course that is biased towards Israel.

(Disclaimer: I have done some graphics work for JOU, including this poster for an educational initiative they have for Jewish high school students. And one more disclaimer: A long, long time ago, under a different name, I wrote a funny article that ended up being used as source material in at least one college course.)

*UPDATE: A reader who has taken the NYU class I mentioned says that Dr. Mozaffari's class at NYU also uses Efraim Karsh's Palestine Betrayed as required reading, even though it is not mentioned in the syllabus. He also says that she was very welcoming of student input into potential bias and works hard to give as fair a portrayal as possible. I am very glad to hear it.

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Darling "historian" of anti-Zionists falsified a Ben Gurion quote

From CAMERA:

Filmmaker Porter Speakman, Jr., producer and director of the 2010 movie With God on Our Side, has issued a press release acknowledging that a quote attributed to David Ben-Gurion by historian Ilan Pappé is not reliable.

In his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications), Pappé  reported that in a 1937 letter to his son, David Ben-Gurion wrote the following: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

It's a damning quote and is featured prominently in With God on Our Side. But it does not appear in any of the sources Pappé cites.

In his book, Pappé provided two references for this quote. The first reference is the July 12, 1937 entry of Ben-Gurion's diary. The second is page 220 of the August-September 1937 issue of New Judea, a newsletter published by the World Zionist Organization.

CAMERA provided electronic copies of both of these sources – neither of which include the quote attributed to Ben-Gurion – to Speakman earlier this week.

In response Speakman issued a press release that states in part:

… this quote cannot be found in the original sources of Ben Gurion's diary and therefore cannot be verified as authentic. While references to this quote exist, we could not find it in its original form. In an effort to be transparent and accurate, the producers have decided to take the extra step of removing it from future printings of "With God On Our Side." We apologize for this change.

The quote attributed to Ben-Gurion also appears in a 2006 article published in The Journal of Palestine Studies. In this article, Pappé provides another source for the quote. He states it appears on pages 167-168 of Charles D. Smith's Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston and New York: Beford/St. Martin's Press, 2004.

The quote does not appear here, either.

The editors at the Journal of Palestine Studies are currently investigating the issue.

CAMERA has made numerous attempts to contact Dr. Pappé at the University of Exeter, but the historian has not responded.

The fake Ben Gurion quote is all over the Internet and has been quoted in The Independent, after which Benny Morris wrote in and said that the quote was a falsification.

We've seen before that Pappe makes stuff up whenever he feels like it. We also have seen him admit:

There is no historian in the world who is objective. I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what's happened....I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings...Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.

He has also said

My bias is apparent despite the desire of my peers that I stick to facts and the "truth" when reconstructing past realities. I view any such construction as vain and presumptuous. This book is written by one who admits compassion for the colonized not the colonizer; who sympathizes with the occupied not the occupiers.

But this is the first time that every single source Pappe supposedly had for a specific quote has been shown to be definitively falsified. He didn't make a mistake - he made up three separate sources for a quote that was nonexistent.

This is not sloppiness. This is historian malpractice. The University of Exeter should take a long, hard look at whether they want their own name sullied by supporting a pseudo-historian who decides what the history would be before he tried to make up facts supporting his pre-existing ideas.

And all who approvingly quotes Pappe, like Richard Falk and John Pilger, are suspect as to their own interest in truth as well.

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