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Ilan Pappé, PhD

Israeli Historian

Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. Pappé was also a board member of the Israeli political party Hadash, and was a candidate on the party list in the 1996 and 1999 Israeli legislative elections.

Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel. Pappé is one of Israel’s New Historians; he has, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, offered an unconventional view of Israel’s establishment in 1948 and the corresponding exodus of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from the land. He has written that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but constituted a planned ethnic cleansing in accordance with Plan Dalet, which was drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. Prior to coming to the United Kingdom, he was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984–2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008). He is the author of Ten Myths About Israel (2017), The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988).