In this episode of the podcast of Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Center for Applied Social Research, we analyze the genocide two years after its onset, with our guest, the historian and activist Professor Ilan Pappé, Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. We begin the episode by attempting to understand the genocide in Gaza through the concepts that our guest set forth in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, published in 2006, and by asking him why he viewed it as an expected chapter in the Palestinian situation, one he considers to have begun more than a decade ago as a form of “incremental genocide”.
We also discuss the Israeli public, complicit along tribal lines in the genocide, across its various political stripes, social strata, and institutions. We further explore the contradiction between living with the memory of being the victim after the Holocaust and the brutal, destructive drive of the past two years to annihilate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, all while ignoring the historical and moral lessons of the Holocaust. Our guest then elaborates on his analysis of internal Israeli division, which, he surmises, will lead to the emergence of a new Israel in the 1967 occupied territories, and on the meaning and consequences of such a shift for Israeli society.
We then turn to the political agency exhibited by Palestinians in the various geographical areas during the genocide, including the role played by the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. We likewise discuss the agency and role of Palestinians within the Green Line during the genocide, and address various questions the genocide raises for the Palestinian national movement with regard to the Palestinian national project and its relations with the Israeli regime and Israeli society.
In addition, we consider the part played by governments of the Global North – and the United States in particular – during the genocide, contrasting it to that of popular movements, civil society organizations, and student movements in Western universities. Finally, we discuss the historic opportunity before the Palestinians to bring about a decisive shift by convincing the world to replace the current regime of racial segregation in historical Palestine with a democratic, humane, and just one.
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