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Exodus: a refugee camp in the Jordan Valley for Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli forces, 1948
History · Universal images · Getty
On 7 November 2023, a month after the Hamas attacks on Israel and with prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s reprisals hitting the Gaza Strip hard, French publisher Fayard decided to stop selling its edition of Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This despite an uptick in sales. Fayard (part of the Hachette group, acquired by far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré in June 2023) claimed its contract with the original publisher, Oneworld, had lapsed.
The true reason was more likely the book’s political stance: Pappé, an anti-Zionist, is a prominent figure among the ‘new’ or ‘revisionist’ Israeli historians who have been exploding the national narrative on the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948. Subsequently reissued by La Fabrique in 2024, Pappé’s authoritative work sets out the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the refugee question and the colonial dimensions of the Zionist movement, which began advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the late 19th century.
Pappé, citing evidence, refutes the Israeli claim that the 800,000 Palestinians (out of 1.4 million at the time) who left the country in 1948 did so willingly, to escape the first Arab-Israeli war (May 1948-July 1949). Pappé calls this a ‘pure fabrication’ mainly intended to mask Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). In reality, he writes, the mass exodus was a direct result of the ‘systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from vast areas of the country’, and of the destruction and violence perpetrated by Jewish troops after the UN vote to divide Palestine into two (unequal) states in November 1947; this was continued by the Israeli army (established in spring 1948) with the aim of ensuring the ethnic homogeneity of the state assigned to the Jewish people and expanding its territory.
Based on first-hand examination of military and political archives and politicians’ (…)
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(3) John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, Century, London, 1993. For a short time during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, it was possible to consult Orlov’s file.
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(5) Founded in 1935. Its founder, Andreu Nin, was for a time close to Trotsky.
(6) There have been allegations that pre-1917 Stalin spied for the tsarist secret police.
(7) Walter G Krivitsky, I Was Stalin’s Agent, The Right Book Club, London, 1940.
(8) Anatoli and Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: the Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – a Soviet Spymaster, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1994.
(9) Boris Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent: the Life and Death of Alexander Orlov, Oxford University Press, 2014.
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(11) His relative, Mary-Kay Wilmers, former editor of the London Review of Books, paints an unflattering portrait of him in her book The Eitingons: a Twentieth-Century Story, Verso, London, 2010.
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