The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Critics

Critics

Some praise the work and the man as noted on his cover page, such as John Pilger who writes that "Ilan Pappé is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian" and historian Walid Khalidi who writes that " a dazzling feat of scholarly synthesis and Biblical moral clarity and humaneness". There are over a dozen more endorsements in the inside cover, including professors from Princeton University, Harvard University, University of Michigan, and Oxford University.

Benny Morris one of the preeminent Israel "New Historians" describing Pappe in his review of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine writes, "At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world's sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two." Adding that "Such distortions, large and small, characterize almost every page of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. "

Commenting in his review Alice in Ethnic Cleansing Land, Raphael Israeli of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs notes, "When we advance beyond the title of this eye-catching volume of one-sided 'History,' whose author has been called 'Israel's bravest, most principled and most incisive historian,' the picture becomes more nuanced and can be argued either way." He goes on to accuse Pappe of falsification of the facts. "The most blatant falsification of history may be found in the distorted presentation of otherwise irrefutable facts," he says.

Ian Black, The Guardian's Middle East editor writes, "Emphasis apart, it is hard to say what is new in his account." He calls the book "a catalogue of intimidation, expulsion and atrocity", and notes that Pappe "does historical understanding a disservice by all but ignoring the mood and motives of the Jews, so soon after the end of a war in which six million had been exterminated by the Nazis".

"He fights the "power of deletion" over the fate of the Palestinians. But he does historical understanding a disservice by all but ignoring the mood and motives of the Jews, so soon after the end of a war in which six million had been exterminated by the Nazis. Ben-Gurion's public rhetoric about the dangers of annihilation or a second Holocaust, Pappe argues, was matched by private confidence about the outcome of an unequal fight. That does not mean the shadow of the Holocaust can be airbrushed out of the story. The Jews were fighting, as they saw it, with their backs to the wall, for survival. To ignore that perception—a huge factor in western sympathy for Israel in 1948 and for so long afterwards—is to misrepresent reality."

David Pryce-Jones, writing in the Literary Review calls Pappe "an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for".

"To him, Israeli politicians and soldiers, one and all, are so many murderers. Forests have been planted only to cover up the past. Houses are ˜monstrous villas and palaces for rich American Jews". Everything Israeli is ugly, everything Palestinian is beautiful.
For evidence of Israeli monstrosity, he relies on quotations from his own previous works or from Palestinian polemicists, and above all on the oral testimonies of Palestinian refugees. Over half a century of military and ideological conflict has passed since their exodus, but Pappe declares his faith that whatever they now say is true".