The question put to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe by Intelligence Squared and recorded before the most recent attack on Gaza was: is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?
His response, recorded on March 30, 2021, is an extraordinary mini-lecture on the origins of this argument and how it is now used to prevent the critique of Israeli policies.
Ilan Pappe is an expatriate Israeli historian and socialist activist. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
Pappé is one of Israel’s New Historians. Since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, they have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. And that includes the corresponding expulsion or flight of 700,000 Palestinians in the same year. An event that is remembered as Nakba, the Catastrophe.
Two months later, on May 20, 2021, when a fragile cease fire ended the most recent bombing of Gaza by Israel, the University of Exeter, UK, held a conference on the transition from capitalism to techno-feudalism. Ilan Pappé and Yanis Varoufakis were keynote speakers and they decided to dedicate part of their discussion to the recent events in Palestine/Israel.
Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist, college teacher, author and politician. A former member of the Syriza party, he served as Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 when he resigned in opposition to his party’s fiscal politics. In the 2019 election Varoufakis regained a seat in the Greek Parliament. Varoufakis is now active in the anti Apartheid movement in solidarity with Palestinians.
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