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For this week’s Green Sunday we’ll be showing a 45-minute lecture by Professor Ilan Pappé that was delivered October 19 at UC Berkeley. The lecture begins with a summary of pre-October 7 Israeli protests regarding proposed constitutional changes to politicize its judicial system and increase religious control over the public domain — a cultural civil war between Israel and Messianic elements in the West Bank. In these internal debates Israelis were told: “the occupation should not be mentioned by any side,” nor the terrorization of Israeli Palestinians by criminal gangs, nor the siege on Gaza. “As far as the Israelis were concerned … the occupation … did not exist as a problem anymore — it is solved.”
And it all blew up on October 7. Pappé’s talk stresses that activists and academics should not fall into the trap of “decontextualizing and dehistoricizing the events of 7 October.” The Palestinian people, since 1929, “are involved in a struggle for liberation. It’s an anti-colonialist struggle. It’s an anti-settler-colonialist struggle.” Pappé’s lecture provides the historical context needed to understand the struggle and the current genocide we see happening daily in Gaza.
We hope that all will participate in a round table discussion following the video beginning at 5:50. If you would like to watch the video separately, it was posted by UC Prof. Hatem Bazian, including the 45-minute Q&A that followed the lecture, at this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OcjOP8iUCU
Professor Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist and a former politician. He is currently a Professor of History, Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, UK. Pappé supports the one-state solution, envisaging a unitary state for both Palestinians and Israelis. He left Israel in 2008 after being condemned in the Knesset. A minister of education had called for him to be sacked, his photograph had appeared in a newspaper at the centre of a target, and he had received several death threats. A strong critic of Zionism and the State of Israel, Pappé has called for an international boycott of Israeli academics. Pappé is the author of nineteen books, most on Palestinian, Arab and Israeli history. Recent books include: The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (2017); Ten Myths About Israel (2017); and On Palestine (2015, with Noam Chomsky).
J