Pappe’s discomfort

[Jan Klimkowski]

Pappe writes, "The perpetrators of the 1948 ethnic cleansing were the Zionist settlers who came to Palestine, like Polish-born Shimon Peres, before the Second World War. They denied the existence of the native people they encountered, who lived there for hundreds of years, if not more." Here Pappe is correct, but then he continues: "The Zionists did not possess the power at the time to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced: their conviction that the land was people-less despite the presence of so many native people there." But Pappe fails to point at any symptom of such a dissonance. Could it be that the director of the Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter is just ignorant?
Certainly not, Pappe is far from being ignorant. Pappe knows the history of Zionism and Israel better than most people. He knows that Zionist settlers' like Polish-born Shimon Peres' were ideologically and culturally driven. But then why would a professor of history attempt to turn a blind eye to the ideology' and the culture' of those early Zionists?
The early Zionists, were neither blind nor were they stupid. They saw the Arabs in the land of Palestinein the fields, in the villages and in the townsbut, being driven by a racial, supremacist and expansionist philosophy, they probably regarded the Arab as sub-human and so easily dismissed their rights, their culture, their heritage and indeed, their humanity.[1]
But, even though a cultural and ideological analysis resolves the proposed alleged dissonance' and illuminates the historical complexity, Ilan Pappe avoids elaborating on those issues. I have a good reason to believe that the truth is just too offensive for Pappe's audience to digest. So instead, Pappe continues with his psychological model: "They [the Zionists] almost solved the dissonance when they expelled as many Palestinians as they could in 1948and were left with only a small minority of Palestinians within the Jewish state."
Yet again, it could be helpful if Pappe provided the necessary historical' evidence that would prove that the Nakba was indeed an attempt to resolve an internal Zionist collective cognitive dissonance.' I assume that Pappe knows very well that it is actually that lack of such a "cognitive dissonance" that drives a few Israeli individuals, such as Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy and Pappe himself towards universalism, humanism and pro-Palestinian activism.
I guess that Pappe's new cognitive analytical model is telling us very little about Zionism, Israel or Shimon Peres but it actually tells us a lot about Pappe and the grave state of the Palestinian solidarity intellectual discourse. The discomfort he talks about is in fact his own: the clash between known and accepted facts and logical conclusions and the task he has accepted of squaring the circle, of wrapping up a racist, supremacist project in psychobabble wrapping and presenting it as nothing less than a pandemic of cognitive dissonance.'
For some reason many of us insist on producing inoffensive' chronicles of Israeli barbarism and Jewish nationalism that attempt to mask and deflect from rather than pointing to the obvious cultural and ideological kernel of the problem.

Precisely.