cepimierz
05.03.06, 07:45
Ogromny wywiad z izraelskim historykiem (Uniwersytet w Hajfie). Pappe bada wydarzenia 1948 roku i analizuje ich wpływ na dzisiejszą sytuację.
Pouczający materiał.
Fragmenty:
<<I realized at the very early stage that the research of history in the cases of people like myself, or as anyone knows in Israel and Palestine, is not just an intellectual pursuit; that the reality, the realities of conflict are informed by what happened in the past. And therefore I thought that not only historians, professional historians, but the society at large should look deeply into the past if it wishes to understand the present better. And I also understood that the way history is taught, being taught and researched in Israeli academia is very loyal to the Zionist ideology, and it was very clear for me, from the early stage in my professional carrier that writing history books, and teaching history courses about the Palestine past, is also a political act, an ideological act, not just an intellectual act.>>
<< Q: When you began to study this, I mean, what conclusions did you come to about, about the state of Israel and the situation of the Palestinians?
I think what came out is something which I think many, many Palestinians before me realized, but for me it took this individual journey into the past to understand that. I was taught as an Israeli academic that there is a very complex story there, and in fact what you find out is that this is a very simple story, a story of dispossession, of colonization, of occupation, of expulsion. And the more I go into it, the clearer the story becomes, even it becomes simpler, and it also brought me to think of the state of Israel, and the Jewish majority in it, in very much the same terms that I used to think about places such as South Africa, and the white supremacy regime there. So I think this is the natural, main conclusion.>>
<<Q: What has been the recent struggle that you’ve been engaged in at the University -why don't you talk about how that began, and why that happened?
I should being by saying that I think the very important, precondition for any genuine reconciliation in Israel and Palestine is an Israel-Jewish ability to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of 1948. I think the Israelis have a mechanism of denial that educated a whole society to totally obliterate from its memory the terrible crimes that the Jews had committed against the Palestinians in 1948, and even afterwards. I am totally convinced that such an acknowledgement, very much like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, is a precondition for any genuine reconciliation, and therefore my main struggle in the Israeli universities is to allow at least the universities to become a source where people can learn about that denied past.>>
O masakrze we wsi Tantura, której opis przedstawił magistrant Pappego:
<<I encourage students to go and research 1948, and one of these students in his research exposed an unknown massacre in 1948, which was another important brick in the story that we are trying to build. [...]
The massacre was in the village of Tantura, which is south of Haifa, and the largest massacre in the war. The Israeli army used to occupy the Arab villages in the way that usually left one flank opened so that the people could be expelled through that side. In several cases, like in the case of Tantura, this did not happen. They made a mistake, it was not on purpose, and they closed the village from all four flanks. One of the reasons, on the west the village was on the sea, and the Israeli navy blocked the village. So in situations like these, the Israeli soldiers used to massacre the people rather than cleanse them. And about 230 people, mostly young men and middle-aged men, were massacred and the women and children were expelled to Jordan. That is what he exposed.
Why was he disqualified? The student could not find enough archival evidence, because the Israeli army was trying to hide the events. So he did something, which we call a professional historiography, a oral history. So he went to interview both Jewish soldiers who participated in the massacre, and Palestinian survivors. And both confirmed that the massacre took place. Now, they found six places in his master dissertation where he did not, when they checked his tapes of the interviews, what was said in the tapes did not accurately correspond to what he transcribed. But none of these sections of the interviews made any difference to the overall conclusion. And as we all know, even very experienced professors, if you check them very thoroughly with their sources, there will be some discrepancies between their sources and what happened. And on the basis of that, he was disqualified whereas students and veteran professors, who had many more known mistakes in their works, would never be challenged in such a way.>>
Cały wywiad pod:
www.imemc.org/content/view/17103/1/