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“While George W. Bush was in office, the killing of women and babies in Gaza could be accepted even by the American administration as part of that holy war against Islam.
The worst month in 2006 for the Gazans was September, when this new pattern in the Israeli policy became all too obvious. Almost daily, civilians were killed by the IDF: 2 September 2006 was one such day. Three citizens were killed and an entire family injured in Beit Hanoun. This was just the morning’s harvest; before the end of the day many more were killed. In September an average of eight Palestinians died every day in Israeli attacks on the Strip, many of them children. Hundreds were maimed, wounded and paralysed”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The very last moment of Beit Nuba’s existence comes to life in his articulate writings (Kenan would become one of Israel’s foremost novelists in later years):
Elegant stone houses, orchards of fruit trees around each house � olives, peach and vine trees � and next to them cedars. All the orchards nicely cultivated and maintained . . . In the morning the first bulldozer arrived and demolished the first house. In ten minutes, the house, the orchard and the trees were all gone. The house and its contents were destroyed . . . After the third house was destroyed, the refugees� convoy began to make its way towards Ramallah.
The three picturesque villages are now hidden by Canada Park â€� a pine forest of the kind planted in the aftermath of the 1948 ethnic cleansing as a means of covering such atrocities, and part of Beit Nuba’s land now forms a new colony named Beit Horon.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“The units spearheaded the operations of mass arrests and the systematic abuse and torture of those arrested. It is very disappointing that the world continued to remain silent at that point, because that particular activity was investigated by a few American congressmen, a rarity in the history of the occupation. Paul Findley reported in 1991 that human rights groups had published ‘detailed credible reports of torture, abuse and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in prisons and detention centresâ€�.29 Although this was totally ignored by Western governments, it did generate for the first time a far wider response from what one might call Western civil societies. A more genuine and widespread movement of solidarity emerged â€� to this day still unable to impact the policies of the governments and hence the reality on the ground.
Needless to say, this kind of treatment reported by Findley was not unique to 1991. The people arrested during the punitive years were added to the thousands who had already been in jail since June 1967”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“And, indeed, once the first Intifada broke out in 1987, settler provocation against the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip increased and became more brutal by the day. At the time, the settlers were mercilessly using their own children to provoke aggression, as happened in the village of Beita, a few miles south-east of Nablus. There, in January 1988, a battalion commander rounded up a large number of youths from Beita and the nearby village of Hawara, tied their hands behind their backs and ordered his soldiers to ruthlessly beat them with sticks and rocks.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“All in all, according to UN sources, Israel expelled nearly 180,000 Palestinians in those early days.40 In summing up this period in Palestine’s ethnic cleansing, I want to return to some of the plans that were not executed, or at least to one that might, unfortunately, still be relevant in the future should Israel ever have the power, the will or the need to massively depopulate the occupied population in order to satisfy what it would deem its strategic and existential requirements. This is the idea of moving the people of the Gaza Strip, or at least the refugees there, into the West Bank.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“Ezra Danin, who would play a leading role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism in three respects. The first is that settler colonies rely only initially and temporarily on the empire for their survival. In fact, in many cases, as in Palestine and South Africa, the settlers do not belong to the same nation as the imperial power that initially supports them. More often than not they ceded from the empire, redefining themselves as a new nation, sometimes through a liberation struggle against the very empire that supported them (as happened during the American Revolution for instance). The second difference is that settler colonialism is motivated by a desire to take over land in a foreign country, while classical colonialism covets the natural resources in its new geographical possessions. The third difference concerns the way they treat the new destination of settlement. Unlike conventional colonial projects conducted in the service of an empire or a mother country, settler colonialists were refugees of a kind seeking not just a home, but a homeland. The problem was that the new “homelandsâ€� were already inhabited by other people. In response, the settler communities argued that the new land was theirs by divine or moral right, even if, in cases other than Zionism, they did not claim to have lived there thousands of years ago. In many cases, the accepted method for overcoming such obstacles was the genocide of the indigenous locals.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Zionism offered itself as the solution to anti-Semitism, but became the main reason for its continued presence. The “dealâ€� also failed to uproot the racism and xenophobia that still lies at the heart of Europe, and which produced Nazism on the continent and a brutal colonialism outside of it. That racism and xenophobia is now turned against Muslims and Islam; since it is intimately connected to the Israel–Palestinian question, it could be reduced once a genuine answer to that question is found.”
― Ilan Pappé

“The great Hasidic German Rabbi of Dzikover summed up this approach bitterly when he said that Zionism asks him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil, and a song (i.e. a flag, a land, and an anthem).”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“For a while, Americans seemed uneasy about the fact that several Palestinians a day were bing killed, and that a large number of the victims were children. There was also some discomfort about Israel's use of collective punishments, house demolitions, and arrests without trial. But they got used to all this.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The most important item to go six feet under is the dictionary of illusion and deception with its famous entries such as “the peace process,â€� “the only democracy in the Middle East,â€� “a peace-loving nation,â€� “parity and reciprocity,â€� and “a humane solution to the refugee problem.â€� A replacement dictionary has been in the making for many years, redefining Zionism as colonialism, Israel as an apartheid state, and the Nakbah as ethnic cleansing.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“At the very beginning of the twentieth century, the newspaper Filastin reflected the way the people named their country. Palestinians spoke their own dialect, had their own customs and rituals, and appeared on the maps of the world as living in a country called Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“...the government offered both versions of the mega-prison to the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. One was an open-air Panopticon prison, the other a maximum security one. If they did not accept the former, they would get the latter.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“History lies at the core of every conflict. A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“What is clear is that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians can in no way be justified as a "punishment" for their rejecting a UN peace plan that was devised without any consultation with the Palestinians themselves.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The three aims of keeping the country Jewish, European-looking and Green quickly fused into one. This is why forests throughout Israel today include only eleven per cent of indigenous species and why a mere ten per cent of all forests date from before 1948.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Dove andarono i palestinesi espulsi? Israele riuscì a mandare i palestinesi dell'Est verso la Cisgiordania occupata e la Transgiordania. Quelli del Nord furono respinti in Siria e Libano. Ma a sud l'Egitto rifiutò di aprire i suoi confini ai palestinesi.
Verso la fine della guerra, Israele "risolse" questo problema creando quella che oggi conosciamo fin troppo dolorosamente come la Striscia di Gaza. Era un piccolo rettangolo ritagliato nella Palestina storica (il 2 per cento del paese). Fu istituita per accogliere le centinaia di migliaia di palestinesi espulsi da Israele delle zone centrali e meridionali della Palestina. Allora era il campo profughi più grande del mondo. Lo è ancora oggi.”
― Ilan Pappé, A Very Short History of the Israel–Palestine Conflict

“This then resurfaced as a formula for peace in the efforts led by the Americans after 1967, when the concept of partition reappeared in different names and references. It was hidden as a discourse with the emergence of two new concepts. The first was ‘territories for peaceâ€�, which every peace negotiator treated as a sanctified formula for peace â€� the more territory Israel withdrew from the more peace it would get. Now the territory in Palestine that Israel could withdraw from was within the 22 per cent it had not taken over in 1948. Therefore, in essence the idea was to build peace on the basis of partitioning the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine between Israel and whoever it would legitimize as a partner for peace (which at first were the Jordanians until the late 1980s and then the Palestinians ever since).”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“We all deserve a better ending to the story of the Holocaust. This could involve a strong multicultural Germany showing the way to the rest of Europe; an American society dealing bravely with the racial crimes of its past that still resonate today; an Arab world that expunges its barbarism and inhumanity â€� Nothing like that could happen if we continue to fall into the trap of treating mythologies as truths. Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not “redeemedâ€�; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Systematic cruelty does not only show its face in a major event like a massacre. The worst atrocities can also be found in the regime’s daily, mundane presence.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The world looks on as the strongest military power in the region, with its Apache helicopters, tanksand bulldozers, attacks an unarmed and defenseless population of civilians and impoverished refugees, among whom small groups of poorly equipped militias try to make a brave but ineffective stand.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“On the land of Huj, Ariel Sharon built his private residence, Havat Hashikmim, a ranch that covers 5000 dunam of the village’s fields.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“When incarceration in prison failed to stop the activists, Israel crushed the boycott by imposing heavy fines, and seizing and disposing of equipment, furnishings and goods from local stores, factories and homes. But you could be subjected to the same treatment for less; a common, non-violent Palestinian form of protest in those days was the use of graffiti to express resistance. This often led to the arrest and collective punishment of the entire family of the perpetrator.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories

“For both Christians and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at the expense of the native people of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“However, its exposed water supply ten kilometres to the north, from the Kabri springs, via an almost 200-year old aqueduct, proved its Achillesâ€� heel. During the siege typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Today we know too much about life under occupation, before and after Oslo, to take seriously the claim that non-resistance will ensure less oppression.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The most reasonable compensation for the particular case of the Palestinian refugees was stated clearly already in December 1948 by the UN General Assembly in its Resolution 194: the unconditional return of the refugees and their families to their homeland (an homes where possible). Without some such restitution, the state of Israel will continue to exist as a hostile enclave at the heart of the Arab world, the last reminder of a colonialist past that complicates Israel's relationship not only with the Palestinians, but with the Arab world as a whole.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“native people of Palestine, like the native people of every other country in the Arab world, Asia, Africa, America and Europe, refused to divide the land with a settler”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine