Ilan Pappé in book launch with Jonathan Cook: “Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid”
▻http://mondoweiss.net/2016/07/colonialism-apartheid-palestinian
(...) However, launching his new collaborative book in East Jerusalem on Saturday night, esteemed Israeli historian Ilan Pappé abandoned any pretence of restraint and made the intrepid and timely case that the use of apartheid descriptors when engaging in Israel/Palestine discourse should be an indisputable starting point, not an equivocal theory up for debate. The collection which Pappé has edited, ‘Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid’, has assembled contributions from a wide range of respected academics, politicians, journalists and lawyers, that are all rooted in a fundamental position that recognises that the relationship the Israeli state has manufactured with its Palestinian subjects, in Israel and the occupied territories, equates to a form of apartheid.
Providing introductory remarks to the vast audience that had gathered in the garden, Pappé commented on the necessity of ensuring the paradigm shift, which has been evident over the last 10 or 15 years within marginal spheres of academia and peripheral political systems around the world, gain credence among those Western elites who actually hold power.
“For about 40 or 50 years in many places like this – institutes, universities, academic centres, media and so on – there was one dominant way or paradigm through which the conflict in Palestine had been analysed and this was the paradigm or model of a conflict between two national movements,” he said, explaining the orthodoxy in western thought, “there is one country for which two national movements are fighting for; they have equal right to the land, they have an equal attachment to the land, and hence what you need is to find a compromise that would answer the aspirations of both national movements, given the fact that they both have a justified claim to the land.”
Given that this is the central paradigm for peace that the Quartet (United Nations, USA, European Union and Russia), the main stream media and influential “peace” politicians continue to use, Pappé considers it entirely unsurprising that the main outcome remains the unworkable two-state solution.
What the book endeavours to do, Pappé expounded, is to expose this manifestly deceitful paradigm, and establish a new paradigm, already common amongst activists and marginalised academics, that relates to the reality on the ground; one of “settler-colonialism and its connection with apartheid.” In essence, the conflict is not between two competing national movements with an equal claim to the land, but between a movement of settler-colonialists and a native people.
The theoretical framework for the book is formed around this concept and the belief that the natural consequence of settler-colonialism is a system of apartheid which ensures the native people are separated from the settler race.
(...)
“Any peace paradigm that retains Israel as a Zionist state has no chance in the world of succeeding,” said Pappé, summarizing, “Similarly to the way that we had to get rid of apartheid, we have to get rid of Zionism before we talk about reconciliation. No other solution will work in this place.”
