Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (review)

In 2007, Israeli "new" historian Ilan Pappe left his long-standing academic post at the University of Haifa to (eventually) take up a Chair at the University of Exeter in the UK. This was the denouement of a long struggle that Professor Pappe experienced inside Israeli academia, largely to have heard the stories of the Palestinians dispossessed of their homes in 1948. Along the way, Pappe had undergone an epiphany, questioning the tenets of Zionism that had been inculcated in him as a child and the legitimacy of the Israeli state. This made life for Pappe inside Israel intolerable. His family received death threats and excrementsmeared correspondence; he was ostracized within the academy. This book is his account of what happened to him and to the Israel to which he once pledged allegiance. It is a semi-autobiographical narrative — that includes a moving fictional story of a Palestinian family — best read as part of the literature on the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. It is an attack on Israeli academia based on Pappe's personal experiences, but it is equally a trenchant general critique of Israel. It reminded this reviewer of Roland Barthes' 1957 short post-structuralist essay, "Operation Margarine," in which Barthes observed that portrayals of the drawbacks of the "Established Order" paradoxically make it stronger. As critics of the critic are wont to observe, Pappe is the homeopathy that cures doubts about Israel. Like Noam Chomsky in the United States, Pappe is heard but not heard, both men proving that Western democracies can tolerate (indeed welcome) dissent, while their militarized states carry on the business of hegemony. In this regard, Out of the Frame should be read alongside Gideon Levy's The Punishment of Gaza (2010), another critical account (also by an Israeli) of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians whose suffering is ignored — seen but not seen — by Israelis as they fight Islamicized terrorism. Both men see themselves as "voices in the wilderness" inside of Israel.

Pappe castigates Israeli universities for stifling debate, highlighting in this regard Haifa University's awarding and then rescinding of an MA to a mature kibbutznik student, Teddy Katz, whose dissertation dealt with a massacre by Israeli troops of several hundred Palestinians at the village of Tantura in May 1948. Out of the Frame includes a long appendix detailing the killings at the village. Irregularities in Katz's oral history accounts drawn from the Israeli veterans at Tantura, on which he built his case, were the reason put forward by the authorities at Haifa University for the withdrawal of the degree. The Katz tale as told by Pappe is shocking. That said, the whole issue of whether Israeli troops massacred Palestinians in 1948 at Tantura and elsewhere seems moot, to this reviewer anyway. Do Israelis really think that tens of thousands of their troops did not do such things in a bitter war in which the "transfer" of non-Jews, however it was done, was vital to make the new state practicable?

Pappe is a convert to the Palestinian cause and, like many converts, is something of a zealot, a fact picked up on by his detractors who argue that he ignores subtleties within Israeli life and overplays his hand when it comes to criticizing the country, presenting it as a monolithic bloc of ultra-Zionists. Israel has moved sharply to the Right in recent years, but Pappe is not the only scholar (or Israeli) resisting this baleful trend. Moreover, Pappe's support for the British-led academic ban on dealings with Israel cannot have endeared him to colleagues, which might explain their hostility to him. Pappe's enemies also accuse him of poor scholarship. Pappe's reply is that Israel is now corrupt, based as it is on "ethnic cleansing, apartheid, dispossession and occupation" (p. 178). And with this has come a willful misreading not only of its own history but that of the Palestinians. Pappe does not present himself in Out of the...