A dreamer of nightmares: Ilan Pappe’s foolish plan to dismantle Israel

Some compromise is essential. The claims of the two sides are not just incompatible but mutually incommensurable. It is not easy to say, or find any basis on which to declare authoritatively, that one of them is stronger than the other.

Yet the claims of each are incomparably stronger, and far more deeply grounded, than are the late-comer, appropriating claims of all and any non-aboriginal Australians to Sydney Cove, Toorak, Canberra or any other part of Australia whose well-meaning, and more naïve, citizens Pappe now seeks to enlighten.

Not only his audiences but Pappe himself and his claque must also either recognise this — in which case he is a dangerously disingenuous advocate of Israel’s self-dissolution and Islamist hegemony in the name of Middle Eastern “peace” — or else he is simply obtuse, intellectually and morally and historically, a political bungler to whom we ought not to give any serious hearing or any credence.

Non-indigenous Australians are not about “to go back to where we all came from”. Nor is Pappe urging that course. That is not why he has come to Sydney. He wants, rather, to enlist as many of us as he can to support the equally quixotic project of Israeli self-abnegation.

Pappe seeks to recruit his listeners to his insight that, if only there were no Jews in the picture to complicate things for others, the world would be a simpler place; and to his ensuing action plan of voluntary or enforced Jewish disappearance in order to make things easier for everybody else.

Pappe and his friends claim to hold the key to peace in the Middle East. But they are dreamers of a silly dream, captives of the naïve wish-fulfilling fantasy of an end to “the Jewish problem”, theirs and the world’s.

Who are Pappe’s local supporters here in Australia? Some of them claim to speak as Jews. In a sense they do, a very weak sense. They may be Jews by origin, by fate of birth. They may even purport to be guided in some sense by “Jewish values”, even though those values are grounded in traditions of which they know and care little. 

But they are not really any part of Australian Jewish life. They contribute nothing to the Jewish community’s diversified network of social welfare, educational and religious institutions. Nor are they other than marginal participants in that living community’s range of socio-cultural activities centred upon the exploration and development of a broad and evolving sense of Jewish identity.

That is just not who they are. They simply voice a view from and for the periphery, remote from the many currents of the mainstream, whom they ineptly address and for whom they absurdly presume to speak.

Pappe’s local champions sometimes claim, although on a much narrower and less passionately committed basis than Jews who are broadly engaged in the mainstream, to be part of the Jewish tradition. Yet they are happy to “sell off”, and to be widely praised for their “principled” readiness to sell off, the greater part of that ancestral tradition, including any notion that in the age of modern nationalism (which has seen so many ancient identities similarly reconfigured) being Jewish is, for most Jews, a modern cultural and national political identity.

Pappe’s tiny band of Jewish supporters are entitled to their views. Yet, choosing to stand largely outside Jewish tradition, they cannot plausibly claim to speak in its name or for most other Jews, nor may they appropriate the mantle of any deeply-rooted Jewish legitimacy.

Theirs is the kind of Jewish “authenticity” that finds favour, and an honoured place, in those captive academic bastions of the new Islamist triumphalism where amenable sophists and doctrinaire casuists such as Pappe have found a home. And from where, should their efforts ever succeed, the dismantling of Israel might be contemplated in detached, risk-free tranquillity.