Ilan Pappé says erased Palestinian narratives can be recovered
The Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé explored how powerful narratives get built, defended and repeated until they feel like common sense.
To disrupt these narratives, he argued, we need to be aware of them, understand their origins and develop strategies to challenge them, including recovering histories that have been systematically erased.
Pappé's argument was that narratives don't only shape opinions, they shape what counts as reality, what gets remembered, what gets denied and what gets framed as "unavoidable".
He stressed that one of the most powerful tools in that process is dehumanisation, the language that turns people into abstraction, a problem or a threat. When speaking about Palestinian stories, he drew a hard line between sentimentality and recognition. 'We are not idealising… we are humanising,' he said.
Israel did all it could to expunge Palestine from history, from memory
Erasure isn't only physical, it's archival and linguistic
"Israel did all it could to expunge Palestine from history, from memory," Pappé said.
Pappé described how historians have tried to reconstruct what was erased, sometimes by working inside the coloniser's own records. Pappé pointed to a period when Israeli openness to research meant some state and movement archives could be accessed, and argued that if you know how to work those archives, and how to decolonise them, you can salvage evidence even from documents designed to justify power.
He also emphasised the importance of oral history and the role of other international archives, including British, American, French and UN records, in piecing together what happened. "It's possible to de-erase the erased," Pappé added.
Why it's so hard to disrupt a narrative that's been institutionalised
Pappé described how he began to question offical narratives as a slow journey, shaped by leaving Israel to study, meeting Palestinian and pro-Palestinian historians, and confronting archive material that contradicted the narrative he'd grown up with.
Born in Haifa in 1954, Pappé received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1984. He taught at the University of Haifa for over two decades before moving to the UK in 2007 to join the University of Exeter, where he is now Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies.
It's not only important to show how things were destroyed, but it's also important to say what was destroyed
He was clear about the force of the system he was challenging. Asked how people raised inside Israeli society can break from institutional narratives, in his account, disruption requires more than information. It needs an 'antidote': moral resilience, sustained exposure to different perspectives and the ability to step outside the media and educational loop that reproduces a single official worldview.
Go back further than 1948 and recover what was destroyed
Pappé urged students to do more than catalogue ruins. "It's not only important to show how things were destroyed, but it's also important to say what was destroyed," he said.
For him, that shift matters because erasure doesn't just happen through force, it also happens when a society is reduced to a backdrop, and when Palestinian life before dispossession is treated as irrelevant, unknowable or not worth naming.
He pointed to the work of Palestinian scholars as vital; not only documenting the damage, but recovering everyday realities, cultural worlds and social 'mosaics' that colonial narratives have long flattened or dismissed.
This, Pappé argued, is part of disrupting the story at its root: refusing a narrative that begins with destruction, and insisting on a fuller record of what existed and what was taken. It's a theme he has explored extensively across his 22 books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007), The Ten Myths of Israel (2018) and most recently Israel on the Brink (2025).
'Cracks' in a century-old story and why they matter
Pappé argued that the 'peace process' has often operated less as a route to justice than as a way to normalise 'abnormality'. Unlike other anti-colonial movements that were eventually celebrated in the West as heroic, Palestinian resistance continues to be framed as illegitimate, he said.
And yet, he said during a lecture organised by Islaah Collective and the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS University of London, there are 'huge cracks' in the edifice, not wide enough, in his view, to halt what he described as genocide in Gaza or ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, but widening over time because of the foundational 'immorality' and 'impracticality' of exporting a European 'solution' into Palestine and the wider region.
A narrative built nearly a century ago can be disrupted, he said as his closing note, but only if people refuse the vocabulary that protects it and keep doing the slow, stubborn work of de-erasure.
