Ilan Pappé

Ilan Pappé is an expatriate Israeli historian and socialist activist, educated at the University of Jerusalem and the University of Oxford. He founded the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva, Israel, and was its director from 1992 to 2000. He was also chair of the Emil Tuma Institute for Palestine Studies in Haifa. His 2016 book The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories received the Palestine Book Award. He has published 17 other books and is currently a professor at the University of Exeter.

Pappé's research contextualizes the history of Palestine into a larger global context of settler colonialism. His historiography challenges the dominant Israeli narrative. He writes, "Standing idle while the American-Israeli vision of strangling the Strip to death, cleansing half of the West bank from its indigenous population and threatening the rest of the Palestinians—inside Israel and in the other parts of the West Bank—with transfer, is not an option. It is tantamount to 'decent' people's silence during the Holocaust."