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The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge

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A major history of Zionism and the state of Israel, for anyone interested in deepening their knowledge of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Middle Eastern politics

"[Ilan Pappé] is . . . one of the few Israeli students of the conflict who write about the Palestinian side with real knowledge and empathy." --Guardian

Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has drawn on Zionism, the movement behind its creation, to provide a sense of self and political direction. In this groundbreaking new work, Ilan Pappe looks at the continued role of Zionist ideology. The Idea of Israel considers the way Zionism operates outside of the government and military in areas such as the country's education system, media, and cinema, and the uses that are made of the Holocaust in supporting the state's ideological structure.

In particular, Pappe examines the way successive generations of historians have framed the 1948 conflict as a liberation campaign, creating a foundation myth that went unquestioned in Israeli society until the 1990s. Pappe himself was part of the post-Zionist movement that arose then. He was attacked and received death threats as he exposed the truth about how Palestinians have been treated and the gruesome structure that links the production of knowledge to the exercise of power. The Idea of Israel is a powerful and urgent intervention in the war of ideas concerning the past, and the future, of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

ISBN-13: 9781784782016

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Verso Books

Publication Date: 01-05-2016

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

Ilan Pappe is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His many books include The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Gaza in Crisis (with Noam Chomsky). He writes for, among others, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Debating the Idea of Israel 1

Part I The Scholarly and Fictional Idea of Israel

1 The 'Objective' History of the Land and the People 17

2 The Alien Who Became a Terrorist: The Palestinian in Zionist Thought 27

3 The War of 1948 in Word and Image 48

Part II Israel's Post-Zionist Moment

4 The Trailblazers 69

5 Recognising the Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 War Revisited 106

6 The Emergence of Post-Zionist Academia, 1990-2000 126

7 Touching the Raw Nerves of Society: Holocaust Memory in Israel 153

8 The Idea of Israel and the Arab Jews 179

9 The Post-Zionist Cultural Moment 197

10 On the Post-Zionist Stage and Screen 217

11 The Triumph of Neo-Zionism 247

12 The Neo-Zionist New Historians 275

Epilogue: Brand Israel 2013 295

Notes 314

Further Reading 336

Index 341