Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian and political activist who serves as a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Born in Haifa to German Jewish parents who fled Nazi Germany, he emerged in the late 1980s as one of Israel’s prominent “New Historians“—a group of scholars who re-examined official narratives of Israel’s founding using newly declassified government archives.
Pappé is best known for his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which argues that the 1948 displacement of Palestinians was a deliberate, premeditated expulsion rather than an unintended byproduct of war. His research brought the New Historians’ work to a wider international audience, while establishing him as a central and controversial figure in modern Middle Eastern historiography.
Facing intense political backlash and boycotts in Israel over his work, Pappé left Haifa University in 2007 to teach in the UK. He remains an outspoken supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and advocates for One-state solution: a single democratic state covering Israel and the Occupied Territories. He maintains that lasting peace requires an explicit acknowledgment of the Nakba and the dismantling of Zionist political structures.