Quotations: Modern Israeli historian on the discrepancy between the collective understanding and the reality illustrated by these candid quotations

“When it comes to the dispossession by Israel of the Palestinians in 1948, there is a deep chasm between reality and the representation. This is most bewildering, and it is difficult to understand how events perpetrated in modern times and witnessed by foreign reporters and UN observers could be systematically denied, not even recognized as historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted, politically as well as morally. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the most formative event in modern history of the land of Palestine, has been almost entirely eradicated from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.”

~Ilan Pappe, prominent Israeli “New Historian,” 2006