Dr Ilan Pappé

Professor of History at Exeter University

Dr Ilan Pappé was born in Haifa. Before attending the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he served in the Israeli Defence Forces during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He graduated in 1978 and moved to the University of Oxford to complete his PhD in 1984. He then moved back to Israel, taking on a History Chair at the University of Haifa, which he held until 2007. He left after a controversy in which he called for a boycott of Israeli university academics, taking up an appointment at Exeter University. Pappé is a well-known New Historian of Israel, challenging the traditional interpretations of the foundation of Israel, and he engages frequently in political activism. He has written a number of books, including Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (1988), The Modern History of Palestine, One Land, Two Peoples (2003) and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).