Papp?PI's questionable content
By Mairghread Ryan | Apr. 14, 2010Ilan Pappé's March 24 lecture certainly stirred up talk within the community. Ernest Sternberg, professor of Urban and Regional Planning, feels that Pappé's lecture bordered on hate speech. Sternberg believes Pappé is "creating evil or sinister causes out of [the] context of war." Where Pappé blames Zionists for rewriting history, Sternberg sees the opposite. "[Pappé is] taking history and distorting it to blame one people," Sternberg said. "The claim it makes of ethnic cleansing is an example of this." Sternberg, an advocate for peace in Israel, wonders why Pappé was invited to speak by the Western New York Peace Center. "Why would the Peace Center invite an extremist?" Sternberg said. "[There is] something fundamentally wrong with this." There are a few radicals on campus, all with Marxist backgrounds, according to Sternberg. "When history didn't work out the right way, they needed to a find a new enemy," Sternberg said. Sternberg believes the Jews have always been convenient to blame. He feels that Pappé has taken much of the Palestinian expulsion out of the context of history. "It is possible to take history out of context," he said. In 1948, Israel – Palestine at the time – experienced a mass migration of Jews from Europe. The country was under English control after the British took it from the Ottoman Empire. The British stopped allowing Jews into Palestine, even after the Arab revolts against the Jews in 1933 and the Holocaust. One hundred thousand Jews were left in displacement camps. Sternberg's own family survived Auschwitz, one of the worst Nazi concentration camps. Unlike Pappé, they see Zionism as a "collective to take care of ourselves, defend ourselves." "[My mother said] how stupid we were to not take our lives in our own hands," Sternberg said. After the UN created the enclave for Jews in the Middle East, five armies attacked the fledgling state. "It would have been like the Holocaust again," Sternberg said. He went on to say that the Palestinian expulsion was in the "context of a total war." "If Israel wanted to ‘ethnically cleanse,' why didn't they get rid of the Arabs, then?" Sternberg said. Instead, Sternberg points out that though some Palestinians were expelled from Israel during the war, many left the country on their own. But all Jews were expelled from the West Bank. "[It is] disturbing to me that this is the image international students get," Sternberg said of the publicized pro-Palestinian views. "[It is] really depressing to me that [some] Muslim students have no radical bone in their body and the most radical image of Israel is being pushed on them." Israel is a land where Jews of all ethnic backgrounds are welcome. Many have Arab ethnicities. They fled the Arab and North African countries where they lived when their citizenship was revoked. They were also tired of living under Shar'ia Laws, which made non-Muslims subservient to Muslims. Sternberg stands by his belief that Pappé is taking a people and making them seem evil. "The question is why Ilan Pappé wants to do this," Sternberg said. E-mail: news@ubspectrum.com
