Professor Ilan Pappé, born in Haifa in 1954, is the director of the European Center for Palestine Studies and a Fellow of the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He earned a Ph.D in 1984 from the University of Oxford then taught at the University of Haifa until 2007 when he moved to Exeter.

Professor Pappé is the author of more than fifteen books, among them: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007); A History of Modern Palestine; One Land, Two Peoples (2006, 2010); The Modern Middle East (2006, 2010, 2014); The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (2014) andOn Palestine (with Noam Chomsky, 2015). His most recent book is an edited collection, Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid.

Pappé is one of Israel’s so-called New Historians who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948, and the corresponding expulsion or flight of 700,000 Palestinians in the same year. He has written that the expulsions were not decided on an ad hoc basis, as other historians have argued, but rather constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, in accordance with Plan Dalet, drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders.