Ilan Pappé

Ilan Pappé was born in 1954 in Haifa

Pappé was born in Haifa in 1954. His parents were German Jews who fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s. He studied in the Oriental studies track of the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa.

He earned a BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1978. He then completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1984, supervised by Albert Hourani and Roger Owen. His thesis became his first book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

From 1984 he taught at the University of Haifa in Middle Eastern history and political science. He headed the peace research institute at Givat Haviva from 1993 to 2000 and chaired the Emil Touma Institute. His books include The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which argues that the 1948 departure of Palestinian refugees resulted from a deliberate expulsion policy.

He was a Hadash candidate in the Knesset elections and supports the BDS movement, including an academic boycott of Israel. He publicly defended Teddy Katz's disputed thesis on events at Tantura in 1948.

After the University of Haifa president called for his resignation over his boycott support, he left Israel in 2007 for the University of Exeter. There he became a professor of history and has directed the European Centre for Palestine Studies since 2009.