The Idea of Israel

Ilan Pappe

ISBN 10: 1836740409 / ISBN 13: 9781836740407

Published by Verso Books, GB, 2025

About this Item

Ilan Pappe's pioneering work, first published in 2014, is a devastating critique of the conceptual foundations of the Israeli state. Divorced from material and political realities, blind to the violent occupation of Palestine, Israel as an idea has been commodified and marketed across the Western world. Now published with a new preface, The Idea of Israel remains a powerful intervention in the struggle to reclaim the past and shape the future in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781836740407

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Idea of Israel
• Publisher: Verso Books, GB
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1836740409
• ISBN 13: 9781836740407
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 400 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has drawn on Zionism, the movement behind its creation, to provide a sense of self and political direction. In this groundbreaking new work, Ilan Pappe looks at the continued role of Zionist ideology. The Idea of Israel considers the way Zionism operates outside of the government and military in areas such as the country’s education system, media, and cinema, and the uses that are made of the Holocaust in supporting the state’s ideological structure.

In particular, Pappe examines the way successive generations of historians have framed the
1948 conflict as a liberation campaign, creating a foundation myth that went unquestioned in Israeli society until the 1990s. Pappe himself was part of the post-Zionist movement that arose then. He was attacked and received death threats as he exposed the truth about how Palestinians have been treated and the gruesome structure that links the production of knowledge to the exercise of power. The Idea of Israel is a powerful and urgent intervention in the war of ideas concerning the past, and the future, of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.

About the Author

Ilan Pappe is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His many books include The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Gaza in Crisis (with Noam Chomsky). He writes for, among others, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.