Ilan Pappe: The problem in Palestine was never religion, it was and is toxic ideology

A Middle East Eye interview with a summary by Vanessa Beeley who says:  “Excellent interview with Ilan Pappe. Well worth listening to the entire interview.”

Important excerpt:

“Zionism was first an Evangelical Christian project before it was a Jewish one.

There is a connection between their perceptions of an Armageddon, or a doomsday scenario, and the messianic Jewish perception of such a vision, a different version of it.

The problem in Palestine was never religion. The problem was…it is a group of settlers with an ideology that its main impulse was to dispossess the indigenous people, a displacement and replacement project that got the support of the West for various reasons.

And the people there resist this project. The Palestinians are Christians and Muslims, there used to be also Jews. Like any other normal people, they don’t agree with the idea that they should be displaced and dispossessed. And they resisted.

In Israel, Zionism was a very secular movement. But its project of taking over Palestine and dispossessing the Palestinians was not fully working. So now you have people saying we’ll be more religious and complete the project: getting rid of all of the Palestinians and create a Jewish state from the river to the sea.

The interaction with religions is important to analyze, but the core problem was not religions, the core problem was that the kind of religion we had in Palestine before 1948, three different religious groups coexisted. That was disrupted by a settler movement supported by Western Imperialism.”

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