Ilan Pappé was born 7 November 1954 in Haifa, to a family of Ashkenazi Jews. His parents were German Jews who had fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s. He is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. Pappé was also a board member of the Israeli political party Hadash.
He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts . He then moved to England to study history at the University of Oxford, completing a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984. His doctoral thesis was titled "British foreign policy towards the Middle East, 1948-1951: Britain and the Arab-Israeli conflict". This became his first book " Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict".
Pappé is one of Israel's New Historians. He has written extensively on the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight. Pappé's work makes the case that the expulsions were the result of a systematic ethnic cleansing, for which Plan Dalet served as a blueprint. He was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984–2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000–2008). He left Israel in 2008 after being condemned in the Knesset and receiving several death threats.
He is the author of Ten Myths About Israel (2017), The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld 2006), The Modern Middle East (Routledge 2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988), The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (Yale), The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (Verso) and with Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians (Penguin). He writes for, among others, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.
With regard to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Pappé supports a one-state solution, advocating for a unitary state for both Palestinians and Israelis. As a critic of Israel, he has called for an international boycott of Israeli academics.
