Ilan Pappé 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, and was a candidate on the party list in the 1996 and 1999 Israeli legislative elections.
Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1954. He is one of Israel's New Historians; since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, 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. Prior to coming to the United Kingdom, 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 (2006), The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988). 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.