DISPATCH FROM THE MIDDLE EAST— A Conversation with Ilan Pappe, by Don Atapattu. Israeli academic Ilan Pappe first came to prominence in the 1980s as a member of Israel's ‘New Historian’ movement that chronicled the war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians in the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948. The author of several books critical of ‘heroic’ myths of Zionist history, he teaches Political Science at Haifa University, and is the Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. A committed advocate of Palestinian rights, he has called for Israel to be internationally ostracised in the same way pressure was applied to apartheid-era South Africa, and has been reviled by the right-wing Zionist periodical FrontPage magazine as ‘the most hated Israeli in Israel’. In 2002 he was put on investigation by his own university for his support of a post graduate student who uncovered the Tantura massacre of Palestinians in 1948; but refused to co-operate denouncing it as a ‘show trial’ and a ‘McCarthyist charade’. The charges were later dropped. His latest book is 2003’s ‘A History of Modern Palestine’, of which he is currently writing a second edition.

The Myth-Makers of Estonia | By ALEVTINA REA | The weather broadcast notwithstanding, the end of April 2007 is definitely a hot spring season for Estonia's high political echelons as well as for people in Tallinn. On the night of April 27, 2007, throngs of people who protested the removal of the Soviet-era monument witnessed the dismantling of the post-WWII-era memorial to a Soldier-Liberator, commonly called the Bronze Soldier. Excavation of the remains of 13 Soviet soldiers buried under the memorial and their relocation were supposed to follow shortly. There are rumors that the monument was cut into pieces and taken to an unknown destination. [READ ON]