Do We Wish That It Fail?

The "it" is Ilan Pappe's attempt at an experiment.

From A Shared History, a Different Conclusion

...Ilan Pappe, one of the revisionist scholars known in Israel as the "new historians,"...is virtually alone among Jewish Israelis in blaming the Zionist project to create a Jewish state in the Arab Middle East for the lack of peace.

"Zionism is far more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam," Pappe says.

...What Pappe calls his "journey to the margins and beyond" began at Oxford University,..."My research debunked all of the lessons about Israel's creation that I had been raised on," Pappe says.

In his view, Israeli professors were not criticizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land with the same stridency in academic conferences abroad as they did in the op-ed pages back home. He increasingly believed that land included all of Israel, not just the territories Israel seized in the 1967 Middle East War.

In 1996, Pappe joined Hadash, the mostly Arab anti-Zionist communist party and ran unsuccessfully for parliament. His work two years later organizing campus events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of "the catastrophe," as Palestinians call the 1948-49 war, placed him at odds with the university's politically powerful Land of Israel Studies department.

Relatives stopped speaking to him over his rejection of the Jewish state in the dedication of his 2003 book, "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples." He dedicated it to his sons: "may they live not only in a modern Palestine but in a peaceful one."

..."That strengthened my conviction that I have very little to do here anymore," said Pappe, whose most recent book is titled "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."

He has accepted a post at the University of Exeter in England and will move there later this year.

"It will be an attempt to see if one can live outside this place," Pappe says.

This is a tricky one.

Do we wish his experiment of living outside of Israel fail?

Do we still have a Zionist hope that once in exile he will pine or at least have another take of Jewish nationalism?

Between you and me, my answer is naw.

But, עוד לא אבדה תקותנו, translated: Our Hope as Yet Been Lost.