Students and community members gathered in Ingraham Hall Tuesday night to hear Ilan Pappe offer his view on the current situation in Israel and potential methods for remedying the mutually bloody conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ilan Pappe is a teacher of political science at the University of Haifa in Israel and the academic director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. He gained global notoriety last May when he was nearly fired from the university after allegedly supporting a student who uncovered evidence of an Israeli massacre of Palestinians during Israel’s 1948 war of independence.

Pappe is among a series of speakers brought to campus to offer students information on the current situation between Israel and Palestine, as well as give their ideas on possible solutions to the conflict.

Pappe believes there have been no successful attempts at bringing peace to the Israelis and Palestinians, because those who have attempted to forge it went about it the wrong way.

“The main thrust of peace-making was a business-like approach,” he said. “[They were] looking for visible aspects of the conflict without looking at the situation analytically.”

He believes that if a solution is going to be found, people are going to have to get closer to the root of the problem. According to Pappe, this is a difficult task for an external power like the United States or United Nations, because in order to help, one must be immersed in the culture and history of the region.

“Whoever tried to sell the Palestine question did not want to get entangled with morality, history or culture,” he claimed.

Ayelet Halamish, an Israeli student at UW who attended the speech, thought Pappe had some good ideas. “I think [Pappe] did a good job of identifying some of the issues,” she said. “This is a problem that needs to be solved very soon.”

“I believe that one thing people or Americans don’t realize is that Israel is the only democracy in the Mideast, and the [Palestinians] are trying to get rid of that,” Halamish said. “They want to go back to ninth-century mob rule and keep it that way.”

Both Pappe and Halamish are hopeful that a resolution will arise in the near future. According to Halamish, people all over Israel are afraid to leave their homes. She described a country that once consisted of streets full of friendly people, now a land of empty streets and restaurants.