@tootbrute @appassionato @palestine @bookstodon

Your question would more correct like this:

What does Israel want us not to know?

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What they like to hide, to relativize, to put up as "disputable" or controversy instead of blunt cruelty?
A common practice by Israelis is also to state how bad Jews are/were treated in other countries at different times, quasi to justify their ongoing genocide in Israel.

@tootbrute @appassionato

In this particular case, Pappé's books are legal to display in Israel itself but not in the Netherlands. This is a weird case where the Netherlands is being more anti-Palestinian than Israel is.

As such, one might ask: what doesn't the Netherlands want people to know?

My guess is that it's to do with colonialism. Dutch teachers don't teach Dutch kids about the slavery and mass murder of the colonial era. They give them only a very sanitised version of what happened in Indonesia, and so those Dutch kids grow into Dutch adults who aren't able to have a meaningful conversation about their state's place in history. Israel, as an eighteenth-century-style colonial state in the modern era, makes that sanitisation more difficult. People look at it and think, wow, were we also like that during what our history books describe as our golden age?

There are probably other reasons too: the desire to other the history of Dutch antisemitism and Nazi collaboration, for example, or the modern dehumanisation of climate refugees requiring an acceptance of barbed wire put up by white people to murder brown people.

The point is, this is the Dutch. When Dutch people ban the display of a Jewish historian's books, that's not on Israel, that's on the Netherlands.