For one brief shining moment, it looked as if the University of Exeter was going to hold Ilan Pappé accountable for attributing a fake quote to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister.

Those hopes were in vain. Not only did the university’s Ethics Committee fail to hold Pappé accountable for his fabrication, the committee accepted an explanation from the historian that is simply so byzantine and ludicrous that it raises questions about how seriously officials at the University of Exeter take the pursuit of truth and respect for the historical record.

In short, Pappé dug himself deeper into a hole when he responded to a challenge about the fake quote, and the Ethics Committee decided to shack up with the historian in the hole he dug.

Pappé’s shell-game began in 2006 when he reported that in a 1937 letter to his son, David Ben-Gurion declared: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war.”

He reported this quote in two venues – in an article (“The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) published in The Journal of Palestine Studies and in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, published by Oneworld Publications.

There was some confusion about exactly where the quotation marks belonged however. In the original version of the book, the quotes appeared only around the first six words, (“The Arabs will have to go”) but in the journal article, the entire sentence was included in the quotes. In later versions of the book, however, the closing quotation mark migrated to the end of the sentence. (More about this later.)

In November 2006, the now-disgraced journalist Johan Hari used the quote in one of his commentaries at The Independent. This prompted a response from historian Benny Morris who declared in a letter to the editor that the quote was “an invention, pure and simple, either by Hari or by whomever he is quoting (Ilan Pappe?)”

Morris was on solid ground. The quote did not appear in any of the sources that Pappé cited for it in his book, Ethnic Cleansing or the article appearing in The Journal of Palestine Studies.

In all, Pappé listed a total of three sources for the quote, none of which check out.