The Impossible Creation Of A Palestinian State As Facts Show

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

Back 39 years ago in 1984, Joan Peters nee Friedman b: 1936 copyrighted her book, From Time Immemorial,  which was about the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine.  Joan was also a Former CBS news documentary producer and author.  She died at the age of 76 in 2015.  

Friedman is a Jewish surname.  I match 25 Friedmans of DNA on FTDNA with 3 of them being 3rd to 5th cousins and may have more on the 2nd page.  So Joan may have been of a Jewish family;  Her 2nd husband, Stanley Kaplan, was Jewish and died.  That may have speeded up her interest, but had nothing to do with finding the facts.  She remarried William Caro, and Caro is a Jewish name-Joseph Caro who had a yeshiva in Safed, Israel born in 1488.  

 She became "fascinated by the Middle East while covering the Yom Kippur War as a freelancer for CBS in 1973".From the information she was picking up from her co-workers and friends, the nasty Jews were taking advantage of the poor Arabs by creating their own country, Israel, out of the land of Palestine.  Wasn't that an Arab country to start with?  So she, being an outstanding newspaper reporter who actually got down into original works, researched, starting off by thinking she was going to prove and uphold the Arab position and rights.                                     

 It's wasn't long until she found how wrong she had been.  She switched her thinking, realizing that the Jews did have the right to their land.  The pocket-book I have is 412 pages long, no pictures, and then gives us 188 more page to page 613 of  notes and a bibliography. 

The entire Arab-Israeli conflict is based on a narrative fabricated by the Arabs that they had lived in Palestine from “time immemorial” until, in the 20th century, Jews from Europe invaded Palestine and drove them out, creating the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

 She came across a remark Winston Churchill made in 1939, challenging the common notion that Jewish immigration into Palestine had uprooted its Arab residents. To the contrary, according to him, “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population.”  1939 was the year Germany invaded Poland and started WWII.  Anti-Semitism in Germany was at its worst.  

A 1984 review of her book by Daniel Pipes analyzed the strength of her research: “Making use of work done by Kemal Karpat in the Ottoman records, Miss Peters ascertains the non-Jewish population in 1893 of the area that would later form Palestine under the British Mandate.                                    

Kemal Karpat was a Romanian-Turkish naturalised American historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who worked on Turkish history.  Daniel Pipes is now working on a book about Israel and said,

 "That a just resolution of the conflict requires the Palestinians to lose hope. Only when they give up their war goal of eliminating Israel will the conflict come to an end. Israel must win and the Palestinians must lose.

Peter's book was the first major study that documented how the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, perpetuates the refugee status of Arabs who were displaced, or left voluntarily, in the wake of the 1948 War of Independence.

In From Time Immemorial (1984), she argued that Palestinians are largely not indigenous to modern Israel and therefore have no claim to its territory. 

She won the National Jewish Book Award in 1985.  

Critics against her book are:

A lot of people who were outraged by facts!  She only wrote facts, not suppositions.  

Norman Finkelstein b: 1953, received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University.   It was a true academic achievement that Norman Finkelstein who was Jewish,  bashed.  Evidently today's academics like him hadn't thought of actually reading original statements for proof.

 Noam Chomsky (b:1928) also Jewish,  was just as bad.  He would not listen to a word of proof in defense of Israel.  

  Chomsky's latest rant claims that bin Laden was not complicit in the attacks of 9/11 and that Bush's sins were worse than those of the al-Qaida ringleader.  Like Finkelstein, Chomsky was also Jewish. Two Jewish PhDs who not only bashed Israel but Joan Peters as well.   Chomsky wrote many books against Israel but his PhD was in Linguistics.  Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955.  Chomsky is known for promoting apartheid accusations about Israel.  The author of dozens of books, including most recently the upcoming Hopes and Prospects, Chomsky spoke at the invitation of the BU student group Students for Justice in Palestine as part of the University’s first-time participation in Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), a series of events held in cities and campuses across the globe.  

The book, a best-seller, became controversial. Scholars and writers such as Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said-Palestinian, Yehoshua Porath- He specialized in the history of Palestinian nationalism.  

 

                                                   Then Ian and David Gilmour criticized it, who only had opinions. David Jon Gilmour CBE is an English guitarist, singer, songwriter, and member of the rock band Pink Floyd. He joined as guitarist and co-lead vocalist in 1967, shortly before the departure of founding member Syd Barrett.  Ian Hedworth John Little Gilmour, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar, PC was a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom. He was styled Sir Ian Gilmour, 3rd Baronet from 1977, having succeeded to his father's baronetcy, until he became a life peer in 1992.  So the Gilmours are part of the British who have been against Israel all along since the 30 year mandate the British had to rule over Palestine until 1948.  They represent the masses that judge by hearsay with prejudice, not by facts.  

Admirers of her book are: 

New York Times Book Review:  The massive research Ms. Peters did...would have daunted Hercules.  In the course of it she turned up a great deal of interesting material from Ottoman recores, the reports of Western consular officers and observant travelers and other sources.

Washington Post Book World:  A remarkable document in itself...The refugees are not the problem but the excuse.  

New Republic:  This book, if read, will change the mind of our generation.  If understood, it could also affect the history of the future.  

Christian Century:  The most thoroughly researched and solidly documented work on the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict...A book that smashes conventional wisdom...Unassailable in its thoroughness...It all makes a totally fresh impact.  

Theodore H. White said that it was a superlative book.  to understand what is happening in the Middle East, one must begin with its past, which Miss Peters traces to the present with unmatched skill."Theodore Harold White  May 6, 1915 – May 15, 1986) born in Dorchester, Boston. His father, David White, was a lawyer. He was raised Jewish. Theodore was an American political journalist and historian, known for his reporting from China during World War II and the Making of the President series.White started his career reporting for Time magazine from wartime China in the 1940s. He was the first foreigner to report on the Chinese famine of 1942–43 and helped to catch international attention to the shortcomings of the Nationalist government.

Palestinian school children chant slogans and raise the victory gesture over a UN flag during a protest at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school, financed by US aid, in the Arroub refugee camp near Hebron in the West Bank on September 5, 2018. (AFP PHOTO / HAZEM BADER)  In April 2021, the US sent $150 million dollars to UNRWA formally restoring aid to the Palestinians.  Biden was quietly ramping up funding to Palestinians; has long said he would reverse freeze put in place by Trump.

Only a year after the publication of From Time Immemorial, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in December 1985 that rejected any efforts to require UNRWA to help Arab refugees engage in resettlement and rehabilitation.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Peters wrote for magazines such as Harper's, Commentary, The New Republic, and The New Leader, was a consultant in the creation of CBS news documentaries in 1973 about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and provided commentary on the subject for PBS. 

Her dedication to the cause of Israel may have been triggered by a visit in the 1970s to the Soviet Union, where officials treated her and her husband with suspicion.

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_H._White

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/joan-peters-a-eulogy-to-an-inspiration-387168

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Peters

https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/jewess-press/impact-women-history/joan-peters-the-myth-of-from-time-immemorial/2015/02/02/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/01/17/joan-peters-journalist-who-wrote-israeli-palestinian-conflict-dies/UC2GsGpLRMeLLGzP8zT1MM/story.html (outrage mentioned) 

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/the-lions-den-daniel-pipes-columns-indepth/path-to-victory-how-israel-can-win-the-palestinian-conflict/2023/01/15/