The origins Of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine--Part 3.

 Nadene Goldfoot                                       

I can't recommend this book, From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters enough.  According to Peters, most people who call themselves Palestinians are not actually Palestinians, but instead descendants of recent immigrants from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, who came to the land in waves of immigration starting in the 19th century and continuing through the period of the British Mandate. She argues that what is referred to as the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight was not ethnic cleansing, but actually a population exchange that resulted from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. I remember reading that Joan went to the source;  not to what someone had said about something....She knew how to dig for the truth and took her time in doing so.  

When the book came out in the US in 1984, it was initially lauded by American writers and public figures including Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Bernard Lewis, Martin Peretz, Alan Dershowitz, and others. It was—and still is, for some—held as "totemic" on the Jewish right.    The USA President was also impressed with the book.  

Joan Peters (née Friedman; April 29, 1936 – January 5, 2015), later Caro, was a Jewish American journalist and broadcaster. She wrote the 1984 book From Time Immemorial, that became a controversial book that claimed that some of the modern Palestinian people were not indigenous to Palestine.  Peters was born in Chicago. She studied at the University of Illinois without earning a degree and became a freelance writer for publications like Harper's. She became "fascinated by the Middle East while covering the Yom Kippur War as a freelancer for CBS in 1973."

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

 When it came out in the UK in 1985, it was met with a more hostile response, receiving critical reviews from publications such as the London Review of Books.When Peters’s book was published in the UK in 1985, it received a much more hostile response.  For example, in the London Review of Books, Ian Gilmour, a Conservative who served in the Heath and Thatcher governments, along with his son David, savaged the book in great detail.  The New York Review of Books then gave space to Israeli history Professor Yehoshua Porath’s extremely critical review.  Soon, even some of Peters’s American supporters were distancing themselves.  For instance, Daniel Pipes, who had given the book a positive review in Commentary, now felt compelled to admit that the book had serious flaws –“From Time Immemorial quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts. . .  The author’s linguistic and scholarly abilities are open to question. . .  In short, From Time Immemorial stands out as an appallingly crafted book.”  (He should have added:  “Sorry I forgot to mention that in my original review.”)  How the leader follows the sheep.....afraid of losing friends.....

The book became controversial and its central claims were discredited by reputable scholars shortly after its publication. Look at who the scholars and writers across the political spectrum were that criticized it, including Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Yehoshua Porath, Ian Gilmour, and David Gilmour; all people against Israel.   Norman Finkelstein was so bad that Israel did not want him back in the country !!!  Norman Finkelstein was deported and banned from entering Israel for 10 years by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, in May 2008. The ban expired in 2018, but he remains a highly controversial figure and effectively excluded due to persistent security and political scrutiny.                               

I've personally had email conversations with Chomsky and he was deplorable;  evaded questions, etc, would or could not debate the question. 

                                                      

Peters’s thesis, simply stated, is that prior to massive immigration of European Jews to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the land was mostly barren and under-populated.  The newly arrived Jews brought great prosperity which attracted a large number of Arabs from neighboring lands who then moved to Palestine to share in the fruit of Jewish ingenuity and wealth.  As a result, many of the people who call themselves Palestinians today are descendants of these relatively recent economic immigrants, and their displacement at the time of Israel’s creation is much fairer, or at least much less unfair, than Palestinians and their supporters claim.

The book proved to be a godsend, particularly for those Zionists who were slightly troubled by the possibility that the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine might have been disadvantaged by the Zionist project of creating a Jewish State on their land.  Whatever minimal discomfort their consciences gave them could now be put to rest entirely, and their ideological adversaries who complained of forcible displacement and exile would be battered by the intellectual clarity of a 600-page heavily-footnoted scholarly tome.  “Palestinians,” who could now appear in quotation marks, were not victims of Zionism, but only nomads who recently had been squatting on Jewish land  then wanting to copy them, somehow.  

                                               Goldberg

                                                         

                                            Peretz

The book was also praised by Arthur J. Goldberg (Arthur Joseph Goldberg (August 8, 1908 – January 19, 1990) was an American politician and jurist who served as the 9th US Secretary of Labor) and Martin Peretz,(Martin Peretz received his BA from Brandeis University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University, where he continued on as a teacher in, and later chairman of, the Social Studies program. In 1974, he bought the New Republic, acting as publisher and editor-in-chief for over thirty-five years.Peretz grew up in New York City. Both of his parents were Zionists, but not religious Jews. He is a descendant of the Polish-Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz.

Under his stewardship, the New Republic won numerous National Magazine Awards. Peretz has received honorary degrees from Bard College, Hebrew College, Hebrew Union College, Coe College, Long Island University, Brandeis, the Chicago Theological Seminary, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the winner of the W. E. B Du Bois Medal, awarded by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, and the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize.   who said: "If (the book is) read, it will change the mind of our generation." Peretz suggested that there was not a single factual error in the book. Walter Reich wrote on the book "fresh and powerful ... an original analysis as well as a synoptic view of a little-known but important human story".

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is the American president famously known for favorably reading Joan Peters' book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict over Palestine. Clinton reportedly read and appreciated the book around the time of its release in the 1980s, before he assumed the presidency.