From Time Immemorial (book)

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a controversial book by Joan Peters published in 1984.

Peters argues in her book that a large portion of Palestine's 1948 non-Jewish population were recent immigrants from adjacent Arab states.

"Much of Mrs. Peters's book argues that at the same time that Jewish immigration to Palestine was rising, Arab immigration to the parts of Palestine where Jews had settled also increased. Therefore, in her view, the Arab claim that an indigenous Arab population was displaced by Jewish immigrants must be false, since many Arabs only arrived with the Jews." [1]

Peters concludes therefore that many of the "refugees" from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war were not native Palestinians, although she does not claim that these non-native persons represented a majority of the refugees.

Assessments

The book was controversial from the time of its publication and remains so. Many prominent right wing political commentators and politicians continue to promote it, but academic historians of Palestine have almost unanimously ignored or dismissed it.

Reviewing the book for the January 16, 1986 issue of The New York Review of Books, Yehoshua Porath, a prominent Israeli scholar in the field of Palestinian history wrote that Peters made "highly tendentious use — or neglect — of the available source material". But more crucially, he wrote, "is her misunderstanding of basic historical processes and her failure to appreciate the central importance of natural population increase as compared to migratory movements." Porath concluded:

"Readers of her book should be warned not to accept its factual claims without checking their sources. Judging by the interest that the book aroused and the prestige of some who have endorsed it, I thought it would present some new interpretation of the historical facts. I found none. Everyone familiar with the writing of the extreme nationalists of Zeev Jabotinsky's Revisionist party (the forerunner of the Herut party) would immediately recognize the tired and discredited arguments in Mrs. Peters's book. I had mistakenly thought them long forgotten. It is a pity that they have been given new life." [2]

The left wing critic and author Norman Finkelstein also dismissed the book by arguing in his book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict that much of Peters' scholarship was fraudulent. From Time Immemorial later became the central issue in the Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair.

The conservative American Middle East historian Daniel Pipes expressed a more favorable, yet nuanced opinion, stating:

"From Time Immemorial quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts. Much of the book is irrelevant to Miss Peters's central thesis. The author's linguistic and scholarly abilities are open to question. Excessive use of quotation marks, eccentric footnotes, and a polemical, somewhat hysterical undertone mar the book. In short, From Time Immemorial stands out as an appallingly crafted book."

"Granting all this, the fact remains that the book presents a thesis that neither Professor Porath nor any other reviewer has so far succeeded in refuting. Miss Peters's central thesis is that a substantial immigration of Arabs to Palestine took place during the first half of the twentieth century. She supports this argument with an array of demographic statistics and contemporary accounts, the bulk of which have not been questioned by any reviewer, including Professor Porath."

External links

• Noam Chomsky on the book
• A critical book review by John P. Richardson (May 27, 1985)
• An exchange about the book between Daniel Pipes, Ronald Sanders and Yehoshua Porath (March 27, 1986)
• A critical article addressing the Christian aspect by Robert L. Wilken (somewhere between July 30 and August 6, 1986)
• A critical, extremely detailed analysis consisting of 6 parts by Paul Blair (April 16 – April 20, 2002)
• Positive Review of the book
• Positive review of the book with critical aspects
• Assorted excerpts from the book
• Short Biography on Peters by Lecture Agency
• Positive Review of the book