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From Time Immemorial

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Front cover of From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine

From Time Immemorial is an 1984 book by Joan Peters arguing that Jews had lived in and around Palestine since the dawn of recorded history. She argues against the idea that 20th century Jewish immigration pushed out indigenous Arabs, but claims that the growth of the Arab population in the region was largely due to immigration.

This is one of the most controversial books on Middle East history.

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.

Assessments

The book was controversial from the time of its publication and remains so. Despite an initially warm reaction by prominent US reviewers, including those from the New York Times and the Washington Post, the book was slammed by commentators in the UK who focused on its inaccuracies and biased viewpoint. Their attention, anticipation and suspicion of the warmly received book had been sharpened by Norman Finkelstein who had prepared what he believed were the main sources of the book’s inaccuracies and lies and presented it to them.

By around 1986, there was a wide consensus of opinion amongst leading reviewers in the UK (including those from The London Times and the Observer) who had extensively researched the book, that many of the book's sources were spurious and its claims little more than propaganda. The broad based attack on the book coupled with the in depth analysis and rebuttal of its claims, led to backtracking by many of those who had lauded the work, such as Anthony Lewis and Ronald Saunders. Saunders was moved to state:

“As I wrote in my review of the book in [t]he New Republic of April 23, 1984, ‘many of its valuable points are buried in passages of furious argumentative overkill,’ and too much of its more than 600 pages is given over to very conventional polemics. Since then, some patient researchers have found numerous examples of sloppiness in her scholarship and an occasional tendency not to grasp the correct meaning of a context from which she has extracted a quotation. All in all, her book is marked -- and marred -- by an over-eagerness to score a huge and definitive polemical triumph, which has caused her too often to leave prudence and responsibility behind.”

Erstwhile the book continued to draw stinging criticism. Reviewing the book for the January 16 1986 issue of The New York Review of Books, Yehoshua Porath, an 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 leftist 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 neoconservative American Middle East author Daniel Pipes expressed a more favourable 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."

The book continues to attract attention. Recently Capitalism Magazine contained an extensive review of the book, outlining the following:

“From Time Immemorial is work of propaganda, with all the bad connotations that term carries. Peters’[s] case rests upon distortion and fabrication. Time and again, she misconstrues sources in a tendentious manner. She cribs uncritically from partisan works. She conceals crucial calculations, and draws hard conclusions from tenuous evidence. She speculates wildly and without ground. She exaggerates figures and selects numbers to suit her thesis. She adduces evidence that in no way supports her claims, sometimes even omitting ‘inconvenient’ portions of the citation. She invents contradictions in sources she wishes to discredit by quoting them out of context. She ‘forgets’ undesirable numbers in her calculations. She ignores sources that cast doubt on her conclusions, even when she herself uses those sources for other purposes. She makes baseless insinuations and misleading claims. “

Many prominent right wing political commentators and politicians still continue to promote it, whereas academic historians of Palestine have almost unanimously ignored or dismissed it.

External links

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