Joan Peters

This article is about journalist Joan Peters. For the soccer player, see Joanne Peters .

Joan Peters (born April 29, 1936 as Joan Sidney Friedman in Chicago , Illinois ; † January 6, 2015 there ) was an American journalist and author.

Life

Peters graduated from the University of Illinois without a degree and worked as a freelance journalist for magazines such as Harper's Magazine .

Peters has written for CBS , Harper's , Commentary , The New Republic, and The New Leader . She has published numerous publications on Israel and Palestine . She worked as a Middle East expert for the Carter cabinet . Most recently she was a board member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a think tank founded by Hans Morgenthau , among others .

She is best known (especially in the US) by the controversial debate about its 1984 published book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine ( "From time immemorial: the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine"), the the settlement of Palestine by Arabs and Israelis dealt with. It became a bestseller in the US and Israel.

In this book, Joan Peters denies the Palestinians any historical homeland rights . Your book and the assertions and conclusions it contained have repeatedly been used as evidence that the Palestinians are not entitled to their own state. Peters claims that Palestine has either been unpopulated since ancient times or was populated by Israelites and Zionists , while Arabs and Palestinians only immigrated later. Most Palestinians did not enter the country until 1917 - attracted by the economic boom of the growing Jewish community in Palestine. Therefore, they would not have any historical right to the land. This line of argument culminated in the claim that the Palestinians collectively forged records in order to obtain property rights and settlement rights in Palestine. The book received the National Jewish Book Council's National Jewish Book Award in 1985.

Joan Peters died of a stroke on January 5, 2015 in her hometown of Chicago, aged 78 . Her first marriage to Gary Peters ended in divorce. She was married to her second husband, Stanley Kaplan, until his death in 1991. Peters had been married to William Caro since 1997, whose last name she adopted. The burial took place on January 8, 2015 at the Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago.

criticism

In contrast to many positive reviews, in his doctoral thesis , Norman Finkelstein assessed the book From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters as a largely false, only superficially scientific representation of the conditions in Palestine before and after the establishment of the State of Israel. His attempts to publish this assessment as an article in the American media were initially unsuccessful; Finkelstein's article appeared in the small magazine In these Times only after Noam Chomsky's entry . Initially, however, it was not noticed by experts or the press.

It was only after Peters' book was published in Great Britain and Chomsky had made Finkelstein's research known there that the reviewers became aware of him. Now the book From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters received consistently negative reviews, including in the renowned London Review of Books . Even Israeli historians like Yehoshua Porath panned the book as pseudoscience ( pseudo-scholarship ). In the USA, too, the previously positive reviews such as Daniel Pipes were then put into perspective.

Works

• From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine . Harper and Row, 1984 (later edition: JKAP Publications 2001, ISBN 0-9636242-0-2 )

Awards

• 1985: Morris J. Kaplun Award as part of the National Jewish Book Award of the National Jewish Book Council for From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine .

literature

• Norman G. Finkelstein : A Land Without a People: Joan Peters 'Wilderness' Myth , from 'Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict' (picture and reality of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict), pp. 21-50, published 1995 by Verso, New York
• Bill Farell: Joan Peters and the Perversion of History . Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Fall 1984), pp. 126-134 ( JSTOR )
• Edward W. Said : The Joan Peters Case . Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter 1986), pp. 144-150 ( JSTOR )

Web links

• Website about Joan Peters
• Audio files by Joan Peters (The Tovia Singer Show)
• Daniel Pipes : From Time Immemorial - Original Review from 1984 and the Revised Review from 1986 and later additions
• Paul Blair: From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine - summary description of the criticism

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Daniel E. Slotnick: Joan Peters, Journalist Who Wrote on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Dies at 78. Obituary in The New York Times, January 12, 2015 (accessed January 13, 2015).
2. ↑ David Bedein: A eulogy to an inspiration, Joan Peters , The Jerusalem Post, January 7, 2015
3. ^ David Remnick: Newt, The Jews and an "Invented" People , The New Yorker , December 11, 2011
4. ↑ NJBA NJBA Winners ( memento of the original from September 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at jewishbookcouncil.org, accessed February 3, 2015.