From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a controversial book by Joan Peters written 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]
She concludes therefore that many of the "refugees" from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war were not native Palestinians, but even she cannot claim that they constituted a majority.
As a result of many critiques, including that of the pre-eminent scholar in the field of Palestinian history, the book is considered discredited in mainstream opinion, though it is still respected and referred to in conservative circles.
Reviewing the book for the January 16, 1986 issue of The New York Review of Books, Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath claimed Peters made "highly tendentious use — or neglect — of the available source material". But more crucially, she 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. [1]
The conservative Jewish-American author and critic
Daniel Pipes, on the other hand, states that although some errors were made in the research,
- they do not diminish the importance of the facts presented. Despite its drawbacks, From Time Immemorial contains a wealth of information, which is well worth the effort to uncover.
The leftwing 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.
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