COMMENTARY
July 1984 Middle East
From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters
Joan Peters began this book planning to write about the Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948-49, when armies of the…
by Daniel Pipes
Refugees?
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. by Joan Peters. Harper & Row. 601 pp. $24.95.
Joan Peters began this book planning to write about the Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948-49, when armies of the Arab states attempted to destroy the fledgling state of Israel. In the course of research on this subject, she came across a "seemingly casual" discrepancy between the standard definition of a refugee and the definition used for the Palestinian Arabs. In other cases, a refugee is someone forced to leave a permanent or habitual home. In this case, however, it is someone who had lived in Palestine for just two years before the flight that began in 1948.
This discrepancy made little impression on her at first, Miss Peters recounts. But as she continued, the anomaly of the Palestinians "began to nag and unravel" the outline of her book. Why a separate definition for the Palestinians? What was it about them that had to be incorporated in the official description of eligibility for refugee status? Reading historical materials about Palestine in the years before 1948, Miss Peters came across a statement by Winston Churchill that she says opened her eyes to the situation in Palestine. In 1939 Churchill challenged the common notion that Jewish immigration into Palestine had uprooted its Arab residents. To the contrary, according to him, "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."
Arabs crowded into Palestine? As Miss Peters pursued this angle she found a fund of obscure information that confirmed Churchill's observation. Drawing on census statistics and a great number of contemporary accounts, she pieced together the dimensions of Arab immigration into Palestine before 1948. Although others have noted this phenomenon, she is the first to document it, to attempt to quantify it, and to draw conclusions from it. Her historical detective work has produced startling results which should materially influence the future course of the debate about the Palestinian problem.
Before entering into the statistics and reports Miss Peters uses to put forward her argument, however, I should enter a word of caution about From Time Immemorial. The author is not a historian or someone practiced in writing on politics, and she tends to let her passions carry her away. As a result, the book suffers from chaotic presentation and an excess of partisanship, faults which seriously mar its impact. But 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.
Making use of work done by Kemal Karpat in the Ottoman records, Miss Peters ascertains the non-Jewish population in 1893 of the area that would later form Palestine under the British Mandate. She then divides this area into three parts: one without Jewish settlement, one with light Jewish settlement, and one with heavy Jewish settlement. She compares the non-Jewish population of each of these parts in 1893 and 1947, on the eve of Israel's independence. In the area of no Jewish settlement, the non-Jewish population stood in 1893 at 337,200; in 1947 it was 730,000, a growth of 116 percent. In the area of light Jewish settlement, the non-Jewish population grew in the same period from 38,900 to 110,900 or 185 percent. Finally, in the area of heavy Jewish settlement, the non-Jewish population grew from 92,300 in 1893 to 462,000 in 1947-or 401 percent. From these figures Miss Peters concludes that "the Arab population appears to have increased in direct proportion to the Jewish presence."
The great variance in the figures usually gets obscured because the three regions are lumped together and counted as a single unit. Population in the whole area of Mandatory Palestine grew 178 percent in fifty-four years. This increase can be accounted for through natural reproduction alone; it therefore raises few questions. But 401 percent cannot be explained in this way, much less the vast difference in growth rates among the three divisions.
How, then, to account for the varying rates? By the movement of peoples. Although the Jews alone moved to Palestine for ideological reasons, they were not alone in emigrating there. Arabs joined them in large numbers, from the first aliyah in 1882 to the creation of Israel in 1948. "The Arabs were moving into the very areas where Jewish settlement had preceded them and was luring them." Arab immigration received much less attention because both the Turkish and British administrators (before and after 1917, respectively) took little interest in them. Under the latter, for instance, "there was not even a serious gauge for considering the incidence of Arab immigation into Palestine." The return of Zionists to the land of their ancestors was a topic of nearly universal fascination, both positive and negative. Arabs crossing newly-established and artificial boundaries caught no one's interest.
As a result, officials in Palestine counted only a small percentage of the Arab immigrants. British records for 1934 show only 1,734 non-Jews as legal immigrants and about 3,000 as illegals. Yet, according to a newspaper interview in August 1934 with the governor of the Hauran district in Syria, "In the last few months from 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranese had entered Palestine and settled there." In 1947, British officials had counted only 37,000 Arabs as the aggregate of non-Jewish immigrants in Palestine since 1917-hardly more than had come from one district of Syria in less than one year alone.
Non-Jewish immigrants came from all parts of the Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Transjordan (as Jordan was once known), Saudi Arabia, the Yemens, Egypt, Sudan, and Libya. Thanks to British unconcern, Arab immigrants were generally left alone and allowed to settle in Mandatory Palestine. So many Arabs came, Miss Peters estimates, that "if all those Jews and all those Arabs who arrived in. . . Palestine between 1893 and 1948 had remained, and if they were forced to leave now, a dual exodus of at least equal proportion would in all probability take place. Palestine would be depopulated once again."
Some British administrators complained about the laxness toward Arab immigration, but to little avail. The author devotes sixteen pages to the memoranda sent in the latter part of 1937 by the British consul in Damascus, Colonel Gilbert MacKereth, in which he urges a more effective patrolling of Palestine's borders. MacKereth failed in this because British concern with immigration remained always focused on the Jews.
What took hundreds of thousands of Arabs to Palestine? Economic opportunity. The Zionists brought the skills and resources of Europe. Like other Europeans settling scarcely populated areas in recent times-in Australia, Southern Africa, or the American West-the Jews in Palestine initiated economic activities that created jobs and wealth on a level far beyond that of the indigenous peoples. In response, large numbers of Arabs moved toward the settlers to find employment.
The conventional picture has it that Jewish immigrants bought up Arab properties, forcing the former owners into unemployment. Miss Peters argues exactly the contrary, that the Jews created new opportunities which attracted emigrants from distant places. To the extent that there was unemployment among the Arabs, it was mostly among the recent arrivals.
This reversal of the usual interpretation implies a wholly different way of seeing the Arab position in Mandatory Palestine. As Winston Churchill observed, "It is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery." The data unearthed by Joan Peters indicate that Arabs benefited economically so much by the presence of Jewish settlers from Europe that they traveled hundreds of miles to get closer to them.
In turn, this explains why the definition of a refugee from Palestine in 1948 is a person who lived there for just two years: because many Arab residents in 1948 had immigrated so recently. The usual definition would have cut out a substantial portion of the persons who later claimed to be refugees from Palestine.
Thus, the "Palestinian problem" lacks firm grounding. Many of those who now consider themselves Palestinian refugees were either immigrants themselves before 1948 or the children of immigrants. This historical fact reduces their claim to the land of Israel; it also reinforces the point that the real problem in the Middle East has little to do with Palestinian-Arab rights.
Conspiracy of Praise
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
Edward Said
October 20, 1985
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
Joan Peters' book was published in the spring of 1984. Its jacket was covered with endorsements from Barbara W. Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Angier Biddle Duke, Philip M. Hauser, Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Paul Cowan, Barbara Probst Solomon and Arthur J. Goldberg. Each endorsement testified to the book's immense importance: Tuchman described it as "a historical event in itself," and Bellow modestly stated that "millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians." After eight hardcover printings, Harper and Row has now issued a paperback edition of the book, bearing all these endorsements (minus that of Barbara Probst Solomon) plus a new one from Theodore H. White.
With only two exceptions, From Time Immemorial received favorable reviews in the American press. (Though as we shall see, its reception in Britain and Israel was almost uniformly negative.) Everyone -- except for those two reviewers and Robert Olson, who dismissed the book in American Historical Review -- commented on Peters' astonishingly thorough scholarship and her unprecedented findings. That assessment was made by relative amateurs (Walter Reich in The Atlantic and Timothy Foote in the Washington Post) as well as by seasoned pros (Daniel Pipes in Commentary, Ronald Sanders in The New Republic and John Campbell in the New York Times). The general impression was that Joan Peters had at last done all the work necessary to settle one of the most vexing and persistent problems of the twentieth century. No longer could a scholar or propagandist argue that "the Palestinians" (Peters entitled everyone to enclose the designation of a people in the quotation marks of suspicion) were in fact a real people with a real history in "Palestine." Her book asserted that their national as well as actual existence, and consequently their claims on Israel, were at best suspect and at worst utter fabrication. In other words, From Time Immemorial relieved Israel and its supporters of responsibility for the refugees created by the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, and for the subject people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Although From Time Immemorial is clearly relevant to the contemporary debate about the Middle East in the United States, its peculiar distinction is to present itself as a full-scale history ab origine of the Palestine problem, which ventures to prove that the Palestinians are and have always been propaganda. How that strikes those of us who have memories of communal life in Haifa, Jerusalem, Safad, Jaffa and Nazareth before 1948 I shall leave to the reader's imagination. Peters claims that a careful rereading of demographic evidence shows that the British (and of course "the Arabs") suppressed evidence about the number of illegal Arab immigrants in Palestine before 1948. She argues that most of the 1948 refugees were in reality people who had not come to Palestine until 1946 and who therefore cannot possibly be considered true inhabitants of Palestine "from time immemorial." In any case, she says, their number has always been inflated for propaganda purposes -- a fairly routine Israeli claim in the 1950s and 1960s, now discarded.
As for the tiny handful of "real" Arab inhabitants in "uninhabited" Palestine, they did a lot of what Peters calls "in-migrating," moving from place to place in Palestine, and were therefore little more than nomads. Given the history of Arab hatred of Jews, which Peters rehearses in much detail, she concludes that "the Palestinians" -- who had been attracted by Jewish prosperity to those parts of Palestine from which they were later evicted -- are a trick foisted on Israel and the rest of the gullible world merely to expedite the malevolent designs of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism. Besides, she says, since many Jews expelled from the Arab world came to Israel after 1948, there was, at very least, parity in the movements of dispossessed people in and out of Palestine.
Nor is this all. Peters tells us that her research was carried out in a spirit of sympathy with the Arab refugees, that she visited them in their miserable camps and studied their history, culture and leaders at close range. That protestation was made much of by reviewers who found that it gave her conclusions the credibility of a genuine discovery arrived at by compassionate research. So obviously well-intentioned a person could have been converted only by the factual evidence she has so dutifully unearthed. (Peters does not mention in the body of the text that she wrote an article, "An Exchange of Populations," in the August 1976 issue of Commentary, where her notions about inveterate Arab anti-Semitism are trundled forth, along with the exchange-of-Arabs-for-Jews idea, all in a prose quite free of sympathy for the poor Arab refugees.)
From Time Immemorial bolsters its appearance of legitimacy by including an impressive list of mentors and scholarly authorities, whom Peters thanks profusely. This list of worthies (Peters implies they are virtually her collaborators) includes famous Orientalists like Elie Kedourie, Bernard Lewis and P. J. Vatikiotis. Not one of these men is known for his Arab sympathies, which is probably why not a single one has made any attempt to dissociate himself from her or her ideas even though evidence of her numerous errors and falsifications has been circulating for some time. Besides, their respectability has not been threatened, so why should they bother about so trivial a question as the scholarly truth of Peters' book?
For someone with no academic credentials, and with only the sketchiest foreign policy and press background, Joan Peters has now become something of an authority on Arab-Jewish matters for the media (non-fiction's answer to Leon Uris). Interviews with her dot newspapers and magazines across the country, and she has been a guest on numerous radio and television talk shows. From Time Immemorial has received, according to Peters, "200 to 300" favorable reviews and, in the spring of this year, won a prize in the Jewish Book Council's Israel category.
The two exceptions to this quite extraordinary outpouring of praise were an article in the September 11, 1984 issue of In These Times, by Norman Finkelstein, a graduate student at Princeton University, and a review in the fall 1984 Journal of Palestine Studies by Bill Farrell, a law student at Columbia University. In what I shall now relate, both young men played courageous roles, and if I speak more about Finkelstein it is to note his amazing persistence despite odds that would have deterred almost anyone else. Finkelstein showed that Peters' work was what he called a "hoax": her evidence was unsound in all sorts of ways; her demographic statistics were inconsistent, mathematically impossible, wildly exaggerated; and, most important, in all the cases he was able to check, she either plagiarized Zionist propaganda sources or deliberately tampered with quotations so as to change their meaning entirely. Much of one chapter, for example, is lifted -- mistakes and all -- from Ernst Frankenstein's Justice for My People, published in 1942. In one place illegal Arab immigration is suggested as "at least" 200,000; in another, 370,000; in a third, 1,300,000; in a fourth, 3,700,000. Taking the same approach Farrell came up with similar results. When, for example, Peters quotes from the Hope Simpson Report of 1930, she transforms the phrase "Egyptian labour is being employed in certain individual cases" to "According to that Report, evidence of Arab immigration abounded: 'Egyptian labor is being employed.'" Where the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine (1945-1946) says that in October 1942 "as a matter of emergency" 3,800 laborers were brought into Palestine from Syria and Lebanon, Peters says: "What the official Anglo-American Survey of 1945-1946 definitively disclosed...is that...tens of thousands of 'Arab illegal immigrants' [were] recorded as having been 'brought' into...Palestine." And so on and on.
Since the core of Peters' case was based on a (mis)reading of demographic evidence, both Farrell and Finkelstein took pains to check and recheck her findings, which they found unacceptable. What neither of them noted, however, is that the last census for Palestine was done under British mandate in 1931. No population estimates of twentieth-century Palestine can avoid its findings, which show a vast native Arab majority. Peters totally ignores that census, just as she ignores the authoritative demographic work of Janet Abu-Lughod, Justin McCarthy and others, whose conclusions are diametrically opposed to her own. Instead she relies on Ottoman statistics for the 1890s, compiled by Professor Kemal Karpat of the University of Wisconsin, and on the impressions of a nineteenth-century French traveler, Vital Cuinet. These do little more for her case than add a lot of numbers to what is already a tiresomely shrill text dotted with embarrassing errors, such as the use of medieval historian Maqrizi as an eyewitness source about nineteenth-century Palestine. (To his credit, Bernard Gwertzman noted the book's offensive tone in his review for the New York Times on May 12, 1984.)
Despite undercurrents of suspicion about Peters' book set off by Finkelstein, only two publications have followed up on his evidence and printed anything systematically critical of From Time Immemorial's major points. In the Guardian and The Nation respectively, Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn described what Peters and her ecstatic reviewers were up to, but no one else has paid much attention. At one point, Colin Campbell of the New York Times expressed some enthusiasm for writing an article like the one he had done on the David Abraham case, but then he dropped the matter.
When the book appeared in Britain this spring it received a vastly different set of reviews. It is worth citing a passage from one of those reviews to give some sense of the startling difference between Britain and the United States when it comes to discussion about the Middle East. The Observer assigned From Time Immemorial to Albert Hourani of Oxford University, probably the world's foremost authority on modern Middle Eastern history. Not incidentally, no scholar of stature was granted the privilege of reviewing Peters in the United States, nor was it entrusted to someone not already known for his or her unqualified support for Israel. The single exception to this pattern may be the New York Review of Books, which reportedly assigned From Time Immemorial to Yehoshua Porath, the leading Israeli authority on Palestinian nationalism, an eminent historian and a man known for his moderate views about the Palestinians. To date, however, Porath's article has not appeared, although Robert Silvers has assured me that he hopes the review will run sometime in the future. At any rate, here is the concluding part of Hourani's review in the March 5 issue of the Observer:
Ms. Peters has found, or been provided with, a large number of documents, but most are well-known, and many of them she misunderstands or quotes out of context. She denounced British policy because she believes it broke the promise of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate that Palestine "east and west of the Jordan river" should become a "Jewish homeland." But the Declaration carefully avoided saying that Palestine should become a "Jewish homeland"; and the British decision to set up an Arab princedom in Transjordan, and exclude it from the area in which a Jewish, national home should be created, was in accordance with the terms of the Mandate.
Her argument that enormous numbers of Arabs came illegally into Palestine also has no basis. One of her few pieces of evidence is a statement made by an obscure Syrian official in 1934, that more than 30,000 Syrians had entered Palestine and settled there during a few months. The Permanent Mandates Commission asked a British representative for his opinion of this, and he said it was "grossly exaggerated." Ms. Peters quotes the statement by the Syrian official but not the British reply; on the next page the statement becomes "verified by an official international document"; a little later it has become "hard evidence," in the light of which British statements to the contrary can be dismissed as fallacious. The whole book is written like this: Facts are selected or misunderstood, tortuous and flimsy arguments are expressed in violent and repetitive language. This is a ludicrous and worthless book and the only mildly interesting question it raises is why it comes with praise from two well-known American writers.
In their 8,000-word essay for the London Review of Books, Ian and David Gilmour went painstakingly through From Time Immemorial, recording a huge number of its inconsistencies and falsifications, among them Peters' suppression of the fact that no Jewish leader of note until, and even after, 1948 denied the presence of the native Arab Palestinian majority. The Gilmours note that Peters misleadingly bandies about population figures for "Jewish settled areas" but does not reveal that those areas amounted only to 4 or 5 percent of the whole country, or -- a slightly more subtle tactic -- that figures for Christian Arabs are simply left out. Peters' revival of the canard about the Arabs leaving voluntarily is also dispatched by the Gilmours, as is her ludicrous contention that British policy encouraged Arab immigration into Palestine.
Similar reviews turned up in The Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator (which compared From Time Immemorial with Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes), Time Out and The Sunday Times, although Peters, whose contact with fact seems tentative, has described the British reviews as "excellent." But perhaps the most revealing thing about this strange book was its reception in Israel this past spring. Most notices of the book were perfunctory and dismissive; Davar's full-length review on March 29 treated it with unmistakable contempt. According to the reviewer, From Time Immemorial's main defect was its embarrassing use of discredited Israeli hasbara ("propaganda"). It should be noted that most of Peters' earth-shaking evidence about the non-existent Palestinians had already been used by official and semi-official Israeli information agencies during the 1950s and 1960s, and that it is now quite commonplace for Israeli government representatives to warn against reusing this worthless stuff. One gets the impression that Israel had written the book off when Peters appeared in the country to reap the glory of her personal, uniquely American hasbara effort. Hence, she was kept out of the public eye; she returned to the United States just in time to receive her Israel award in New York.
There are several curious facets to this egregious book. Many passages contain disconnected items all pressed into making the same point. The impression you get is of one team of experts tossing file cards into large folders labeled "Jews, Arab hatred of," or "Palestinians, myths of," and another team pasting them onto more or less consecutive pages. That Peters has nothing to say about the immense amount of Arab, or for that matter Israeli, material on Palestine, all of it easily enough available, is testimony to how narrowly focused, how dry and single-minded, is her effort. During the past five years alone there have been several volumes of original Arab documentation of Palestinian life in Palestine. (Scholars and reviewers interested in assessing Peters' book may also consult two very recent works, Walid Khalidi's fine Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948, and Basheer K. Nijim and Bishara Muammar's Toward the De-Arabization of Palestine-Israel, 1945-1977.) Such works prove that a native Arab community once flourished in Palestine, and that it was not simply the illegal, temporary presence of a small, shifty population of nameless vagrants sneaked in by rascally anti-Semitic British officials acting in cahoots with a worldwide network of Arab fanatics. Peters touches on none of this, nor does she refer to the large bibliography of scholarly Western works on the history of Palestine, many of which give the lie to her preposterous thesis.
Granted that Peters is an inept writer, a bad propagandist and a hopelessly incompetent historian, how is it that virtually no criticism of her work has appeared in the United States? Let us grant also that Harper and Row continues to ignore evidence of her falsifications and plagiarisms. Why do normally competent editors, historians, journalists and intellectuals go along with the fiction that From Time Immemorial is a wonderful work of historical discovery? Peters' factual distortions and innumerable mistakes have been exhaustively documented by Norman Finkelstein, yet no one paid attention to him, no one followed his leads. No one paid the slightest heed to the British reviews, or to those in Israel. Worst of all, no one has demanded that Peters and her supporters respond to the huge list of accusations that her book has collected in the 18 months since it appeared. She still gives interviews to American journalists, cheerfully asserting the complete acceptance of her work.
I speak here less as a Palestinian who wants to keep saying "but we exist and always have and will," than as an American intellectual disgraced by the shoddiness of our present so-called life of the mind. The Peters case is not just a matter of poor work. It is, after all, a case of orchestrated compliance by which the history and actuality of an entire people are consigned to non-existence. Where are all those guardians of intellectual morality who, in a chorus led by the Conor Cruise O'Briens and the Leszek Kolakowskis, whine about Communist and Third World disinformation and propaganda, who stalwartly defend American freedom of expression and healthy debate, who invoke Orwell and denounce totalitarianism? Has it come to this, then: an unconsciously held ideology that permits the most scandalous and disgusting lies -- execrably written, totally disorganized, hysterically asserted -- to pass as genuine scholarship, factual truth, political insight, without any significant challenge, demurral or even polite reservation?
The sad truth is that where discussion of Israel is concerned, the United States is well below Israel itself in norms of truth and methods of debate. Here then is a perfect illustration of Richard Hofstader's "paranoid style" in American political life. This is not, alas, a matter of the left being better than the right. The young progressives who publish Radical History conscientiously avoid discussion of the Palestinians. Those who know better are cowed by the Israeli lobby. It is true that the American-Israeli Political Action Committee has been criticized in the press for its campus campaigns against those who have dared to speak out against Israel or to support Palestinian rights; yet how many deans and faculty members have raised their voices against the censorship and blackmail still applied by AIPAC against "enemies" on the nation's campuses?
To read Peters and her supporters is, for Palestinians, to experience an extended act of ethnocide carried out by pseudo-scholarship. Tom Sawyer attends his own funeral as a kind of lark, whereas we are being threatened with death before being permitted birth. And we are told to stay out of the whole thing. The irony of this occurring in the United States at a time when so many effusions about Middle Eastern peace are perpetually stymied by US and Israeli actions designed to keep Palestinians out should not be difficult to detect. In this way -- democratically -- do intellectuals and the state sychronize their efforts to sweep the small people of this world under the rug.
The one thing I still cannot grasp is how people can be so foolish as to believe From Time Immemorial's contention that the Palestinians are something made up or imaginary, like the unicorn or the tooth fairy. Why do Barbara Tuchman and Saul Bellow, for example, expect that four million of us, scattered everywhere, can be made to repeat the lie of our own existence for 35 years? Do they imagine that all of us get instructions from a central propaganda office? And, toughest question of all, how have we been as successful as Peters implies in uniting most of the Arab, Islamic, Third World, European and Socialist community in our cause if we are no more than a myth? Surely it would have been a lot less trouble for us simply to get a Palestinian state!
Editor's Note: This essay originally appeared in The Nation, October 19, 1985. It is reprinted here with permission of the editors and the author.
DISPUTE FLARES OVER BOOK ON CLAIMS TO PALESTINE
By Colin Campbell
28 November 1985
A dispute has broken out over a year-old book that argues against all Palestinian Arab claims to the land that is now Israel.
The book is "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine," published last year by Harper & Row. The author is Joan Peters, a Chicago writer, and her title is ironic: The thrust of the book's 601 pages is that the Palestinians did not, despite Arab claims, have deep historical roots in the territory that became Israel after 1948.
Many early reviewers described the book as extraordinarily important. Barbara Tuchman in a comment for the dustjacket called it "a historical event in itself." The book, which has recently appeared in paperback, has sold a total of 35,000 copies.
Gradually the book drew critics. Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn and other writers on the Left have called the book slanted and heavily dependent on misquotations. Some relatively nonpolitical scholars of Middle Eastern history later made the same charges.
Census Figures
Miss Peters chose a provocative thesis. At one point in her research, she writes, she glimpsed the possibility that large numbers of Arabs may have entered Palestine only after the Zionists arrived.
At the end of the 19th century, she says - interpreting Ottoman census figures and other sources in unconventional ways - there were about 90,000 Arabs and 60,000 Jews in the areas of Jewish settlement in Palestine. But after Zionist settlers revitalized the economy, Arabs poured in from Syria and Egypt.
The whole "Palestinian" issue, Miss Peters claims, is a "big lie" that has caused "bewildering, squeamish reactions" of "doubt and guilt" among Israel's supporters.
Yehoshua Porath, an Israeli historian of the Palestinian Arabs who teaches at Hebrew University, was asked in a telephone interview from Jerusalem about the book. "I think it's a sheer forgery," he replied.
"In Israel, at least, the book was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon," the historian said. Mr. Porath described his politics as centrist. He has written an essay on the book for The New York Review of Books that will be published soon.
Others who praised the book include Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Arthur J. Goldberg, Theodore H. White, Paul Cowan and Angier Biddle Duke. Philip M. Hauser, a University of Chicago demographer and former director of the United States Census, recommended the book's methods.
Reviewers for Commentary, The National Review, The Atlantic and other journals described the book's themes as revelations. Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, wrote: "This book, if read, will change the mind of our generation. If understood, it could also affect the history of the future."
Writers who have attacked the book, besides Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Cockburn, include: Edward W. Said, professor of English at Columbia and a member of the Palestine National Council, a political body associated with the P.L.O., who wrote in The Nation that Miss Peters was trying to deny the reality of four million Palestinians; Norman G. Finkelstein, a Princeton graduate student who has described dozens of apparent misquotations and misleading statistics from British and other documents; Sir Ian Gilmour, a Conservative Member of Parliament in Britain; Albert Hourani, a historian of the Middle East at Oxford University, and most other British reviewers. Miss Peters condemns Britain for many anti-Jewish actions during the Palestine Mandate.
Mrs. Tuchman, in an angry letter to Sir Ian that was printed last month in The Nation, traced part of the hostility against the book to Britain's "growing anti-Semitism." Mrs. Tuchman said later that she regarded some of the book's American critics as "committed P.L.O. supporters" who were guilty of "the worst kind" of anti-Semitism.
Miss Peters has given several interviews about her book, and her editor, Aaron Asher, says she has many lectures scheduled. But Miss Peters refused, through Mr. Asher, to be interviewed by The New York Times. She gave no reason for her refusal. Miss Peters described herself in the book as having begun her research seven years earlier sympathizing with the Palestinian refugees. Her supporters cite this as a mark of fairness. Some opponents have replied that Miss Peters was distinctly anti-Arab a decade ago: In May 1975, in Commentary, she attacked the idea that there were "moderate Egyptians" who wanted peace with Israel, and in 1976 in Commentary she argued that Jewish refugees from Arab countries amounted to an "exchange" for the Palestinian refugees.
Most demographers say Palestine had a sizable Arab population before Jewish settlers began arriving. On the eve of World War I, Mr. Porath said, citing Ottoman statistics, there were about 600,000 Arabs and 85,000 Jews.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, professor of religion at Dartmouth College and vice president of the World Jewish Congress, said in an interview: "I think that she's cooked the statistics. I think the right-wingers in Israel have an interest in cooking the statistics. The scholarship is phony and tendentious. I do not believe that she has read the Arabic sources that she quotes." Mr. Hertzberg and other detractors say the book's themes have been argued by right-wing Zionists since the 1930's.
Mr. Peretz of The New Republic charged that the "political far left" had attacked Miss Peters to recoup such losses as "the utter disintegration" of the alliance between Palestinian nationalists and the Arab states.
Mrs. Tuchman said she had not kept up with recent scholarship but she retained a vivid sense from research she did 30 years ago that Jewish labor had reclaimed a desolate Palestine, just as Miss Peters argued. The notion of "the Palestinians" was "a fairy tale," Mrs. Tuchman said.
Mr. Hauser, the Chicago demographer, recalled that Miss Peters, a family friend, had asked him to check some calculations and he had done so. He said he had "no competence" in Middle Eastern history.
Saul Bellow declined to comment. Mr. Wiesel, Mr. Duke, Mr. White and several others said they had not followed the controversy.
The New York Review
Mrs. Peters's Palestine
Yehoshua Porath January 16, 1986 issue
Reviewed:
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab--Jewish Conflict Over Palestine
by Joan Peters
Harper and Row, 601 pp., $12.95 (paper)
For centuries the future of the place called Palestine was the subject of a bitter struggle. Even the name was controversial. Where the Arabs transformed the Roman name of Palestine into the Arabian name Filastin, the Jews insisted on the traditional Hebrew name Eretz Israel, "The Land of Israel." Zealots of both sides continue to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the name used by the other side. In the early days of the British Mandate, for instance, the Arabs successfully convinced the British that even in Hebrew the name should be Palestina and not Eretz Israel. The British added the initials "El" to Palestina only over heavy Arab opposition. On the other hand, some Israeli educators of the 1950s wanted only a transliteration of the Hebrew name to appear in the textbooks that were used in the Arabic-speaking schools. Along with armed struggle, ideological and propagandistic warfare of this sort has proliferated in the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine.
One feature of this battle of words and of history writing has been the two contrasting mythologies that the Arabs and the Jews have developed to explain their situations. Like most myths these generally contain some element of plausibility, some grain of historical truth, which through terminological ambiguity is then twisted into a false and grotesque shape: The unfortunate thing about Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial (1984) is that from a position of apparently great learning and research, she attempts to refute the Arab myths merely by substituting the Jewish myths for them. Although she claims to have uncovered facts that show the historical accuracy of the Jewish myths, there have appeared during the last year and a half, in addition to many favorable reviews, a number of articles that dispute her collection and interpretation of this data. I do not propose here to go over the ground that these criticisms have already covered. Rather, I shall discuss both sets of myths in the light of the political and social history of Palestine as it is currently understood.
The New York Review
Mrs. Peters's Palestine: An Exchange
Ronald Sanders and Daniel Pipes, reply by Yehoshua Porath
27 Mar 1986
In response to:
Mrs. Peters's Palestine from the January 16, 1986 issue
To the Editors:
It has become open season on Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, although Yehoshua Porath's review [NYR, January 16] is one of the more restrained of the attacks upon it made in the past fifteen months or so. Mrs. Peters has brought this upon herself to a large extent, for, as I wrote in my review of the book in The 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.
But the fact remains that there is an original and significant argument at the heart of her book, and this has scarcely been dealt with by critics, apart from Mr. Porath, who only weakly challenged it. He writes:
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.
This is a correct summary of her main point, which, as Mr. Porath justly recognizes, stands on very problematical terrain-the demographic history of modern Palestine, a subject that "cannot be summed up briefly," according to Mr. Porath, who adds however that "its main features are clear enough and they are very different from the fanciful description Mrs. Peters gives." But except for mentioning one widely criticized statistic of Mrs. Peters's regarding Palestine demography in the 1890s-with which I shall deal below-Mr. Porath does not go on to demonstrate any significant difference between her view of that history and his own. On the contrary, he joins her in accepting clear indications of what the British Mandatory authorities deemed an "abnormally high (and possibly unprecedented)" rate of increase in the Arab population in modern times. The difference between them lies simply in the reason assigned for this growth. Mr. Porath agrees with the British authorities in attributing it to "natural increase" at a rate greatly accelerated by improvements in health facilities, whereas Mrs. Peters insists it can only be accounted for in full by the immigration factor.
Unfortunately, the British, while keeping thorough records of Jewish immigration, did not keep any for Arabs migrating overland into the country, so Mrs. Peters has had to resort to circumstantial evidence, inference, and deduction to make her case. As Mr. Porath puts it, "she has apparently searched through documents for any statement to the effect that Arabs entered Palestine." And it must be granted that she has achieved ample results, though, of course, the statements she has collected are impressionistic and have no statistical value. Mr. Porath therefore maintains that "even if we put together all the cases she cites, one cannot escape the conclusion that most of the growth of the Palestinian Arab community resulted from a process of natural increase." But he goes no further than this flat assertion of his opinion against hers in challenging Mrs. Peters's main argument.
Yet neither he nor any of the detractors I have read has taken on the most striking of her demonstrations in favor of her case, dealing with the phenomenon she calls "in-migration"-that is, the movement of Arabs from other parts of Palestine into the main areas of Jewish settlement. She shows that in the years 1893 to 1947, while the Palestinian Arab population slightly more than doubled in areas where no Jews were settled, it quintupled in the main areas of Jewish settlement. How can this difference be accounted for without including Arab migration as a factor?
This particular demonstration, it should further be pointed out, is in no way affected by the debate that has arisen over Mrs. Peters's use of a source on Palestinian population in the 1890s that some have found questionable (including Anthony Lewis, in a woeful misparaphrase of the relevant passage, in The New York Times of January 13, 1986). Still, it is worth dwelling on that matter for a moment, since Mrs. Peters's approach to the problem had more merit than her critics have allowed. Pursuing her case back to the earliest significant example for which there was evidence, Mrs. Peters states that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living within the main areas of Jewish settlement, alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000. If correct, these figures would indicate that, as far back as 1893, the Jews not only were already far from being a small minority in the areas where they had settled, but were even-if one divides the non-Jewish population into Muslim and Christian-the largest single group there.
But here is the problem. Whereas her figures for non-Jews in this passage are based on the official Ottoman census of 1893, which is generally considered by scholars to be reliable with certain qualifications, her Jewish population figure does not come from that source-which counts only 9,817 Jews in all of Palestine! Instead, she has turned for her Jewish figure to a French traveler and geographer of that era, Vital Cuinet, whose statistical estimates have undergone some severe scholarly criticism in our own time. Yet Mrs. Peters offers instances in which Cuinet's figures are not far from those of the Ottoman census, and the only serious discrepancy between the two sources regarding the material she uses is in the Jewish population count. Why, then, in this one instance, has she considered it permissible to eschew the Ottoman statistic in making her case?
Obviously because, in this instance, the Ottoman figure is patently absurd. A good deal of responsible, if impressionistic, counting of the Palestine population had been done by that time, and the general consensus among Western observers was that the Jewish population of Jerusalem alone was something more than double that of the official Ottoman figure for the Jewish population of the whole country. But how could such a huge discrepancy have come about? Mrs. Peters offers an explanation, quoted in all fairness by Mr. Porath, that makes a good deal of sense: "The Ottoman Census," she writes, "apparently registered only known Ottoman subjects; since most Jews had failed to obtain Ottoman citizenship…, a representative figure of the Palestinian Jewish population could not be extrapolated from the 1893 census." It is a pity that Mrs. Peters has buried this sound bit of reasoning in an obscure part of her book-as a footnote within an appendix-so that her unheralded switch in the main text from the Ottoman figures to Cuinet's has the look of a suspect sleight-of-hand maneuver, which has therefore generated a good deal of hostility. I can only add in this connection that, even if Cuinet's figure for the Jewish population of Palestine in the mid-1890s is not the last word, it is at any rate much closer to correct than the Ottoman one.
But the only place at which I find Mr. Porath's otherwise fair-minded review descending into the kind of imbalance that has been displayed by Mrs. Peters's more vehement detractors is in his remarks about "references to the Arabs surrounding them everywhere in Palestine" made in the writings of early Zionist settlers. In the first place, Mrs. Peters has not overlooked Asher Druyanov's collection of some of these writings, as Mr. Porath suggests she has: she quotes from it on page 252, with full citation in the end notes. But, what is far more important, Mr. Porath's image of "Arabs surrounding them everywhere" is tendentious. Let me quote two relevant passages from the memoirs of one of those early Zionist settlers, Rachel Yannait Ben-Zvi. Describing her first arrival in Palestine in 1908, she writes of walking through the utterly Arab port town of Jaffa:
The stream of pedestrians pushed us into the main street. Up the street strode a camel, stretching its neck, its nostrils quivering, sniffing, its hump heaving and falling. A Beduin led it on a rope. I felt like greeting the man of the desert because our forefathers had been so like him.
So much for Arab-filled Jaffa and many smaller communities besides. Now here she is a few days later, on the train from Jaffa to Jerusalem, just past the Ramle station:
Desolate stretches of uncultivated fields spread all the way to the horizon, up to the far off Samarian hills visible through a bluish haze. The sight of all the barren ground filled me with a kind of joy-joy that fate had kept the soil of Judea uninhabited and unworked…. In my mind's eye I saw it brought back to life by the hands of Jews returning from far away.
In the light of richly human observations like these, it seems fatuous to depict a Palestine at the turn of the century either empty of Arabs or covered all over with them, depending on the position one takes in the debate about Mrs. Peters's findings.
Ronald Sanders
New York City
To the Editors:
Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial has, broadly speaking, been received in two ways at two times. Early reviews treated her book as a serious contribution to the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict and late ones dismissed it as propaganda. Coming almost two years after the book's publication, Professor Yehoshua Porath's review in your January 16, 1986 issue probably closes the second round. As one of those who reviewed the book when it first appeared-and who was referred to for this reason in Professor Porath's review-I should at this time like to comment on the debate.
The difference between the two rounds is not hard to explain. Most early reviewers, including myself, focused on the substance of Miss Peters's central thesis; the later reviewers, in contrast, emphasized the faults-technical, historical, and literary-in Miss Peters's book.
I would not dispute the existence of those faults. 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.
Nonetheless, Professor Porath dismisses her argument as "fanciful." He says that "the main reason" for Arab population growth is that Arab births remained steady while infant mortality decreased. He concludes that the movement of population was not significant in comparison with natural increase.
Now, there can be no question that improvements in medical conditions contributed to the increase in Arab population. But it is not immediately clear that declining infant mortality was more important than immigration. Professor Porath asserts this but he does not provide the evidence necessary to convince a reader.
The disproof of Miss Peters's thesis requires a detailed inquiry into birth and death records, immigration and emigration registers, employment rolls, nomadic settlement patterns, and so forth. She may be wrong; but this will be proven only when another researcher goes through the evidence and shows that immigration was unimportant. The existence or absence of large-scale Arab immigration to Palestine has nothing to do, of course, with Miss Peters's motives or the obvious short-comings of her book. The facts about population change will not be established by heaping scorn on Miss Peters, only by going back to the archives.
Faulty presentation notwithstanding, Miss Peters's hypothesis is on the table; it is incumbent on her critics to cease the name-calling and make a serious effort to show her wrong by demonstrating that many thousands of Arabs did not emigrate to Palestine in the period under question.
Until such happens, what is one to think? Is there reason to accept Miss Peters's version of events? I believe so: even though From Time Immemorial does not place Arab immigration to Palestine in a historical context, it is not hard to find a rationale for their movement. The Arabs who went to Palestine sought economic opportunity created by the Zionists. As Europeans, the Zionists brought with them to Palestine resources and skills far in advance of anything possessed by the local population. Jews initiated advanced economic activities that created jobs and wealth and drew Arabs. Zionists resembled the British, Germans, and other Europeans of modern times who settled in sparsely populated areas-Australia, southern Africa, or the American West-and then attracted the indigenous people to themselves.
There is really nothing surprising in all this; and because it makes such good sense, I put credence in the argument that substantial numbers of Arabs moved to Palestine. I will adjust my views, of course, should compelling evidence be found to show otherwise. But this will require that Miss Peters's critics go beyond polemics and actually prove her thesis wrong.
Daniel Pipes
Naval War College
Newport, Rhode Island
Yehoshua Porath replies:
In reply to Mr. Sanders, I am sorry to have overlooked the one reference in Mrs. Peters's book to Druyanov's collection. It is, however, characteristic of her to have ignored all the many passages in his two volumes referring to the presence of Arabs living in the areas where Jews had settled.
That is of course a minor point. Much more significant, as Mr. Sanders rightly notes, is Mrs. Peters's demographic argument. I did not want to devote a large part of my review to discussing the 1893 statistics on the numbers of Muslims, Christians, and Jews living in all of Palestine or in the areas where Jews settled. Unlike other reviewers I preferred to argue with Mrs. Peters's basic concepts, explanations, and methods. However, Mr. Sanders's fair-minded letter requires some comment on demographic issues. As he notes, Mrs. Peters's claims about Arabs entering Palestine "are impressionistic, and have no statistical value." Mr. Pipes apparently believes they do but he gives no specific evidence of a "substantial migration of Arabs to Palestine." I will therefore consider what Mr. Sanders calls "the most striking of her demonstrations in favor of her case"-her claim that between 1893 and 1947 the Palestinian Arab population quintupled in the main areas of Jewish settlement, contrary to the statistics in the Ottoman census.
I never claimed, however, that the 1893 Ottoman census figure of the number of Jews living in Palestine (9,817) is correct; nor do I accept that the Ottoman figure for the Muslims (371,959), also cited by Mrs. Peters from an article by K. Karpat,*********1
K. Karpat, "Ottoman population records and the Census of 1881/82-1893," IJMES, Vol. 9 (1978), pp. 237-274. 1 is correct. As all students of Ottoman history know, only after 1909 did the "Young Turks" government begin to draft Christian and Jewish subjects of the Ottoman Empire into the army. Therefore, until that date, it was mainly the Muslims who had good reason not to register their names with the census authorities or, for that matter, with any other official authorities, since registration made them easy prey for the draft officers. The same fear prompted them to avoid the land registers too-with disastrous results for their property rights.
As a result the official Ottoman figure for the Christian population (42,689) looks fairly accurate, whereas the figure for the Muslims is underestimated. The Jews were certainly undercounted in that census, since all the Jewish newcomers were foreign nationals who cherished their privileged status under the capitulatory regime and would have refused to have anything to do with the census authorities.
We do have plausible estimates of the population in Palestine in the very thorough analysis by A. Ruppin of the economy and society of Syria and Palestine on the eve of World War I (Syrien Als Wirtschaftsgebiet, Berlin, 1917 and 1920). Professor Ruppin was an outstanding demographer and sociologist and the head of the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization in Palestine. No one could accuse him of superficial work or of anti-Zionist bias. His figure for the population of all Palestine (the three districts of Acre, Nablus, and Jerusalem) is 689,275, as against 425,802 in the 1893 Ottoman census, the number presented in Karpat's article. Ruppin and all other Jewish sources I am aware of agree that the number of Jews living in Palestine just before World War I was between 80,000 and 85,000.2
See pages 14 and 15 of Ruppin's book and also, for example, Alex Bein, The History of the Zionist Settlement (Tel-Aviv, 1954), pp. 34-35 and Y. Slutsky et al., The History of the Haganah, Vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv, 1960), p. 315 (both in Hebrew).2 That makes the number of non-Jews living in Palestine a little more 600,000, as against the Ottoman census figure of about 415,000.
The main flaw in Mrs. Peters's arguments, which Mr. Sanders seems to accept, is her statement (in Mr. Sanders's words) "that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living in the main area of Jewish settlement; alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000." By 1947, she argues, the number of non-Jews in those areas had quintupled while in other areas of Palestine it only slightly more than doubled. This difference, in her view, can be accounted for only by the factor of Arab migration. But how did Mrs. Peters arrive at the number of the non-Jews in "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine for 1893? Her claim that there were about 92,000 non-Jews is made on page 250 of her book and the reader is referred there for the source to Appendix V. However, in the appendix no source is given. Only in the next appendix devoted to methodology does she claim that she used "Turkish census figures" (p. 427). But in the footnotes to chapters 10-12, where the composition of the Palestine population during the nineteenth century is discussed, no reference is made to the Ottoman archives where Mrs. Peters would, if she had consulted them, have found the returns of the Ottoman censuses of 1893 and 1915 that she uses in Appendix V.
The Ottoman census returns, in fact, were never published. Therefore Mrs. Peters could use them only by referring to a secondary source based on research in the Ottoman archives. And indeed that is the case with the article by Kemal Karpat quoted by Mrs. Peters and cited above. Karpat's figures are given, presumably as they appear in the Ottoman census returns, according to subdistricts (Kaza). It is impossible to ascertain from the figures he cites which of the Ottoman subdistricts of Palestine correspond to what Mrs. Peters defined as "the Jewish-settled areas" of Palestine. But one does find such a characterization of Ottoman subdistricts in the work by Vital Cuinet mentioned in Mr. Sanders's letter. And if one consults Cuinet's book to find where in Palestine, in 1893, 59,431 Jews (the number quoted by Mrs. Peters on page 251 of her book) were living, one finds that exactly the same number is given for the aggregate of Jews living in the seven subdistricts (Kaza) of Acre, Haifa, Tiberias, Safed, Nazareth, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Consequently, we now know precisely what Peters defines as "the Jewish-settled areas"; she is evidently referring to the seven Ottoman subdistricts mentioned by Cuinet.
Now we must consider the number of non-Jews living in those areas. According to Mrs. Peters (again on page 251), and apparently Mr. Sanders accepts her view, they numbered about 92,300, of which nearly 38,000 were Christians (making the number of Muslims about 54,300). But the Ottoman census figures in Karpat's table (pages 262 and 271 of his article) give the number of Muslims as 158,379 and of the Christians as 39,884, making a total number of 198,263 non-Jews in "the Jewish settled areas." If we use Cuinet's own figures we still do not get an estimate of the non-Jewish population that brings us much closer to the number of non-Jews claimed by Mrs. Peters. According to Cuinet's data on the seven Ottoman subdistricts comprising "the Jewish-settled areas" we have 124,686 Muslims and 61,964 Christians, a total of 186,263 non-Jews.
3
V. Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine (Paris,1896),pp. 100, 106, 110, 114, 117, 627, and 663.3
Obviously, these figures are more than double the figure of 92,000 non-Jews given in Mrs. Peters's book. One could argue that the actual area defined by Mrs. Peters as "the Jewish-settled areas" is smaller than the total area covered by the seven subdistricts listed above, and the map published on page 246 of her book indicates such a possibility. But if this were the case, nowhere in her main text or in the methodological appendices (V and VI) did Mrs. Peters bother to explain to her readers how she managed to break down the Ottoman or Cuinet's figures into smaller units than subdistricts. As far as I know no figures for the units smaller than subdistricts (Nahia; the parallel of the French commune), covering the area of Ottoman Palestine, were ever published. Therefore I can't avoid the conclusion that Mrs. Peters's figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that.
I would add that even a superficial glance at Cuinet's figures should make any serious historian recoil from using them. While the official Ottoman figures for the Muslims are underestimated for the reasons I earlier explained, Cuinet's are much more so. As far as his figures for the Christians are concerned, their main flaws are not only their inflated character but also the distortion in the estimates he gives for the various Christian communities. First, Cuinet found hardly any Greek Orthodox Christians living in Palestine (450 in the Haifa subdistrict and 169 in the Jama'in subdistrict of the Nablus district). But by all other accounts, this community was the largest single Christian community living in Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century; indeed, it is still the largest such community in the combined territory of present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza strip.
Secondly, Cuinet claimed that substantial numbers of Syrian Orthodox Christians (about seven thousand) were living throughout Palestine, whereas in fact this Christian community was hardly to be found in Palestine at all. Its only presence in the country was a small monastery in Jerusalem. And thirdly and most absurdly, Cuinet claimed that precisely five thousand Maronites, who amounted to 10 percent of the population of the district, were living in the district of Nablus. But as everyone knows Maronites were to be found in the Middle East only in Mount Lebanon. The only exceptions were a cluster of villages in Cyprus and one village and half a village in the upper-most Galilee in northern Palestine (Bir'am and Jish in Israel of today), a direct extension of the Lebanese stronghold. No Maronites were to be found in the Nablus district and no other writer claimed that they were. Cuinet's mistakes were deliberately made in order to prove that Palestine, as much as Lebanon and Syria, should be put under French protection. His attitude is well known and requires that his material be used with great caution.
Since we are left with no sound basis for Mrs. Peters's figures for the population in the "Jewish-settled areas" in 1893, there is no need to account for the supposed quintupling of the Arab population in those areas by 1947; so dramatic an increase did not take place. It is true nevertheless that during the Mandatory period the Arab population of the coastal area of Palestine grew faster than it did in other areas. But this fact does not necessarily prove an Arab immigration into Palestine took place. More reasonably it confirms the very well-known fact that the coastal area attracted Arab villagers from the mountainous parts of Palestine who preferred the economic opportunities in the fast-growing areas of Jaffa and Haifa to the meager opportunities available in their villages.
The coastal area had several main attractions for the Arab villagers. They found jobs in constructing, and later working in, the port of Haifa, the Iraq Petroleum Company refineries, the railway workshops, and the nascent Arab industries there. They also took part in the large-scale cultivation of the citrus groves between Haifa and Jaffa and found jobs connected with the shipment of citrus fruits from the Jaffa port. Contrary to what Mr. Pipes claims, all these developments had almost nothing to do with the growth of the Jewish National Home. The main foreign factor that brought them about was the Mandatory government. The Zionist settlers had a clearly stated policy against using Arab labor or investing in Arab industries. At the same time, the natural increase in the Palestinian Arab population I referred to is made clear in the statistical abstracts and quarterly surveys published by the Mandatory government in the years following the census of 1931.
As for the evidence quoted by Mr. Sanders from Rachel Yannait Ben-Zvi's reminiscences, it should be enough to say Mrs. Ben-Zvi was a founding member of the Greater Israel Movement. Mrs. Ben-Zvi could hardly be expected to recall any positive impression the Arabs made on her, all the more so if one remembers that she published her memoirs during the 1960s when the Israeli-Arab conflict had become intense.
COMMENTARY
Whose Palestine?
Apart from who the critics of journalist Joan Peters's book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over…
by Rael Isaac
July 1986
In the spring of 1984, Harper & Row published, to almost universal critical acclaim, a 600-page book by the journalist Joan Peters called From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine. The book received almost two hundred reviews around the country, with many if not most reviewers echoing the sentiments of Martin Peretz, the editor of the New Republic, who wrote that this was a book that could "change the mind of our generation" regarding the Arab-Israel conflict.1 Miss Peters received a National Jewish Book Award for 1984 and the book went through eight hardcover printings before going into paperback. It was also published in England, receiving wide attention although more mixed reviews.
A substantial part of Miss Peters's book is devoted to an analysis of the historical experience of Jews in Arab lands, and to an account of the betrayal by Britain of its responsibilities under the Mandate when during World War II it effectively barred Palestine to Jewish refugees and thereby entered into complicity in Hitler's "Final Solution." But it was not these sections that struck most reviewers as the book's major contribution. Rather, it was Miss Peters's demographic analysis, which occupies roughly a third of From Time Immemorial. Here, she separates out from the rest of Western Palestine the areas of Jewish settlement, and maintains that as early as 1893, there were in these "Jewish-settled areas" more Jews than either Muslims or Christians. Using projections from 1893 data and a variety of contemporary sources, including a series of British Mandatory reports, she proceeds to argue that contrary to Arab assertions and the by-now conventional wisdom, Jewish settlers in Palestine did not displace native Arabs but rather attracted large numbers of Arabs-both "in-migrants," i.e., Arabs from the hill country of Judea and Samaria, and immigrants from neighboring Arab countries. The latter, Peters contends, for the most part entered the country illegally, but this was by and large ignored by the same British authorities who were zealously circumscribing Jewish immigration into the Jewish National Home.
During and immediately after Israel's War of Independence (1948-49) an "exchange of populations" took place: Jews expelled from Arab countries made their way to Israel, while an almost equal number of Arabs left the areas of Jewish settlement in Palestine. (Except for the Negev, these areas formed the greater part of the territory that became Israel.) According to Miss Peters, the Arab exodus was in fact largely made up not of long-settled Palestinian Arabs but of recent arrivals, many of whom presumably simply returned to the areas from which they or their fathers had come, whether to the hill country of Western Palestine (now called the West Bank) or to their countries of origin. Since these Arabs had not developed a sense of national feeling for Palestine (Miss Peters continues), it would have been a fairly easy task to reintegrate them into neighboring Arab lands. The refusal of all but Jordan to permit such integration of the refugees-because of a determination to use them as pawns in the struggle against Israel-is what converted their plight into a catastrophe for them and their children.
Thus, in brief, the argument of From Time Immemorial. The book's success in undercutting Arab territorial and national claims, coupled with the attention it received, made inevitable a response from those who feel an affinity with the Palestinian Arab cause. That cause generates enthusiasm in a variety of non-Arab breasts: the anti-Zionist secular Left, the Christian Left (especially as lodged in the bureaucracies of the mainline churches), the anti-Semitic Right, those with oil and trade interests in the Arab world, State Department and British Foreign Office Arabists, and those connected with educational, health, or missionary efforts in the Arab world.
The assault began only a few months after the book's publication when one Norman Finkelstein (subsequently identified as a doctoral candidate at Princeton University) sent some highly critical comments to the publisher. Noam Chomsky, whose career as a political activist has brought him more public attention, if considerably less credit, than his career in linguistics, followed up with a phone call to Miss Peters's editor at Harper & Row, demanding to know what was being done in response to Finkelstein's critique.
Finkelstein's attack, published as an article ("Immemorial Hoax") in In These Times, is in the Left's best conspiratorial style. Finkelstein does not simply criticize Miss Peters for mistakes of interpretation or of fact. Rather, he decries the book as a deliberate hoax, "among the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict." A measure of the scholarly objectivity of this "graduate student" is his attribution of "fraud" not merely to Joan Peters but to much of the writing on Jewish rights in Palestine, "a field littered with crass propaganda, forgeries, and fakes. . . ."
Even the terms "fraud" and "vulgar hoax" do not satisfy Finkelstein. In a letter to the London Jewish Chronicle he has denounced the book as the "most successful disinformation effort ever mounted by Israel's self-styled 'friends' abroad." "Disinformation," of course, derives from "dezinformatsiya," the craft practiced by a department of the KGB which specializes in faking documents and spreading "cooked" materials to a targeted population. For Finkelstein, Zionism by definition seems to be a malevolent plot to extinguish Palestinian nationalism and steal its homeland.
There was a predictable lineup following Finkelstein's article, with reviews of From Time Immemorial in the Nation (by Edward Said, a member of the Palestine National Council, as well as by Alexander Cockburn, whose credentials as an anti-Israel spokesman are scarcely less impressive than Said's), the leftist Village Voice, and the Link (published by a pro-Arab group called Americans for Middle East Understanding), all of them citing Finkelstein while adding little to him.
In England, a second major attack on the book was launched by Sir Ian and David Gilmour in the London Review of Books, a journal well known for publishing the views of the anti-Zionist lobby. Sir Ian is a Tory who served as Lord Privy Seal and Foreign Office spokesman in the House of Commons. More to the point here, he was first chairman of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), while his son David has served as both its information officer and assistant director. While the tone of their review is gentlemanly, at least in contrast to Finkelstein's invective, most of the specific points raised in their piece are unmistakably his.
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Thus far, whether coming from the ideological Left or Right, the hostile reviews were guided by a clear anti-Zionist animus rather than by a concern for scholarly standards. In a letter to the London Review of Books, one reader noted acerbically and quite correctly that CAABU's own material was "at best tendentious and at times downright offensive," and that "the Gilmour family's concern for historical accuracy could be profitably invested in the material produced under their own auspices." Little credibility resides in reviewers who would not be convinced even by the most meticulous scholarship, since their basic presumption is that Israel should not exist.
But then in November 1985 a story appeared in the New York Times (by Colin Campbell) describing the book as a subject of "dispute" and quoting not only its anti-Zionist critics but Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg ("I think that she's cooked the statistics") and the Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath ("I think it's a sheer forgery"). The Times's Anthony Lewis followed with a column in January 1986 entitled "There Were No Indians." In this attack on Miss Peters's thesis, Lewis seems to have relied entirely upon the book's critics rather than upon any independent reading of his own, since he misquotes her statistics. Even his analogy between the Palestinian Arabs and the American Indians is problematic, since one could equally well cast the Jews, with their long history of dispossession from Palestine, as the "Indians" in this scenario.
More or less simultaneously with Lewis's column there appeared a long review of the Peters book by Yehoshua Porath in the New York Review of Books. This piece had been eagerly awaited by the Left (Edward Said referred hopefully to its appearance in his own article in the Nation several months earlier). In it, Finkelstein is dispensed with summarily ("I do not propose here to go over the ground . . . already covered"), and instead Porath goes after the "discredited" Zionist "myths" which, he argues, underlie Miss Peters's work. With Porath, and with Jesse Zel Lurie, the former editor of Hadassah magazine who came forward to attack the book in Jewish World, a Long Island Jewish newspaper, the focus shifts to intra-Zionist ideological conflicts. This is explicit in the conclusion of Porath's review, where he declares that "[E]veryone familiar with the writing of the extreme nationalists of Zeev Jabotinsky's party (the forerunner of the Herut party) would immediately recognize the tired and discredited arguments in Miss Peters's book." Similarly, Lurie calls the book variously a "Herut polemic" and a "Revisionist polemic." Both, in other words, see Miss Peters as enhancing the claims of political strands within Zionism with which they disagree. But since her themes would resonate equally well with the Labor mainstream (and have in fact been important staples of its ideology), these comments are hard to understand except as attempts to discredit the book by association.
Interestingly, both the Zionist and the anti-Zionist critics have triumphantly pointed to an alleged disdain for the book in Israel. Porath told the Times that "in Israel, at least, the book was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon," and Lurie declares that "no Israeli publisher will touch this book" for "Israeli book readers are too sophisticated for this kind of rubbish." Even Edward Said, who normally does not look to the Israeli public for vindication of his judgment, notes with satisfaction that reviews of the book in Israel were "perfunctory and dismissive" and that the reviewer for the daily Davar had treated it with "unmistakable contempt." Actually, although Davar did indeed publish what could fairly be called a dismissive review, most notices in Israel were favorable, and the book is being published by the Kibbutz Hameuchad-a Labor publishing house-which has assigned it to one of Israel's top translators.
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Quite apart from who the critics of From Time Immemorial have been, however, there is the matter of what they have said. Here the problem becomes more complex.
There is no doubt that much of the criticism is not merely ill-intentioned, or downright vicious, but silly. Thus, the Link argues at length against the "myth" that mid-19th-century Palestine was a "neglected land," citing travelers who testified to the country's scenic beauty and in particular Lawrence Oliphant, who reported in 1887 that he saw in the Valley of Esdraelon "a huge green lake of waving wheat." But even today there are few sights more beautiful than the barren hills of Ephraim north of Jerusalem, and testimony about Palestine's natural beauty says nothing as to its state of development. Oliphant, one of the early British Christian proponents of Zionism, was worried that the massive testimony of travelers concerning the desolate character of the country would discourage Jews from coming, and thus emphasized everything he could find that was positive. But even he spoke of rich soil "waiting for development." Overwhelmingly, the relevant documents show that Palestine at the turn of the century was, to use the title of a recent compendium of eyewitness reports from that period, a Land of Dust.
The Gilmours expand upon the PLO chestnut that the Arabs of Palestine are the true "immemorial" inhabitants of the land. They write: "Their ancestors are the Canaanites and Philistines who, unlike the Jews, were never deported. They remained in Palestine . . . and their descendants formed, and still form, the core of the indigenous population." But not only are the Palestinian Arabs not descendants of Canaanites, it is highly doubtful that more than a very few are even descended from those who settled the country as part of the Arab invasion of the 7th century. For over a thousand years following the Arab conquest, Palestine underwent a series of devastating invasions, followed by massacres of the existing population: Seljuk Turks and Fatimid reconquerors were followed by Crusaders who were followed by waves of Mongol tribes who were followed in turn by Tartars, Mamelukes, Turks, and incessant Bedouin raiders.
In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries Palestine was essentially repopulated by foreigners, some coming from great distances. Egyptians arrived in a number of waves, with an especially large one from 1832 to 1840. Sudanese pioneered successfully in the swampy marshlands. Entire tribes of Bedouin from as far away as Libya settled on the coastal plain. Abandoned villages in the Galilee were resettled by Lebanese Christians. Coastal towns attracted Armenians, Syrians, Turks. The French expansion in North Africa resulted in waves of refugees coming to Palestine; many of the followers of the Algerian resistance leader Abd el Kader went to the Galilee, where they founded a number of villages (Samakh, Deishum). Russian expansion into the Caucasus led to the emigration of many of its Muslim peoples (Circassians and Georgians) who were welcomed by the Ottoman empire; many of these made their way to Palestine, where they founded their own villages. Similarly, the Austrian advance into the Balkans led to the emigration of Bosnian Muslims to Palestine. Turkomans from Russian Central Asia and Kurds complete this roster of "Canaanites." Ironically, the only surviving "Canaanite" culture is that of the Jews, who everywhere still pray, and in Israel also speak, in a Canaanite language.
Much of Finkelstein's malevolent attack is similarly wrong. He incorrectly adds 40,000 Arabs to Miss Peters's projections of the number of Arabs who could have been expected, on the basis of natural increase, to live in the Galilee and Negev (what she calls "Area IV") in 1947, and then accuses her of not accounting for them properly. He charges her with "falsifying" the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine of 1945-46 by claiming that it discloses tens of thousands of Arab illegal immigrants who had been brought into Palestine during the war when in fact (according to Finkelstein) it states only that 3,800 laborers had been brought in. Yet the Survey does list many thousands of laborers who were brought in under official arrangements or came on their own. Egyptian labor, for example, was imported by civilian contractors to the military, without the agreement of the civil administration. The Survey is admittedly confusing, at one point saying that no estimates are available of the number who entered in this way and shortly afterward giving an estimate of just under 10,000 in this category. Even those brought in "officially" numbered far more than 3,800; the Survey mentions an additional 4,000 illegal immigrants employed directly by the War Department, and 380 by the Air Force. To conclude from the Survey, as Miss Peters does, that "tens of thousands" of illegal Arab immigrants entered Palestine during the war thus appears reasonable.
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Although as an Israeli scholar Porath is the most credible of the critics, his New York Review essay is only superficially more balanced than that of the other anti-Peters writers. Porath contrasts what he calls Arab and Zionist "myths," each of which contains "some grain of historical truth" which is then "twisted into a false and grotesque shape." His chief accusation against Joan Peters is that she treats the Jewish-Zionist myths as if they were "true and relevant."
According to Porath the major Arab myths are: (1) The Jews are not a nation and Arabs occupied the land as far back as pre-biblical times; (2) historically, Jews in Arab countries were treated fairly and equally, were not in sympathy with Zionism, and emigrated to Israel after 1948 only as a result of the machinations of Israel's government working with corrupt Arab rulers who were "stooges of imperialism"; and (3) in the 1948 war Jews systematically expelled the Arab population, if they did not in fact start the war expressly for that purpose.
Against these Arab myths Porath poses such Zionist myths as: (1) The ancient Israelite and Judean kingdoms were equivalent to modern nation-states, and the Maccabean revolt was the equivalent of a modern struggle for national liberation; (2) Jews in exile retained a separate national identity and preserved the memory of their ancestral land to which they hoped to return and which, against all odds, some never left; (3) Palestine during the Ottoman and early British period was a barren land, "hardly inhabited," with modern Jewish settlement bringing about economic development and attracting Arabs from neighboring lands; and (4) the 1948 war was fought because the Arabs rejected the partition plan, and although there was a subsequent defacto exchange of populations, Jewish refugees were cared for and rehabilitated while the Arab states refused to resettle Arab refugees and prevented their absorption.
For all his apparent scholarly dispassion in this balancing of opposing myths, there is something very wrong with the exercise. Most of the Arab myths Porath cites belong to the category of historical fabrications. His Zionist myths, by contrast, are for the most part reasonable summaries of what happened. Even the comparison between the ancient kingdoms and modern Israel is not as absurd as Porath seems to think. Those ancient states existed; they were not manufactured to give legitimation to a newly invented nationalism. Moreover, they were a vivid part of the religious and national life of Jews throughout the millennia.
On some points, indeed, Porath actually seems to accept the most egregious Arab myths as true. Thus, in arguing against the Zionist claim that mid-19th-century Palestine was a barren and depopulated land, Porath declares that those living in Palestine at the beginning of modern Jewish settlement were either descendants of the pre-Islamic population or Bedouins. But as we noted earlier, there is overwhelming evidence of massive settlement in Palestine by foreigners in the 18th and 19th centuries. Perhaps Porath would depart from the Arab myth by maintaining that the pre-Islamic population was not Arab. But this is a distinction without a difference, for the myth in its Palestinian version claims a separate identity for the population reaching back to ancient Canaan, with subsequent ethnic accretions which were Arabized and became Muslim in the course of time.
Porath faults Miss Peters for overlooking variations in the treatment of Jews in Islamic countries over the centuries, and the fact that Jews occupied high positions in some parts of the Ottoman empire. One cannot, however, deduce too much concerning the status of a minority as a whole from the position of a few in elite positions. Certainly, conditions varied, just as they did in Christendom, but the dhimmi-"protected," i.e., second-class-status, particularly as it applied to Jews, was a degraded and degrading one.
As for the exchange of populations, that is no myth; it happened. Porath concedes only a "superficial similarity" between the two kinds of refugees, Arab and Jewish. For the Arabs, Porath asserts, the experience was "an unwanted national calamity that was accompanied by unending personal tragedies," while from the Zionist point of view the Jewish refugees represented "the in gathering of the exiles." To this one may answer that for many Near Eastern and North African Jews, the migration involved personal tragedy and mob violence. (As early as November 1945 bloody pogroms broke out in Tripoli, Libya, and since the British army did not intervene, spread through the countryside.) The perceptions of individuals caught up in such events may differ, both among Jews and among Arabs. The decisive difference between the two groups lies precisely where Miss Peters (and the Zionist "myth") locates it: in their reception and treatment in the country of refuge.
To Porath, the Zionist myths are deeply flawed; no matter how alive and powerful the past was in the emotional and intellectual life of Jews, the modern state of Israel has its ideological roots elsewhere. In his analysis, the state of Israel emerges not as an integral product of a specifically Jewish historical experience but rather in discontinuity with it. To Porath, Zionism is mainly a European-style nationalist ideology that appeared among secularized Jews in response to the failure of assimilation in Europe. The Jewish sense of a shared fate and a common destiny, which binds together the communities of the dispersion and today focuses on Israel as its primary concern, may perhaps reflect an emotional need, but is based on a historical illusion. Whatever else one may say about this line of reasoning, it lends intellectual respectability to the Arabs' contention that they can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Jewish.
Porath's concern for debunking Zionist "myths" is the more noteworthy since he is himself best known for his sympathetic studies of the rise of Palestinian nationalism, which, despite its recent origin, he does not dismiss as a myth. Yet it is precisely as myth that this nationalism is best viewed. In general Arab nationalism was overwhelmingly the product of non-Arab Christian intellectuals to whom the vision of secular nationhood provided a potential escape from the degraded status of being non-Muslims in the Islamic world, as well as from the oppressive hold of their own religio-communal elites. A number of Greek Orthodox were especially active in establishing the movement: George Antonius, Rafiq Rizq Sallum, Issa al Issa, Ya'aqub Faraj, Khalil Sakakini, George Hanna, Khalil Iskandar Qubrusi. By creating an Arab "nation" these ideologues hoped in effect to become Arabs. But for most, the effort failed. As Bat Ye'or points out in The Dhimmi: "Arab values, linked to Islam, justified the very discriminatory laws of the dhimma from which they were attempting to free themselves by means of Arabism." Only Palestinian nationalism, the most recently-minted version, offers a myth-that of a "secular-democratic state"-which provides room for radicalized Christians and a quasi-secularized Muslim intelligentsia.
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On the other hand, despite all the faults of Miss Peters's critics, her book does indeed deserve some of the criticism it has received. Her handling of materials, particularly in the central section dealing with demographic issues, is flawed. Even some of Finkelstein's specific criticisms, setting aside his accusations of deliberate deception, are well taken. One of these criticisms was amplified by the Gilmours, and since it involves arguably the worst error Miss Peters makes, and also illustrates general defects in her handling of material, it is worth examining in some detail.
Sir John Hope Simpson, a civil servant with extensive experience in India, had been called upon by the British to assess the absorptive capacity of Palestine, particularly in relation to agricultural settlement, in the wake of the 1929 Arab riots. In his report of 1930 there occurs a paragraph of which Miss Peters makes extensive use. It reads as follows:
The case of the "pseudo-traveler" who comes in with permission for a limited time and continues in Palestine after the term of his mission has expired is more difficult. Each case requires consideration on its merits. Where the case is flagrant, recourse should certainly be had to expulsion. In cases of no special flagrancy, and where there is no objection to the individual, it is probably sufficient to maintain the present practice, under which he is counted against the Labour Schedule, though this method does a certain injustice to the Jewish immigrant outside the country whose place is taken by the traveler concerned.
Miss Peters interprets this to mean that the Arab pseudo-traveler was replacing the Jewish immigrant. In her interpretation:
The pivotal Hope Simpson Report literally admitted not only that it was "the present practice" of British officials to blink at all but the most "flagrant" of the thousands of Arabs immigrating into Western Palestine, but also acknowledged that the illegal Arab immigration was an "injustice" that was displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants. [Emphasis in original]
The trouble with this, as Finkelstein and then the Gilmours rightly point out, is that Hope Simpson was really referring to one group of Jews (those who entered on temporary visas) displacing another group of Jews (those waiting for immigration certificates under the labor schedule which the Mandatory administration annually negotiated with the Jewish Agency). Hope Simpson, in other words, was addressing the question of what to do with those who "jumped the queue," and his solution was to continue the "present practice" of allowing them to do so despite the fact that this involved a "certain injustice" to those waiting in line.2
Unfortunately, by constantly coming back to the passage she has misinterpreted in the Hope Simpson Report, Miss Peters converts what should have been a confined mistake, easily correctible in a later edition of the book, into a lethal systemic error. (Finkelstein found 19 references on 12 different pages; actually there are more.) The reiterated use of the Hope Simpson passage is the worst example in this book of a tendency on Miss Peters's part to substitute, for the piling-on of evidence, the escalation of rhetoric based on the same piece of evidence.
But the problem goes deeper, to Miss Peters's ability to evaluate evidence. She. writes: "The [Hope Simpson] Report protected the so-called 'existing' indigenous Arab population, the same community that the report itself had proved was largely composed either of immigrants or Arab in-migrants. . . ." Actually, even if Hope Simpson had indeed been referring to Arab pseudo-travelers, Miss Peters would have no justification for claiming that the report "proved" the Arab population was composed "largely" of immigrants or in-migrants. It does no such thing.
Ironically, if Miss Peters had read the report more carefully, and had avoided grandiose claims of "proof," she could legitimately have used it in support of her thesis. She could have pointed to Hope Simpson's acknowledgment (this time clearly referring to Arabs) that "illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is material" as well as his reference to "unemployment lists being swollen by immigrants from Trans-Jordania" and his obfuscation of the issue by discussing it in a context where Jewish immigration, both legal and illegal, was being analyzed.
Let us look at another case (duly picked up by Finkelstein) in which Miss Peters is guilty of carelessness. She writes (this time, fortunately, only twice) that "although carefully categorized records were kept for age groups, occupations, amount of capital, etc. of those Jews who immigrated, there was no specific accounting of the non-Jews in the official reports. None except for one phenomenon . . . the number of non-Jews recorded as having been 'deported for immigration offenses' was more than twice as great as the number of Jews." In fact, the British reports to the Mandate Commission, to which Miss Peters is referring, specify for (legal) Arab immigrants, as well as for Jews, the country of origin, sex, age, conjugal condition, and financial status.
By making an error of fact here, Miss Peters undercuts what is basically an excellent point: namely, that the deportation figures were consistently higher for non-Jews than for Jews; in 1935 (as Miss Peters notes) they reached almost as high as ten to one. We know from experience in our own country that the number of illegal immigrants caught by the authorities is in rough proportion to the number entering; that is, the largest number of illegals coming into the United States are Mexicans and more Mexicans are caught than Salvadorans or Nicaraguans, who also enter in substantial numbers. U.S. immigration authorities estimate that currently for each person caught, another slips through. Moreover, many of those deported to Mexico simply turn around and almost immediately cross the border once again. While corresponding proportions cannot simply be extrapolated to Mandatory Palestine, the cases are similar in that porous borders combine with economically better conditions to attract immigrants from neighboring countries.
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But perhaps the most serious problem with Miss Peters's book is not any of the errors picked up by Finkelstein but her apparent inability to use judiciously the material at her disposal. At times she goes so far as to ignore evidence that does not bear out a specific point she wants to make even when that evidence actually strengthens her general case.
Consider the example of immigrants to Palestine from the Hauran in Syria in 1934. Miss Peters quotes an interview given by the governor of the Hauran, Tewfik Bey El-Hurani, published in La Syrie on August 12, 1934, in which he stated that "in the last few months, from 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranese [Syrians] had entered Palestine and settled there" (emphasis added by Miss Peters). This passage receives the full treatment, with frequent repetitions and escalating rhetoric in which the interview is described as one "verified by an official international document" and then as "hard evidence." But even on its face it is very soft evidence indeed, for although Miss Peters makes much of El-Hurani's statement that the Hauranis had "settled" in Palestine (i.e., had not simply gone in search of temporary work because of bad agricultural conditions that year), there was no way El-Hurani could know three months after the exodus whether it was permanent or not.
Actually, Miss Peters has much better evidence on this point which she ignores. In the testimony given before the Palestine Royal Commission by the Jewish Agency's Eliahu Epstein and Moshe Shertok, and on the very pages from which she elsewhere quotes effectively and extensively, there is a lengthy discussion of the immigrants who came from the Hauran in 1934. Epstein complained to the Commission about this Haurani influx; his estimate was that 20,000-25,000 had entered, of whom 6,000 to 8,000 had settled in Palestine. Epstein had done genuine research on the issue, visiting 30 villages in the Hauran to determine how many migrants had been seasonal and how many had left permanently. (He published some of his findings in the Journal of the Royal Asian Society in 1935.) One can only speculate that Miss Peters felt El-Hurani's numbers-30,000 to 36,000-made her case more dramatically than Epstein's better-documented account of 6,000 to 8,000. But a serious scholar obviously does not operate in this way.
Sharp-sometimes unfair-criticism has been directed at Miss Peters's population data and statistics. One ground of the attack has been that she uses different sources in determining the Jewish and the non-Jewish (Muslim and Christian) population for 1893. Thus, for the Arab and Christian population she resorts to the Ottoman census of 1893. But she dismisses its figure of under 10,000 Jews, turning instead to the figure of 59,431 calculated in 1895 by the French geographer Vital Cuinet. This, however, is reasonable, because the Turkish figures covered Ottoman subjects and most Jews did not belong in that category. It is possible that Cuinet's figures are a little too high-the demographer Roberto Bacchi has estimated that there were 42,900 Jews five years earlier, in 1890-but they are clearly far more realistic than those of the Ottoman census. (It is a mark of Porath's polemical animus that he attempts to turn Miss Peters's use of different sources for the numbers of Jews and Arabs against her. In a subsequent exchange of letters in the New York Review, Porath asserts he never claimed the 1893 Ottoman census figure for Jews was correct. But he certainly left that impression by treating Miss Peters's use of disparate sources as suspect, and by failing to comment on the obvious inadequacy of Ottoman census figures with regard to Jews.)
On the other hand, there are problems with Miss, Peters's figure of 92,300 non-Jews in what she defines as the "Jewish-settled area" in 1895. These 1895 figures are the base from which she makes her projections to 1947, bolstering her case that the Jewish-settled areas experienced an enormous growth of population impossible to account for by natural increase. In the correspondence on his article Porath points out that Miss Peters could not have drawn directly upon Ottoman census data because only the data for "kazas"-Ottoman subdistricts which do not correspond to her "Jewish-settled areas"-have been published. Porath concludes that Miss Peters's "figures were, at best, based on guesswork and an extremely tendentious guesswork at that."
On being asked (by Erich Isaac) how she had arrived at the figure of 92,300 Arabs in the Jewish-settled areas, Miss Peters described a method which historical geographers would find broadly acceptable. What she did was to superimpose the UN partition plan on the map of the 1893 kazas, as well as on the district map of the British Mandate government and on the ceasefire lines of 1949. This enabled her to identify the main areas of Jewish settlement; the purely Arab areas; and "intermediate" areas that may have had no Jewish settlement but became part of Israel, or had some Jewish settlement but came under Jordanian control. Some of the 1893 kazas presented no problem-they fell entirely out of or entirely within the area that became Israel. For kazas that fell only partly within her "Jewish-settled areas," she first identified the towns that became part of Israel, adding their Arab population to her figure for Arabs in the Jewish-settled area. (For these town populations she had to rely on a variety of contemporary reports.) Second, the rural population was presumed by her to be uniformly distributed throughout the kaza and the population was then proportionately divided between Jewish and Arab areas on the basis of the relative sizes of the territories assigned to each.
Historical geographers would have problems with Miss Peters's assumption of a uniformly distributed rural population. A geographer trying to reconstruct historical population patterns and densities would first do field studies on the age of villages, the duration of occupancy, abandonment and reoccupation of settlement sites, forms of settlements and their functions, geographic names, other ethnic indicators, types of farming, etc. These would flesh out data from travelers' descriptions, raw census figures, military and tax lists, consular correspondence, and the like. Such field work would also make it easier to delimit the various population regions, helping in this case to overcome the differences between Ottoman and British districts and thus increase the confidence in population projections from Ottoman times to the period of the British Mandate.
Of course Miss Peters could not be expected to engage in elaborate geographic fieldwork. But this means that her figures should have been presented tentatively, as a suggestive and valuable way of looking at population changes in these areas over time. The problem is not with what she has done, but with her failure to explain her method, and with the impression she leaves that her figures derive directly from the census and are thus "scientific." (We set aside the question of how reliable the Ottoman figures are, in itself the subject of considerable dispute.) Moreover, the reader is not informed that neither the Ottoman census nor Cuinet provides figures broken down for the Jewish-settled areas. Miss Peters writes: "The total of 92,300 'non-Jews' as recorded by the Turkish census corroborates Vital Cuinet's estimate in 1895 of roughly 93,600 'non-Jews'-37,853 Christians and 55,823 Muslims-compared to 59,431 Jews, in the Jewish-settled areas." Those numbers actually represent Miss Peters's estimate for both the Turkish census and Cuinet, neither of whom "records" them.3
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Ironically, there was no need for Miss Peters to overstate the precision or importance of her projections because there is overwhelming evidence, some of which (for example, in the studies of Fred Gottheil) she uses in her book, of extensive in-migration from the predominantly Arab to the Jewish-settled areas. Scholars, Porath included, do not dispute this (Porath disagrees on the reason for the migration). Such dispute as there is concerns the amount of illicit Arab immigration. The projections do not address this question, but rather confirm the disproportionate growth of areas of Jewish settlement compared with mainly or purely Arab areas within Western Palestine.
Arieh Avneri, in The Claim of Dispossession, published after Miss Peters's book, provides additional data in support of her thesis, with regard both to Arab in-migration and to Arab immigration. (It is noteworthy that Porath, who so vigorously disputes Miss Peters, is one of those thanked by Avneri for "valuable comments" on a manuscript that reaches the same conclusion as hers.) Avneri finds that between 1922 and 1947, in 35 regions of Western Palestine that became Israel, the Arab population increased by 134 percent. By contrast, in 13 regions where there was no Jewish settlement, the Arab population increased by only 98 percent. Avneri points out that even the 98-percent increase is deceptive, for it includes Arab Jerusalem whose population grew over a twenty-five-year period at a rate second only to that of Haifa (150 percent as compared with Haifa's 290 percent). Cities remote from Jewish development grew much more slowly: Nablus, 56 percent; Jenin, 78 percent; Hebron, 64 percent. (Gaza was an exception to these very low rates.)
The rural Arab population also grew in response to Jewish development. The growth was highest in the hinterland of Jaffa, which was the rural area of greatest Jewish concentration, but in the Haifa and Acre district Arab rural population also increased in response to the growing urban demand for vegetables and fruit. In contrast, the rural population in the districts of Jenin, Nablus, Hebron, and Gaza, all remote from Jewish settlements, grew at rates below the national average.
The geographer Avraham Brawer, in his book Eretz Yisrael, published in 1949, compares the population of Western Palestine with that of neighboring countries. He finds that even the purely Arab areas had a population density (96 per square kilometer) equal to that of Lebanon with its more favorable climatic conditions and large, culturally more advanced Christian population component, and double that of the settled areas of Syria and Cyprus, both of which enjoyed better climatic and soil conditions. In the areas of Jewish settlement, the population density was much higher: 136 per square kilometer. Brawer attributes the high population density in all of Western Palestine to the infusion of Jewish capital and the dramatic improvements in public health, which had no equal at the time in any Mediterranean country except France.
As we have noted, Porath does not dispute the fact of Arab migration within Western Palestine to areas of Jewish settlement on the coast. As against Miss Peters, however, he attributes this not to the presence of the Jews but to improvements made by the Mandatory government. It is true that Arabs found work in the government's public-works projects, including the railroad and ports. In fact, as Miss Peters points out, the utilization of Arab labor by the British was a standing grievance of the Jewish Agency. Jobs were being created by an administration pledged to facilitate the development of a Jewish National Home (with tax money, moreover, coming chiefly from the Jewish population), and those jobs were being filled, often not even by Palestinian Arabs but by Arabs coming from abroad. Thus, in December 1936, out of 750 men employed in porterage at Haifa port, 200 were Egyptians and 500 others were described as "Hauranis," with only 50 being Palestinian Arabs.
Nevertheless, while it is possible that Britain might have developed the port of Haifa as a naval base and oil port even had there been no Jews in Palestine, the fact remains that Haifa's growth was closely connected to the development of Jewish Palestine. It was in Haifa that in 1905 Baron Rothschild set up the "Great Mills"-the first industrial enterprise in Palestine-and during the Mandate period Haifa became the home of the only cement plant in the country (Nesher), the largest factory of edible oil and soap (Shemen), the only industrial-scale glass factory (Phoenicia) and iron foundry (Vulcan). In Eastern Palestine (Transjordan), in the absence of Jewish investment, the British presence did not generate any comparable economic growth; it was Western Palestine that continued to be a magnet to the Arabs of Transjordan.
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When it comes to the growth of the Arab population of Palestine, Porath, accepting the Mandatory government's claim that illegal immigration was a trivial factor, finds the entire explanation in a "demographic revolution." According to Porath, that "revolution" began at the end of the Ottoman rule as epidemics receded, and continued under the Mandate with further improvements in public health.
Porath, however, exaggerates the positive impact of Ottoman rule upon population growth. Natural increase in Palestine in the last three generations of Ottoman rule was negligible. Until 1842 there was not a single physician with formal medical training in the country. Well into the first decade of the 20th century, Bedouin raids, widespread illness and epidemics, and intercommunal fighting kept the population down. In the cholera epidemic of 1865, for example, one-third of the population of Jerusalem died. Infant mortality, needless to say, was high. The military draft took large numbers of men in their prime reproductive years for the various wars in which the empire was engaged. A British consular report mentions 12,000 men having been drafted in the Jerusalem district, of whom only four came back. Emigration-a subject, incidentally, which Miss Peters completely ignores-was substantial, particularly of Christian Arabs, a better educated and more affluent group. Avneri notes the availability of reliable data from Bethlehem, for the ten-year period 1910-20, showing that a third of the population emigrated. The large Arab population in many Latin American countries-not to mention Detroit-testifies to this movement. (Shafik Handal, general secretary of El Salvador's Communist party, comes from a Palestinian Arab family.)
Although there is no doubt that health measures improved markedly under the British, and that natural increase was high, it is hard to see how the evidence for substantial Arab immigration can be dismissed. Even the British reports, including that of Hope Simpson, speak of "material" illicit Arab immigration that border posts were failing to halt. According to a study by the Israeli geographer Moshe Brawer of hundreds of Muslim villages in Judea, Samaria, and Galilee in areas remote from development to which relatively few immigrants came (and from which few left), the natural growth of the population between 1922 and 1931 was no more than 21 to 22 percent-not the almost 29 percent claimed by the Mandate figures, In other words, more than a quarter of the growth in that period was by immigration from neighboring countries. A similar study of such villages from 1922 to 1945 would show, according to Brawer, that about 20 percent of the growth of the Muslim population was by immigration, not 4 percent as the Mandate data claim. As for Christian Arabs-and here the Mandate itself acknowledged a growth by immigration of 28 percent-actual immigration was considerably higher.
Avneri comes to similar conclusions, finding that during the Mandate the country absorbed 100,000 legal and illegal Arab immigrants and their offspring-a figure that is not very different from Miss Peters's estimates.
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Despite its lapses, then, Joan Peters's book offers a generally sound thesis. It should be noted, however, that both Miss Peters and her critics may have placed altogether too much emphasis on the demographic issues. Important though they be, these issues do not go to the heart of the conflict. The Jews, after all, had a historic claim to all of Palestine, not merely to the Jewish-settled area; they have also, repeatedly, demonstrated their willingness to accept considerably less than the whole. The Arabs, meanwhile, both in the past and today, have vigorously contested the right of the Jews to any portion of Palestine. It is in the service of this intractable Arab position that the myth has been successfully propagated of the Palestinian Arabs as a nation living on its soil "from time immemorial." The undeniable contribution of Joan Peters's book is to help unmask that myth.
1 COMMENTARY's generally favorable review, by Daniel
2 There are problems as well with Miss Peters's map. The Western Galilee is incorrectly shown as an area devoid of Jewish settlement (thus disposing of Hanita, Nahariya, Shavei Zion, etc.). Moreover, according to the map, Miss Peters's "Area III," which she defines as an "Intermediate area, some Jewish settlement (excluded from Israel, 1949-67)," has no reason for being; since the area is entirely Arab, it should have been part of her "Area V: Main area of Arab settlement, no Jewish settlement (excluded from Israel, 1949-67)."
3 The chapter of the report in which this passage appears is devoted to a discussion of the procedures used by the British Palestine government in issuing immigration certificates to Jews. But illegal Arab immigration was also an awkward problem for Hope Simpson, and immediately before his discussion of (Jewish) pseudo-travelers, he inserts a paragraph on the failure of land border posts to control illegal crossings: "The immigrant who wishes to evade the control naturally leaves the road before reaching the frontier and takes to the footpaths over the Hills." Actually, given the context, a reader might easily think he is speaking of Jews here as well; the only way one can be sure is that twelve pages on, in a passage explicitly concerning Arabs, Hope Simpson mentions their illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontiers and says, "This question has already been discussed."
What presumably misled Miss Peters, then, was this paragraph on infiltration across the land border. She correctly inferred that Hope Simpson was speaking of Arabs here, but then incorrectly concluded that the following section on pseudo-travelers referred to Arabs as well.
Conspiracy of Praise
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
Edward Said
October 20, 1985
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
Joan Peters' book was published in the spring of 1984. Its jacket was covered with endorsements from Barbara W. Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Angier Biddle Duke, Philip M. Hauser, Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Paul Cowan, Barbara Probst Solomon and Arthur J. Goldberg. Each endorsement testified to the book's immense importance: Tuchman described it as "a historical event in itself," and Bellow modestly stated that "millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians." After eight hardcover printings, Harper and Row has now issued a paperback edition of the book, bearing all these endorsements (minus that of Barbara Probst Solomon) plus a new one from Theodore H. White.
With only two exceptions, From Time Immemorial received favorable reviews in the American press. (Though as we shall see, its reception in Britain and Israel was almost uniformly negative.) Everyone -- except for those two reviewers and Robert Olson, who dismissed the book in American Historical Review -- commented on Peters' astonishingly thorough scholarship and her unprecedented findings. That assessment was made by relative amateurs (Walter Reich in The Atlantic and Timothy Foote in the Washington Post) as well as by seasoned pros (Daniel Pipes in Commentary, Ronald Sanders in The New Republic and John Campbell in the New York Times). The general impression was that Joan Peters had at last done all the work necessary to settle one of the most vexing and persistent problems of the twentieth century. No longer could a scholar or propagandist argue that "the Palestinians" (Peters entitled everyone to enclose the designation of a people in the quotation marks of suspicion) were in fact a real people with a real history in "Palestine." Her book asserted that their national as well as actual existence, and consequently their claims on Israel, were at best suspect and at worst utter fabrication. In other words, From Time Immemorial relieved Israel and its supporters of responsibility for the refugees created by the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, and for the subject people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Although From Time Immemorial is clearly relevant to the contemporary debate about the Middle East in the United States, its peculiar distinction is to present itself as a full-scale history ab origine of the Palestine problem, which ventures to prove that the Palestinians are and have always been propaganda. How that strikes those of us who have memories of communal life in Haifa, Jerusalem, Safad, Jaffa and Nazareth before 1948 I shall leave to the reader's imagination. Peters claims that a careful rereading of demographic evidence shows that the British (and of course "the Arabs") suppressed evidence about the number of illegal Arab immigrants in Palestine before 1948. She argues that most of the 1948 refugees were in reality people who had not come to Palestine until 1946 and who therefore cannot possibly be considered true inhabitants of Palestine "from time immemorial." In any case, she says, their number has always been inflated for propaganda purposes -- a fairly routine Israeli claim in the 1950s and 1960s, now discarded.
As for the tiny handful of "real" Arab inhabitants in "uninhabited" Palestine, they did a lot of what Peters calls "in-migrating," moving from place to place in Palestine, and were therefore little more than nomads. Given the history of Arab hatred of Jews, which Peters rehearses in much detail, she concludes that "the Palestinians" -- who had been attracted by Jewish prosperity to those parts of Palestine from which they were later evicted -- are a trick foisted on Israel and the rest of the gullible world merely to expedite the malevolent designs of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism. Besides, she says, since many Jews expelled from the Arab world came to Israel after 1948, there was, at very least, parity in the movements of dispossessed people in and out of Palestine.
Nor is this all. Peters tells us that her research was carried out in a spirit of sympathy with the Arab refugees, that she visited them in their miserable camps and studied their history, culture and leaders at close range. That protestation was made much of by reviewers who found that it gave her conclusions the credibility of a genuine discovery arrived at by compassionate research. So obviously well-intentioned a person could have been converted only by the factual evidence she has so dutifully unearthed. (Peters does not mention in the body of the text that she wrote an article, "An Exchange of Populations," in the August 1976 issue of Commentary, where her notions about inveterate Arab anti-Semitism are trundled forth, along with the exchange-of-Arabs-for-Jews idea, all in a prose quite free of sympathy for the poor Arab refugees.)
From Time Immemorial bolsters its appearance of legitimacy by including an impressive list of mentors and scholarly authorities, whom Peters thanks profusely. This list of worthies (Peters implies they are virtually her collaborators) includes famous Orientalists like Elie Kedourie, Bernard Lewis and P. J. Vatikiotis. Not one of these men is known for his Arab sympathies, which is probably why not a single one has made any attempt to dissociate himself from her or her ideas even though evidence of her numerous errors and falsifications has been circulating for some time. Besides, their respectability has not been threatened, so why should they bother about so trivial a question as the scholarly truth of Peters' book?
For someone with no academic credentials, and with only the sketchiest foreign policy and press background, Joan Peters has now become something of an authority on Arab-Jewish matters for the media (non-fiction's answer to Leon Uris). Interviews with her dot newspapers and magazines across the country, and she has been a guest on numerous radio and television talk shows. From Time Immemorial has received, according to Peters, "200 to 300" favorable reviews and, in the spring of this year, won a prize in the Jewish Book Council's Israel category.
The two exceptions to this quite extraordinary outpouring of praise were an article in the September 11, 1984 issue of In These Times, by Norman Finkelstein, a graduate student at Princeton University, and a review in the fall 1984 Journal of Palestine Studies by Bill Farrell, a law student at Columbia University. In what I shall now relate, both young men played courageous roles, and if I speak more about Finkelstein it is to note his amazing persistence despite odds that would have deterred almost anyone else. Finkelstein showed that Peters' work was what he called a "hoax": her evidence was unsound in all sorts of ways; her demographic statistics were inconsistent, mathematically impossible, wildly exaggerated; and, most important, in all the cases he was able to check, she either plagiarized Zionist propaganda sources or deliberately tampered with quotations so as to change their meaning entirely. Much of one chapter, for example, is lifted -- mistakes and all -- from Ernst Frankenstein's Justice for My People, published in 1942. In one place illegal Arab immigration is suggested as "at least" 200,000; in another, 370,000; in a third, 1,300,000; in a fourth, 3,700,000. Taking the same approach Farrell came up with similar results. When, for example, Peters quotes from the Hope Simpson Report of 1930, she transforms the phrase "Egyptian labour is being employed in certain individual cases" to "According to that Report, evidence of Arab immigration abounded: 'Egyptian labor is being employed.'" Where the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine (1945-1946) says that in October 1942 "as a matter of emergency" 3,800 laborers were brought into Palestine from Syria and Lebanon, Peters says: "What the official Anglo-American Survey of 1945-1946 definitively disclosed...is that...tens of thousands of 'Arab illegal immigrants' [were] recorded as having been 'brought' into...Palestine." And so on and on.
Since the core of Peters' case was based on a (mis)reading of demographic evidence, both Farrell and Finkelstein took pains to check and recheck her findings, which they found unacceptable. What neither of them noted, however, is that the last census for Palestine was done under British mandate in 1931. No population estimates of twentieth-century Palestine can avoid its findings, which show a vast native Arab majority. Peters totally ignores that census, just as she ignores the authoritative demographic work of Janet Abu-Lughod, Justin McCarthy and others, whose conclusions are diametrically opposed to her own. Instead she relies on Ottoman statistics for the 1890s, compiled by Professor Kemal Karpat of the University of Wisconsin, and on the impressions of a nineteenth-century French traveler, Vital Cuinet. These do little more for her case than add a lot of numbers to what is already a tiresomely shrill text dotted with embarrassing errors, such as the use of medieval historian Maqrizi as an eyewitness source about nineteenth-century Palestine. (To his credit, Bernard Gwertzman noted the book's offensive tone in his review for the New York Times on May 12, 1984.)
Despite undercurrents of suspicion about Peters' book set off by Finkelstein, only two publications have followed up on his evidence and printed anything systematically critical of From Time Immemorial's major points. In the Guardian and The Nation respectively, Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn described what Peters and her ecstatic reviewers were up to, but no one else has paid much attention. At one point, Colin Campbell of the New York Times expressed some enthusiasm for writing an article like the one he had done on the David Abraham case, but then he dropped the matter.
When the book appeared in Britain this spring it received a vastly different set of reviews. It is worth citing a passage from one of those reviews to give some sense of the startling difference between Britain and the United States when it comes to discussion about the Middle East. The Observer assigned From Time Immemorial to Albert Hourani of Oxford University, probably the world's foremost authority on modern Middle Eastern history. Not incidentally, no scholar of stature was granted the privilege of reviewing Peters in the United States, nor was it entrusted to someone not already known for his or her unqualified support for Israel. The single exception to this pattern may be the New York Review of Books, which reportedly assigned From Time Immemorial to Yehoshua Porath, the leading Israeli authority on Palestinian nationalism, an eminent historian and a man known for his moderate views about the Palestinians. To date, however, Porath's article has not appeared, although Robert Silvers has assured me that he hopes the review will run sometime in the future. At any rate, here is the concluding part of Hourani's review in the March 5 issue of the Observer:
Ms. Peters has found, or been provided with, a large number of documents, but most are well-known, and many of them she misunderstands or quotes out of context. She denounced British policy because she believes it broke the promise of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate that Palestine "east and west of the Jordan river" should become a "Jewish homeland." But the Declaration carefully avoided saying that Palestine should become a "Jewish homeland"; and the British decision to set up an Arab princedom in Transjordan, and exclude it from the area in which a Jewish, national home should be created, was in accordance with the terms of the Mandate.
Her argument that enormous numbers of Arabs came illegally into Palestine also has no basis. One of her few pieces of evidence is a statement made by an obscure Syrian official in 1934, that more than 30,000 Syrians had entered Palestine and settled there during a few months. The Permanent Mandates Commission asked a British representative for his opinion of this, and he said it was "grossly exaggerated." Ms. Peters quotes the statement by the Syrian official but not the British reply; on the next page the statement becomes "verified by an official international document"; a little later it has become "hard evidence," in the light of which British statements to the contrary can be dismissed as fallacious. The whole book is written like this: Facts are selected or misunderstood, tortuous and flimsy arguments are expressed in violent and repetitive language. This is a ludicrous and worthless book and the only mildly interesting question it raises is why it comes with praise from two well-known American writers.
In their 8,000-word essay for the London Review of Books, Ian and David Gilmour went painstakingly through From Time Immemorial, recording a huge number of its inconsistencies and falsifications, among them Peters' suppression of the fact that no Jewish leader of note until, and even after, 1948 denied the presence of the native Arab Palestinian majority. The Gilmours note that Peters misleadingly bandies about population figures for "Jewish settled areas" but does not reveal that those areas amounted only to 4 or 5 percent of the whole country, or -- a slightly more subtle tactic -- that figures for Christian Arabs are simply left out. Peters' revival of the canard about the Arabs leaving voluntarily is also dispatched by the Gilmours, as is her ludicrous contention that British policy encouraged Arab immigration into Palestine.
Similar reviews turned up in The Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator (which compared From Time Immemorial with Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes), Time Out and The Sunday Times, although Peters, whose contact with fact seems tentative, has described the British reviews as "excellent." But perhaps the most revealing thing about this strange book was its reception in Israel this past spring. Most notices of the book were perfunctory and dismissive; Davar's full-length review on March 29 treated it with unmistakable contempt. According to the reviewer, From Time Immemorial's main defect was its embarrassing use of discredited Israeli hasbara ("propaganda"). It should be noted that most of Peters' earth-shaking evidence about the non-existent Palestinians had already been used by official and semi-official Israeli information agencies during the 1950s and 1960s, and that it is now quite commonplace for Israeli government representatives to warn against reusing this worthless stuff. One gets the impression that Israel had written the book off when Peters appeared in the country to reap the glory of her personal, uniquely American hasbara effort. Hence, she was kept out of the public eye; she returned to the United States just in time to receive her Israel award in New York.
There are several curious facets to this egregious book. Many passages contain disconnected items all pressed into making the same point. The impression you get is of one team of experts tossing file cards into large folders labeled "Jews, Arab hatred of," or "Palestinians, myths of," and another team pasting them onto more or less consecutive pages. That Peters has nothing to say about the immense amount of Arab, or for that matter Israeli, material on Palestine, all of it easily enough available, is testimony to how narrowly focused, how dry and single-minded, is her effort. During the past five years alone there have been several volumes of original Arab documentation of Palestinian life in Palestine. (Scholars and reviewers interested in assessing Peters' book may also consult two very recent works, Walid Khalidi's fine Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-1948, and Basheer K. Nijim and Bishara Muammar's Toward the De-Arabization of Palestine-Israel, 1945-1977.) Such works prove that a native Arab community once flourished in Palestine, and that it was not simply the illegal, temporary presence of a small, shifty population of nameless vagrants sneaked in by rascally anti-Semitic British officials acting in cahoots with a worldwide network of Arab fanatics. Peters touches on none of this, nor does she refer to the large bibliography of scholarly Western works on the history of Palestine, many of which give the lie to her preposterous thesis.
Granted that Peters is an inept writer, a bad propagandist and a hopelessly incompetent historian, how is it that virtually no criticism of her work has appeared in the United States? Let us grant also that Harper and Row continues to ignore evidence of her falsifications and plagiarisms. Why do normally competent editors, historians, journalists and intellectuals go along with the fiction that From Time Immemorial is a wonderful work of historical discovery? Peters' factual distortions and innumerable mistakes have been exhaustively documented by Norman Finkelstein, yet no one paid attention to him, no one followed his leads. No one paid the slightest heed to the British reviews, or to those in Israel. Worst of all, no one has demanded that Peters and her supporters respond to the huge list of accusations that her book has collected in the 18 months since it appeared. She still gives interviews to American journalists, cheerfully asserting the complete acceptance of her work.
I speak here less as a Palestinian who wants to keep saying "but we exist and always have and will," than as an American intellectual disgraced by the shoddiness of our present so-called life of the mind. The Peters case is not just a matter of poor work. It is, after all, a case of orchestrated compliance by which the history and actuality of an entire people are consigned to non-existence. Where are all those guardians of intellectual morality who, in a chorus led by the Conor Cruise O'Briens and the Leszek Kolakowskis, whine about Communist and Third World disinformation and propaganda, who stalwartly defend American freedom of expression and healthy debate, who invoke Orwell and denounce totalitarianism? Has it come to this, then: an unconsciously held ideology that permits the most scandalous and disgusting lies -- execrably written, totally disorganized, hysterically asserted -- to pass as genuine scholarship, factual truth, political insight, without any significant challenge, demurral or even polite reservation?
The sad truth is that where discussion of Israel is concerned, the United States is well below Israel itself in norms of truth and methods of debate. Here then is a perfect illustration of Richard Hofstader's "paranoid style" in American political life. This is not, alas, a matter of the left being better than the right. The young progressives who publish Radical History conscientiously avoid discussion of the Palestinians. Those who know better are cowed by the Israeli lobby. It is true that the American-Israeli Political Action Committee has been criticized in the press for its campus campaigns against those who have dared to speak out against Israel or to support Palestinian rights; yet how many deans and faculty members have raised their voices against the censorship and blackmail still applied by AIPAC against "enemies" on the nation's campuses?
To read Peters and her supporters is, for Palestinians, to experience an extended act of ethnocide carried out by pseudo-scholarship. Tom Sawyer attends his own funeral as a kind of lark, whereas we are being threatened with death before being permitted birth. And we are told to stay out of the whole thing. The irony of this occurring in the United States at a time when so many effusions about Middle Eastern peace are perpetually stymied by US and Israeli actions designed to keep Palestinians out should not be difficult to detect. In this way -- democratically -- do intellectuals and the state sychronize their efforts to sweep the small people of this world under the rug.
The one thing I still cannot grasp is how people can be so foolish as to believe From Time Immemorial's contention that the Palestinians are something made up or imaginary, like the unicorn or the tooth fairy. Why do Barbara Tuchman and Saul Bellow, for example, expect that four million of us, scattered everywhere, can be made to repeat the lie of our own existence for 35 years? Do they imagine that all of us get instructions from a central propaganda office? And, toughest question of all, how have we been as successful as Peters implies in uniting most of the Arab, Islamic, Third World, European and Socialist community in our cause if we are no more than a myth? Surely it would have been a lot less trouble for us simply to get a Palestinian state!
Editor's Note: This essay originally appeared in The Nation, October 19, 1985. It is reprinted here with permission of the editors and the author.
Apr. 8, 1988 D. Pipes update: The following review of Yehoshua Porath's role in the controversy over From Time Immemorial was written for a mailing from the Foreign Policy Research Institute:
In 1984 Joan Peters provoked a peculiar controversy when she published From Time Immemorial, a study of Arab-Israel relations. The debate centered about the author's contention that most Palestinians were not living in Palestine for centuries but immigrated to the region in the first half of the twentieth century. Reactions were sharply polarized. Those who sympathize with Israel welcomed Miss Peters' study as a major contribution to the understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict; those sympathetic to the Arabs rejected her efforts as biased and fraudulent. Although some pro-Israeli reviewers expressed reservations about the book on academic grounds, no American reviewer crossed these lines.But then, in a long review, "Mrs. Peters's Palestine," in The New York Review of Books, an Israeli historian, Yehoshua Porath, damned the book. As the first prominent Israeli to participate in this debate, his opinions carried exceptional weight. His review gave ammunition to anti-Israel elements; if an Israeli damned the book, surely the pro-Peters position had been undercut.But the Porath review fits a context. He sees the Peters work in the Likud historiographic tradition and takes her to task for accepting and extending the Likud version of Palestinian history. In a word, Porath is debating Peters in the context of Israeli politics, of Labor vs. Likud, and not in the American context of anti-Israel vs. pro-Israel. His review would be understood in this way if it appeared in Hebrew in Israel, but it has a vastly different impact when published in English in New York.
The legacy of Joan Peters and 'From Time Immemorial'
By David Samel January 17, 2015
Joan Peters, center, Hebron settler spokesman David Wilder, left, and Dr. William Caro, right, outside an Israeli settlement in Hebron in 2010. (Photo: www.hebron.com)
Joan Peters has died. She wrote, or at least inspired, a very significant chapter in the history of Israeli hasbara. Thirty years ago, Peters, a formerly little known "journalist," published her magnum opus, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine. The book launched a wide-ranging controversy that involved Norman Finkelstein, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Alan Dershowitz, Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Daniel Pipes, and many others. Even now, thirty years later, Peters is mourned by some and reviled by others.
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 and seeking to mooch off the success of a superior culture. Donation banner advertisement.
Consequently, the book received rapturous attention and praise upon its publication in 1984. World renowned historian Barbara Tuchman raved: "This book is a historical event in itself, a discovery that has lain in the dark all along until its revelation by Joan Peters's unrelenting research. It could well change the course of events in the Middle East." Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg also gushed their enthusiasm over this ground-breaking book, as did Elie Wiesel. There was little serious criticism of FTI in the U.S. until Norman Finkelstein, then a graduate student at Princeton, started methodically picking it apart, with the cautious encouragement of Noam Chomsky, who presciently advised him that such heretical activities might derail his budding academic career. Finkelstein's preliminary findings were published in In These Times, and he subsequently expanded them in his book a decade later, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
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.")
Defenders of the book love to point out that Peters began her project out of sympathy for the Palestinians, referencing her self-serving claims to that effect at the beginning of chapter 1. Actually, Peters professes that she set out to blame neighboring Arab states for failing to cooperate with the Zionist project by absorbing the refugees and removing any reason for them to return to their beloved homes and communities. Peters pretended to be enlightened when her research revealed that the Palestinians' misfortune was all their fault to begin with. So she approached this project with the pre-conceived notion that Arab countries, and not Israel, were responsible for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, and changed her position to find that Arab countries and the Palestinians themselves were at fault, with Israel even more blameless than she thought. Quelle surprise! Donation banner advertisement.
Noam Chomsky has publicly declared his skepticism that Joan Peters even wrote the book, speculating that it might have been authored by some intelligence agency. That may be true, but I would have guessed that any "intelligence" agency would have written a better book. Still, if you have the stomach, watch this video interview of Peters by Zola Levitt. It is difficult to tell who is more clueless, and in my opinion, anyone who watches Peters's performance could reasonably question her ability to write a book of this scope, even a lousy one. In any event, Chomsky is surely right that the reaction to the book is far more important than the mostly irrelevant and unanswerable question of its authorship.
Enter the Dersh. In 2002, Alan Dershowitz published The Case for Israel. I have read through much of this book and found it a field manual for rank dishonesty. On virtually every single page, Dershowitz engages in wide variety of deceit - from outright lies to even more misleading half-truths. Indeed, I probably learned more about this subject by carefully checking Dersh's claims and supposedly supporting footnotes than from any other source. In any event, Norman Finkelstein, who had labored so long and hard to expose the gargantuan flaws in Peters's book about 17 years earlier, must have been shocked to see Dershowitz repeat her discredited thesis, sometimes with attribution to FTI and sometimes without. In a now famous joint appearance on Democracy Now, Dershowitz must have felt blindsided by the well-prepared and merciless Finkelstein.
The DN! debate is probably most famous for the discussion of Dershowitz's plagiarism. There is no doubt that Dershowitz restated Peters's thesis (in chapter 2 of a 32-chapter book) with little change. Rather than pretend that he came up with it solely on his own, or admit that he was simply regurgitating someone else's analysis, Dersh chose a middle course. He gave Peters credit for some of his citations, and passed off the rest as his own. The problem was that he did not pay sufficient attention to differentiating between these two categories, and made some conspicuous errors. The most notorious one was to repeat a unique and somewhat bizarre excerpt from Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad that appears in the Peters book. [1] Peters uses about a half-dozen ellipses to denote excluded material, and combined, the entire quote spans nearly one hundred pages (pages 349, 366, 367, 375, 429, 441-442). Dershowitz foolishly reprinted (almost entirely) Peters's quote, with the very same ellipses, but his footnote only cites Twain at almost the very same pages cited by Peters - 349, 366, 367, 375, 441-442 (but not 429). He subsequently claimed that he never even came across Peters's rendition of the Mark Twain quote. In other words, Dershowitz suggested that he independently fashioned his Twain excerpts on a very odd set of pages, and was not merely relying on Peters's earlier, virtually identical version. It didn't help that Peters made various typographical errors in her transcription of Twain, errors that were repeated by Dershowitz. Whoops! For those interested in the full details, a lawyer named Frank Menetrez wrote the definitive account of Dershowitz's blunder and his false insistence to have been cleared of all plagiarism charges, followed by an exchange between Dershowitz and Menetrez.
Turning back to Peters's death, the New York Times obit is noteworthy for its absurd effort to appear impartial about the FTI controversy. Most interesting is its depiction of Yehoshua Porath's opinion on the book. As a real-live Israeli, and a history professor to boot, Porath's opinion counts for much more in the paper of record than supporters of Palestinian rights or Palestinians themselves, like Finkelstein or Said. This is what the Times says about Porath:
[Porath] said the book was symptomatic of "the two contrasting mythologies that the Arabs and the Jews have developed to explain their situations. Like most myths, these generally contain some element of plausibility," he continued, "some grain of historical truth, which through terminological ambiguity is then twisted into a false and grotesque shape. The unfortunate thing" about the book, he added, "is that from a position of apparently great learning and research, she attempts to refute the Arab myths merely by substituting the Jewish myths for them.
The quote from Porath's review is accurate but its apparent even-handedness hardly sums up Porath's actual opinion of the book. A more succinct and accurate rendition would include this quote: "I think it's a sheer forgery. In Israel, at least, the book was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon," the historian said. Where can that Porath quote be found? In the New York Times, of course. In a 1985 article on the controversy surrounding the book, the Times reporter interviewed Porath, who offered this unsparing assessment. Indeed, even if the Times overlooked its own article, the Porath piece in the New York Review that the obit does quote includes this far more devastating conclusion:
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.
Still, the Times obit managed to cite Porath's much more neutral statement out of context without mentioning his unequivocal condemnation of the recently deceased Peters.
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about the entire Peters affair is that her attempt to rewrite history was intended to justify an immoral outcome. Let's assume for the purposes of argument that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the dishonest scholarship and analysis, and even the atrocious writing and shoddy editing, Peters is right. Palestine was virtually empty and desolate until the Jews arrived to spruce up the place and make the desert bloom, creating a magnet for poor Arabs from surrounding countries. How would that justify a state where those of a certain ethnicity/ancestry impose second-class status upon their fellow citizens who are "ethnically challenged," and exercise a military dictatorship over millions of non-citizens as well? All of Peters's historical shenanigans were intended to show that Jewish and Arab migration were essentially contemporaneous and that the Arab population does not enjoy a longer history in Palestine. Wasn't the 1948 creation of a "Jewish State," and the post-1967 Occupation that Peters implicitly defended, still horribly unfair to the non-Jews who shared the land? Wouldn't such rule by one ethnic group over another be a distasteful anachronism in the 21st century, or even in the 1980's when Peters wrote her book? Peters's thesis is not only dead wrong, it does not serve her intended purpose as a mathematical QED that justifies the status quo.
The bizarre chapter of Joan Peters's contribution to the Middle East debate does not end with her death. Her arguments, both those she adopted from others and those she formulated herself, still constitute a huge portion of the go-to hasbara repertoire. From Time Immemorial is an embarrassment that taints anyone who embraced it as well as those who continue to do so.
Notes
1. Mark Twain would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that his mostly humorous travelogue was being used for the nefarious purpose of denying an indigenous people's connection to their own land. Twain uproariously ridiculed Western claims to Palestine in this debate between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in Tom Sawyer Abroad:
[Tom:] "A crusade is a war to recover the Holy Land from the paynim."
[Huck:] "Which Holy Land?"
"Why, the Holy Land-there ain't but one."
"What do we want of it?"
"Why, can't you understand? It's in the hands of the paynim, and it's our duty to take it away from them."
"How did we come to let them git hold of it?"
"We didn't come to let them git hold of it. They always had it."
"Why, Tom, then it must belong to them, don't it?"
"Why of course it does. Who said it didn't?"