"Пәлестина дауы: Жоан Петерстің кітабы және талқылаулар"

1984 book by Joan Peters
the expression

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a 1984 book by Joan Peters, published by Harper & Row, while Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath called it "sheer forgery". In 2004, From Time Immemorial was the subject of another academic controversy, when Finkelstein accused Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz of largely plagiarizing his book The Case for Israel from it.

According to Peters, most people who call themselves Palestinians are not actually Palestinians, but instead descendants of recent immigrants from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, who came to the land in waves of immigration starting in the 19th century and continuing through the period of the British Mandate. She argues that what is referred to as the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight was not ethnic cleansing, but actually a population exchange that resulted from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

When the book came out in the US in 1984, it was initially lauded by American writers and public figures including Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Bernard Lewis, Martin Peretz, Alan Dershowitz, and others. It was—and still is, for some—held as "totemic" on the Jewish right. When it came out in the UK in 1985, it was met with a more hostile response, receiving critical reviews from publications such as the London Review of Books. The book provoked public debate, but has since been refuted by reputable scholars, in Israel and elsewhere.

Peters' claims in the book have been refuted by reputable scholars. arguing that its substance was based on extensive plagiarization of a work by Ernst Frankenstein published in the 1940s. His 1984 review was based on his doctoral thesis, later expanded and published in Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict. Finkelstein went into a close examination of all of Peters' notes and sources, and argued that her work persistently misrepresented or distorted the primary documents. His systematic critique of the book, attacking the two major pillars of Peters' thesis, which he regarded as a 'threadbare hoax' supported by the 'American intellectual establishment', had a major impact of later reviews of the book, especially those in Great Britain. Firstly, in a number of lists, tables and examples Finkelstein juxtaposes the historical evidence Peters presents with extended quotations of the primary and secondary source material showing its original context. By doing so Finkelstein argues that the "evidence that Peters adduces to document massive illegal Arab immigration into Palestine is almost entirely falsified." For example, Peters cites the Hope Simpson Enquiry as having said that "Egyptian labor is being employed" in supporting her thesis of Arab immigration to Palestine. The actual Hope Simpson Report passage says "[In Palestine] Egyptian labor is being employed in certain individual cases " In another instance, Peters cites the Anglo American Survey of Palestine as having found that "the 'boom' conditions in Palestine in the years 1934–1936 led to an inward movement into Palestine, particularly from Syria" when, as Finkelstein demonstrates, the Survey, in the very next sentence, notes that "The depression due to the state of public disorder during 1936–1939 led to the return of these people and also a substantial outward movement of Palestinian Arabs who thought it prudent to live for a time in Lebanon and Syria." Secondly, in a detailed analysis of the demographic study central to Peters' book, Finkelstein argued that Peters' conclusions are not supported by the data she presents. Finkelstein asserts that the study "is marred by serious flaws: (1) several extremely significant calculations are wrong; and (2) numbers are used selectively to support otherwise baseless conclusions". His primary contention is that Peters divided up Palestine into five regions for her demographic study to confuse the reader, assigning regions I, II, and IV as Israel and III and V as the West Bank, then claiming that most of the refugees from 1948 had actually emigrated from the West Bank and Gaza (Area V) a year earlier, when Finkelstein argues they just as well could have come from northern Israel (Area IV). Finkelstein's deconstruction of the evidential basis for what had become a best selling book, hailed for its quality by numerous American intellectuals, initially encountered difficulties in securing a publishing venue that might have given his findings a wider airing. In a retrospective reflection he opined that:

The periodicals in which From Time Immemorial had already been favorably reviewed refused to run any critical correspondence (e. g. The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary). Periodicals that had yet to review the book rejected a manuscript on the subject as of little or no consequence (e. g. The Village Voice, Dissent, The New York Review of Books). Not a single national newspaper or columnist contacted found newsworthy that a best selling, effusively praised "study" of the Middle East conflict was a threadbare hoax. He also said that many of the statistics Peters cited were in Turkish, a language that Peters was unable to read. Finkelstein also mocked as a racist absurdity Peters's argument that, because Palestinians ranged so much in skin tone, from fair skinned to dark brown skinned, that they could not be descended from the same land. On the occasion of Peters' death, Finkelstein, in a long interview with Adam Horowitz, contextualized the thesis and the book's reception within Israel's emerging image problem after its invasion of Lebanon in 1982.