FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine

by Joan Peters ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 1984

According to Peters, there is no--quote, unquote--""Palestinian problem"": the facts about who did what to whom are all wrong. In 600 pages of accusation and spot-documentation (there are some 1800 footnotes), tracing Arab-Jewish relations from bib; lical times onward, she rehashes much that is known if not always remembered: Arab exploitation of the Palestinian refugees as an anti-Israeli issue, in preference to resettling them; long Arab mistreatment of their Jewish populations, and the migration of those Jews to Israel. This she considers a population transfer, a real-property exchange, and a refutation of the charge that Israel is an outpost of European Jewry. ""In actuality, more than half of the people in Israel today are Jews or offspring of Jews who have fled from Arab brutality."" (So much, too, for ""the myth of 'harmony among Jews and Arabs' "" before 1948.) Those ""Sephardic Jews,"" moreover, maintained a devotion to the Holy Land that was only revived in Europe by the late-19th-century Zionist movement. Some of them, furthermore, maintained a continuous presence in Palestine--which (this is the crux of Peters' much-italicized argument) had little settled Arab population, as well as no ""Palestinian"" identity. Something like half the book is then devoted to demonstrating, both laboriously and heatedly, that Arabs followed Jews into Palestine for economic betterment, swelling the Arab population and occupying lands intended for Jewish settlement; that under the Mandate, the British blinked at this ""illegal"" immigration--while restricting Jewish immigration on grounds of Arab ""displacement""; that in ""the Jewish-settled areas of Western Palestine"" in particular, ""Jews were perhaps actually a marginal majority of the population"" in 1893, when development began. In Walter Laqueur's standard History of Zionism, however, all this is put plainly and succinctly: ""No one doubted that the Arabs had benefited from Jewish immigration. Their numbers had almost doubled between 1917 and 1940, wages had gone up, the standard of living had risen more than anywhere else in the Middle East. The Jews had certainly not displaced the Arabs. . . But the Jewish immigrants . . . had been instrumental in generating a Palestine Arab national movement""--to which the British, excepting Churchill, responded. Peters believes that her ""findings"" alter the present situation: abolish the ""myths,"" discredit the ""propaganda deception,"" and the Arabs ""may accede to a policy of genuine moderation,"" resettle the refugees, and abandon the idea of a Palestinian state. (Peters doesn't think much of Arab claims to the West Bank/East Palestine either--nor of ""guilty"" peacenik Jews.) For a positive, unemotional Israeli view, see, most recently and specifically, Mark Heller's A Palestinian State (1983).

Pub Date: May 2, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION