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From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine
This monumental and fascinating book, the product of seven years of original research, will forever change the terms of the debate about the conflicting claims of the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East.The weight of the comprehensive evidence found and brilliantly analyzed by historian and journalist Joan Peters answers many crucial questions, among Why are the Arab refugees from Israel seen in a different light from all the other, far more numerous peoples who were displaced after World War II? Why, indeed, are they seen differently from the Jewish refugees who were forced, in 1948 and after, to leave the Arab countries to find a haven in Israel? Who, in fact, are the Arabs who were living within the borders of present-day Israel, and where did they come from?Joan Peters's highly readable and moving development of the answers to these and related questions will appear startling, even to those on both sides of the argument who have considered themselves to be in command of the facts. On the basis of a definitive weight of hitherto unexamined population and other historical data, much of it buried in untouched archives, Peters demonstrates that Jews did not displace Arabs in Palestine-just the Arabs displaced Jews; that a hidden but major Arab migration and immigration took place into areas settled by Jews in pre-Israel Palestine; that a substantial number of the Arab refugees called Palestinians in reality had foreign roots; that for every Arab refugee who left Israel in 1948, there was a Jewish refugee who fled or was expelled from his Arab birthplace at the same time-today's much discussed Sephardic majority in Israel is in fact composed mainly of these Arab-born Jewish refugees or their offspring; that Britain, the Mandatory power, winked at and even encouraged Arab immigration into Palestine between the two World Wars; that by disguising the Arab immigrants as "indigenous native Palestinian Arabs," the British justified their restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement, dooming masses of European Jews to destruction in the Nazi camps.Joan Peters also unfolds a historical record to shatter the widely held belief that Arabs and Jews harmoniously coexisted for centuries in the Arab world-the fact is that the Jews, along with other non-Muslims, were second-class citizens, oppressed in the Muslim world for more than a millennium. And this continuing prejudicial tradition of hostility underlies, as well, every Arab action toward the state of Israel.In addition to her pioneering archival researches, Joan Peters has frequently traveled in the Middle East, conducting numerous interviews and gathering the personal observations of the first-rate reporter she is. The result is a book that has already had a major impact on policy discussions of one of the most vital and intractable of the world's problems, shrouded until now in a fog of misinformation and ignorance.Distributed exclusively by Jonathan David Publishers.
2099 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 26, 2023
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March 24, 2024
DID ‘PALESTINE’ TRULY EXIST HISTORICALLY, TO PRODUCE ‘REFUGEES’?
Joan Peters (1936-2015) was a journalist and broadcaster. She wrote in the first chapter of this 1984 book, “It was not until this book was well under way that I reluctantly confronted the historical factors underlying the ‘Palestinian problem.’ The book was originally meant to be solely an investigation of the current plight of the ‘Arab refugees’… The deprivation of Arab refugees’ human rights and the political manipulation of their unfortunate situation were unconscionable to me, particularly because it seemed their plight had been prolonged by a mechanism funded predominantly by contributions from the United States… I went to the Middle East during the 1973 Yom Kippur War… From that starting point, I came to learn that the Arabs weren’t the only unfortunates who fled from their homes at the time of the Arab-Israeli War of Independence… I was startled to find that, also around 1948, whole Jewish populations from numerous Arab countries had been forced to flee as refugees to Israel and elsewhere in the world.” (Pg. 3-4)
She continues, “while I was examining United Nations data from 1948 onward, a seemingly casual alteration of the definition of what constitutes an Arab ‘refugee’ from Israel caught my attention… the definition had been broadened to include as ‘refugees’ any persons who had been in ‘Palestine’ for only TWO YEARS before Israel’s statehood in 1948. The question that began to nag and unravel the outline of my book was: ‘Why was it necessary to amend that Arab refugee definition?’ … what the altered ‘two-years-presence’ definition … implied was a direct contradiction of assumed historical factors that are the very foundation of the current Arab claim of ‘legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to their homeland for a thousand or two thousand years.’” (Pg. 4-5)
She goes on, “Once that challenge to popular assumptions had become too compelling in disregard, I found myself troubled by other previously isolated and disparate items that had gone unrecognized during earlier research… What began as a closer look at the refugees led to reflecting on the lengths the Arabs were willing to go to, including their cruel indifference to the well-being of their own brethren, in their hostility toward a Jewish state. Concern and curiosity prompted a closer look at the ‘harmony’ between Muslims and Jews that had allegedly existed traditionally in Arab countries before the existence of Israel, from time immemorial.” (Pg. 7-8)
She notes, “According to various estimates, the accurate number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 was somewhere between 430,000 and 650,000… There was heated controversy over the exact number of Arab refugees who left Israel. In October 1948, there were three ‘official’ sets of figures… the Arab League’s official figures reported a total already greater by almost 150,000 than the higher of the UN figures. The swollen Arab League figures could never be verified because the Arabs refused to allow official censuses to be completed among the refugees. Observers have deduced that the Arab purpose was to seek greater world attention through an exaggerated population figure and thereby induce the UN to put higher pressure upon Israel, to force ‘repatriation.’” (Pg. 16-17)
She observes, “Since the rebirth of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands have swarmed into the new state. In 1948 more than 850,000 Jews lived in the Arab world. Today there are fewer than 29,000… Most of these Jewish refugees fled to Israel. Where did they come from with such urgency---and why? Contrary to the myth the Jews lived in harmony with the Arabs before the Zionist state, innumerable authoritative works document decisively the subjugation, oppression, and spasmodic anti-Jewish eruptions of violence that darkened the existence of the Jews in Muslim Arab countries. In truth, before the seventh-century advent of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam, Jews and Arabs did have harmonious relations… It was the Prophet Muhammed himself who attempted to negate the positive image of the Jew that had been prevalent earlier…” (Pg. 33)
She records, “Hitler’s crimes against the Jews have frequently been justified in Arab writings and pronouncements. In the 1950s, Minister Anwar Sadat published an open letter to Hitler, hoping he was still alive and sympathizing with his cause… Arab defense of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews has persisted: prominent Egyptian writer Anis Mansour wrote …’Hitler committed a grave error in not doing away with more of you…’ It was from such a climate that the Jews had escaped, seeking refuge in Israel.” (Pg. 37-38)
She summarizes, “Why then would ANY Arab-born Jew persist in living in a hostile Arab community that avowedly views him or her an ‘enemy,’ when there is an alternative? Unquestionably there are many surface explanations---loss of livelihood, fear of change… The process of rejection of one’s perilous predicament, however, is nearly analogous, by its very existence, to the avoidance mechanism that Jews have employed in so many unfortunate periods of Jewish history. They avoided perhaps because the knowledge or acceptance of such history required an awareness too painful to bear---that flight for the Jews was inexorable, at some point, from everywhere, and that any haven other than Israel was only transient.” (Pg. 134)
In the 19th century, she states, “The land called Palestine was never considered a nation at all, and surely could not have been regarded by the later immigrants as their ‘ancestral’ homeland, any more than a Norwegian immigrant to the United States would consider that his ‘ancestral’ home was the United States when his ancestors were born in Norway.” (Pg. 169)
She outlines, “it was long AFTER, NOT BEFORE, the Jews settled their new farms that the first claims of ‘Palestinian Arab’ identity and an ‘age-old’ tie to the land would be invented. Even the Arabs’ impressive propaganda effort could not obscure the unassailably recorded persistence of Jewish nationalism, or the lesser-known obstinate Jewish presence in Judah-cum-Palestine---a combination of historical factors that resulted in the international recognition of the Jews’ renewed national liberation. So the Arab world has attempted to match the Jewish history by inventing an ‘identity’ for the ‘Palestinian Arabs’ that WOULD, they reason, ‘counter Zionism,’ Thus has been largely accomplished by the cynical rewriting of history, which in turn can only result in a perversion of ‘justice.’” (Pg. 171)
She summarizes, “We have seen strong evidence that the Holy Land was inhabited only sparsely in the nineteenth century. For centuries the non-Jewish, particularly the Muslim, peoples who did inhabit the land had been largely composed of a revolving immigrant population of diverse ethnic origins who could not possibly have constituted a substantial indigenous ‘Palestinian’ population, much less a nation of inhabitants for ‘a thousand’ or ‘two thousand’ years. Rather, the majority of those inhabitants were migrants and peasants originating from other land, many of whom had been unscrupulously exploited by feudal or absentee landlords, moneylenders, and corrupt officials of the Turkish government. They in turn traditionally exploited and preyed upon the oppressed ‘dhimmi’ Jewish population.” (Pg. 196)
She notes, “Wages were rising. In 1937 land prices soared and it was solely Arab landsellers who were the beneficiaries, even while ‘in public’ they might be helping incite the Arab peasants to anti-Jewish violence and ‘denouncing’ the land sales.” (Pg. 323)
She argues, “The Arabs believe that by creating an Arab Palestinian identity, at the sacrifice of the well-being and the very lives of the ‘Arab refugees,’ they will accomplish politically and through ‘guerrilla warfare’ what they failed to achieve in military combat: the destruction of Israel---the unacceptable independent ‘dhimmi’ state. That is the ‘heart of the matter.’” (Pg. 391-392)
She points out, “Today’s twelve- or twenty-year-old ‘Arab Palestinian people’ were not yet born when the Arab exodus from Israel occurred. Most have no notion themselves of the prior history of in-migration and immigration to the Jewish enclaves of settlement within Western Palestine. They do, however, know that to verbalize out loud the thought that it was their Arab ‘brothers’ that kept them in a suspended state of animation called ‘refugeehood’ would bring ostracism and perhaps worse. The Arab Palestine ‘Liberation’ Organization ‘eliminates traitors,’ as the PLO’s United Nations ‘observer’ Terzi declared in 1978.” (Pg. 396)
She concludes, “In the end, Britain’s systematic policy of virtual exclusion of Jews had resulted in utter disaster… for the Arabs… it was disaster then to be faced, ironically, with the anathema of a ‘dhimmi’ nation that the Jews achieved ultimately because of the world’s horror at the senseless slaughter of those six million; for the Jews, there was disaster in the tragic timing of Israel’s independence: had it been unrepressed it would have culminated in time to preclude the holocaust… Today, the explicitly stated Arab goals appear to be gaining credence once again through the medium of propaganda and twisted rhetoric, unquestioned by those of us who haven’t known the questions to ask, and unhindered by many who have guessed. Those who understand the reality ought to demand more. Throughout the Mandate, the British attempted to gain peace by appeasing intimidation and terror. It was a self-imposed intimidation to a perception of oil-power and force that the Western powers by themselves in fact evoked… But the lesson ought to be clear by now that the West’s continuation of the protracted British policy of submission has not brought a peaceful life. As Winston Churchill cautioned in 1939, the acts that we engage in for appeasement today we will have to remedy at far greater cost and remorse tomorrow.” (Pg. 412)
Obviously controversial (you might read Norman Finkelstein’s book ‘Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict’ for an opposing view), this book is still of great interest to those studying the conflicts of the Israel/Palestine question.
Joan Peters (1936-2015) was a journalist and broadcaster. She wrote in the first chapter of this 1984 book, “It was not until this book was well under way that I reluctantly confronted the historical factors underlying the ‘Palestinian problem.’ The book was originally meant to be solely an investigation of the current plight of the ‘Arab refugees’… The deprivation of Arab refugees’ human rights and the political manipulation of their unfortunate situation were unconscionable to me, particularly because it seemed their plight had been prolonged by a mechanism funded predominantly by contributions from the United States… I went to the Middle East during the 1973 Yom Kippur War… From that starting point, I came to learn that the Arabs weren’t the only unfortunates who fled from their homes at the time of the Arab-Israeli War of Independence… I was startled to find that, also around 1948, whole Jewish populations from numerous Arab countries had been forced to flee as refugees to Israel and elsewhere in the world.” (Pg. 3-4)
She continues, “while I was examining United Nations data from 1948 onward, a seemingly casual alteration of the definition of what constitutes an Arab ‘refugee’ from Israel caught my attention… the definition had been broadened to include as ‘refugees’ any persons who had been in ‘Palestine’ for only TWO YEARS before Israel’s statehood in 1948. The question that began to nag and unravel the outline of my book was: ‘Why was it necessary to amend that Arab refugee definition?’ … what the altered ‘two-years-presence’ definition … implied was a direct contradiction of assumed historical factors that are the very foundation of the current Arab claim of ‘legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to their homeland for a thousand or two thousand years.’” (Pg. 4-5)
She goes on, “Once that challenge to popular assumptions had become too compelling in disregard, I found myself troubled by other previously isolated and disparate items that had gone unrecognized during earlier research… What began as a closer look at the refugees led to reflecting on the lengths the Arabs were willing to go to, including their cruel indifference to the well-being of their own brethren, in their hostility toward a Jewish state. Concern and curiosity prompted a closer look at the ‘harmony’ between Muslims and Jews that had allegedly existed traditionally in Arab countries before the existence of Israel, from time immemorial.” (Pg. 7-8)
She notes, “According to various estimates, the accurate number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 was somewhere between 430,000 and 650,000… There was heated controversy over the exact number of Arab refugees who left Israel. In October 1948, there were three ‘official’ sets of figures… the Arab League’s official figures reported a total already greater by almost 150,000 than the higher of the UN figures. The swollen Arab League figures could never be verified because the Arabs refused to allow official censuses to be completed among the refugees. Observers have deduced that the Arab purpose was to seek greater world attention through an exaggerated population figure and thereby induce the UN to put higher pressure upon Israel, to force ‘repatriation.’” (Pg. 16-17)
She observes, “Since the rebirth of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands have swarmed into the new state. In 1948 more than 850,000 Jews lived in the Arab world. Today there are fewer than 29,000… Most of these Jewish refugees fled to Israel. Where did they come from with such urgency---and why? Contrary to the myth the Jews lived in harmony with the Arabs before the Zionist state, innumerable authoritative works document decisively the subjugation, oppression, and spasmodic anti-Jewish eruptions of violence that darkened the existence of the Jews in Muslim Arab countries. In truth, before the seventh-century advent of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam, Jews and Arabs did have harmonious relations… It was the Prophet Muhammed himself who attempted to negate the positive image of the Jew that had been prevalent earlier…” (Pg. 33)
She records, “Hitler’s crimes against the Jews have frequently been justified in Arab writings and pronouncements. In the 1950s, Minister Anwar Sadat published an open letter to Hitler, hoping he was still alive and sympathizing with his cause… Arab defense of the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews has persisted: prominent Egyptian writer Anis Mansour wrote …’Hitler committed a grave error in not doing away with more of you…’ It was from such a climate that the Jews had escaped, seeking refuge in Israel.” (Pg. 37-38)
She summarizes, “Why then would ANY Arab-born Jew persist in living in a hostile Arab community that avowedly views him or her an ‘enemy,’ when there is an alternative? Unquestionably there are many surface explanations---loss of livelihood, fear of change… The process of rejection of one’s perilous predicament, however, is nearly analogous, by its very existence, to the avoidance mechanism that Jews have employed in so many unfortunate periods of Jewish history. They avoided perhaps because the knowledge or acceptance of such history required an awareness too painful to bear---that flight for the Jews was inexorable, at some point, from everywhere, and that any haven other than Israel was only transient.” (Pg. 134)
In the 19th century, she states, “The land called Palestine was never considered a nation at all, and surely could not have been regarded by the later immigrants as their ‘ancestral’ homeland, any more than a Norwegian immigrant to the United States would consider that his ‘ancestral’ home was the United States when his ancestors were born in Norway.” (Pg. 169)
She outlines, “it was long AFTER, NOT BEFORE, the Jews settled their new farms that the first claims of ‘Palestinian Arab’ identity and an ‘age-old’ tie to the land would be invented. Even the Arabs’ impressive propaganda effort could not obscure the unassailably recorded persistence of Jewish nationalism, or the lesser-known obstinate Jewish presence in Judah-cum-Palestine---a combination of historical factors that resulted in the international recognition of the Jews’ renewed national liberation. So the Arab world has attempted to match the Jewish history by inventing an ‘identity’ for the ‘Palestinian Arabs’ that WOULD, they reason, ‘counter Zionism,’ Thus has been largely accomplished by the cynical rewriting of history, which in turn can only result in a perversion of ‘justice.’” (Pg. 171)
She summarizes, “We have seen strong evidence that the Holy Land was inhabited only sparsely in the nineteenth century. For centuries the non-Jewish, particularly the Muslim, peoples who did inhabit the land had been largely composed of a revolving immigrant population of diverse ethnic origins who could not possibly have constituted a substantial indigenous ‘Palestinian’ population, much less a nation of inhabitants for ‘a thousand’ or ‘two thousand’ years. Rather, the majority of those inhabitants were migrants and peasants originating from other land, many of whom had been unscrupulously exploited by feudal or absentee landlords, moneylenders, and corrupt officials of the Turkish government. They in turn traditionally exploited and preyed upon the oppressed ‘dhimmi’ Jewish population.” (Pg. 196)
She notes, “Wages were rising. In 1937 land prices soared and it was solely Arab landsellers who were the beneficiaries, even while ‘in public’ they might be helping incite the Arab peasants to anti-Jewish violence and ‘denouncing’ the land sales.” (Pg. 323)
She argues, “The Arabs believe that by creating an Arab Palestinian identity, at the sacrifice of the well-being and the very lives of the ‘Arab refugees,’ they will accomplish politically and through ‘guerrilla warfare’ what they failed to achieve in military combat: the destruction of Israel---the unacceptable independent ‘dhimmi’ state. That is the ‘heart of the matter.’” (Pg. 391-392)
She points out, “Today’s twelve- or twenty-year-old ‘Arab Palestinian people’ were not yet born when the Arab exodus from Israel occurred. Most have no notion themselves of the prior history of in-migration and immigration to the Jewish enclaves of settlement within Western Palestine. They do, however, know that to verbalize out loud the thought that it was their Arab ‘brothers’ that kept them in a suspended state of animation called ‘refugeehood’ would bring ostracism and perhaps worse. The Arab Palestine ‘Liberation’ Organization ‘eliminates traitors,’ as the PLO’s United Nations ‘observer’ Terzi declared in 1978.” (Pg. 396)
She concludes, “In the end, Britain’s systematic policy of virtual exclusion of Jews had resulted in utter disaster… for the Arabs… it was disaster then to be faced, ironically, with the anathema of a ‘dhimmi’ nation that the Jews achieved ultimately because of the world’s horror at the senseless slaughter of those six million; for the Jews, there was disaster in the tragic timing of Israel’s independence: had it been unrepressed it would have culminated in time to preclude the holocaust… Today, the explicitly stated Arab goals appear to be gaining credence once again through the medium of propaganda and twisted rhetoric, unquestioned by those of us who haven’t known the questions to ask, and unhindered by many who have guessed. Those who understand the reality ought to demand more. Throughout the Mandate, the British attempted to gain peace by appeasing intimidation and terror. It was a self-imposed intimidation to a perception of oil-power and force that the Western powers by themselves in fact evoked… But the lesson ought to be clear by now that the West’s continuation of the protracted British policy of submission has not brought a peaceful life. As Winston Churchill cautioned in 1939, the acts that we engage in for appeasement today we will have to remedy at far greater cost and remorse tomorrow.” (Pg. 412)
Obviously controversial (you might read Norman Finkelstein’s book ‘Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict’ for an opposing view), this book is still of great interest to those studying the conflicts of the Israel/Palestine question.
March 4, 2024
Absolutely a must read for everyone. It gives a thorough history of the Israel/Palestine conflict and is written by a person who had a preconceived favoritism toward the Palestinians. After conducting her extensive research she did a 180. She realized how much the narrative was and is dictated by proArab countries, trying to keep Israel from having its rightful homeland. She discusses the colonizer/settler situation and even the 2 state scenario offered by Israel numerous times. I sure wish it would be printed again. It is available on Internet Archive
May 2, 2024
A giant load of Zionist nonsense.
Do not even fire off one retinal cone reading this crap.
Do not even fire off one retinal cone reading this crap.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews