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Title: From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine by Joan Peters ISBN: 0-9636242-0-2 Publisher: J K A P Pubns Pub. Date: 01 February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.83 (42 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Anecdotal and Simply Not True
Comment: This is a book covering a topic with enormous consequences: who has the right to Palestine? By means of a barrage of quotations, this book attempts to destroy the concept of a Palestinian people and any Palestinian rights to their land. The end result is far from being an inviting sight for interested readers: hundreds of pages of quotation strung after quotation, with editorial comments interjected everywhere and a voluminous set of endnotes that serves more to baffle than to elucidate. This style of writing makes it very hard to read and sort out.
I did not find the evidence presented compelling or convincing at all, particularly since there is no guarantee that the quotes selected as "evidence" are representative. The use of anecdotes makes it a good collection for those readers who prefer good stories. However the historical research is not scientific and has been discredited by most serious modern historians, such as Norman Finkelstein's "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict". One can always find exceptions that prove the rule, and this book tries hard to look for them.
At best "From Time Immemorial" is an interesting experiment of how one can arrive at completely false and illogical conclusions by following unscientific and unscholarly methods of research. A case in point, the book goes to great lengths to "prove" that 30,000 Arabs immigrated to Palestine from neighboring countries in the 1930s, without commenting a bit about the number of Arab emigrants from Palestine in the same amount of time, and while making light of the fact that Jewish immigration from Europe in the same decade was of the order of 600,000. Given that the Arab population in Palestine as early as 1914 was over 1 million [see for instance the article by John D. Whiting in the Mar. 1914 issue of National Geographic], I still don't see the book's point about those 30,000 Arab immigrants.
If you desire the truth so you can learn how to make peace work between the people in the Middle East, this is not the book. Instead, I recommend "The Palestinian People: A History" by Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, and "Palestinian Identity" by Rashid Khalidi.
Rating: 1
Summary: This is the worst book on the Middle East-distortions
Comment: This notorious book is a classic example of really bad historical study and writing. It is full of omissions and distortions. Often pure fantasy. It's also a bore to read, poorly written, tedious and plodding. There are too many good books on the Palestiniann-Israeli conflict even to bother with this one.
Rating: 3
Summary: everything is complicated...
Comment: My reaction to this book is mixed.
Many a screed against Israel has been justified by reference to the traditional failure of Western media to come to grips with the legitimate (historical, ongoing, and new) grievances of the Palestinians. If such extreme opposition is justified, then so is Ms. Peters' strident defense of Israel.
It is another question, however, whether the perspective she develops can be justified in its own right, without reference to those (other) extreme perspectives.
This is where things get complicated. It seems to me that she gives vastly insufficent attention to the legtimate claims and grievances of the Arab population of Palestine. If "the case for Israel" depends on this failing, then that case is in sorry shape indeed.
However, I do not believe that what's good in Ms. Peters's presentation really depends on this very serious moral and intellectual defect.
What is valuable in her presentation is that she gives center stage to issues that are often marginalized, and that deserve to be central at least some of the time. For example, there is the extent to which the same Arab countries that attacked the newly minted state of Israel (and that went on to incarcerate the Palestinians in the land they captured) ultimately contributed to Israel's legitimacy. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled at various points (during the 40's and 50's) from their ancestral homelands in Arab-dominated lands, and were absorbed by Israel. To say that these indigenous communities have no right to a land of their own anywhere in the Middle East/North Africa is to say, in effect, that it is not enough that 99.9% of this land must be Arab/Muslim-ruled, but that nothing short of 100% will do. Yet this position seems, in short, fanatical and racist.
Not that the bad behavior of Arab countries in any way diminishes the grievances of Palestinians against the Zionist settlers. The point is that the whole issue of indigenous Middle Eastern and North African--and, yes, Palestinian--Jews is often dismissed in a panic by sources eqully extreme as, but ideologically opposed to, Ms. Peters. Yet if the rights of indigenous peoples are at issue in the Arab/Israeli conflict, as they clearly are, then the rights of indigenous Jews cannot be dismissed simply because this angle happens to be inconvenient.
An interesting development regarding this book is this: Extreme critics often cite unfavorable reviews by Israeli scholars as evidence of both the book's bankruptcy and those scholars' (surprising) probity. But it is ironic that those same extreme critics are guilty of equally serious distortions of their own, and would never dream of adopting the vaunted standards of those Israeli scholars within their own ranks. (Indeed, even Chomsky lines up to take a pot shot at this book. Good for him, I would say, if his own record of skewing the facts did not make this so patently hypocritical. Yet even in Chomsky's work there is value...)
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Title: Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israel Conflict, Second Edition by Mitchell G. Bard ISBN: 0971294518 Publisher: A I C E Pub. Date: 10 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz ISBN: 047146502X Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism by Dore Gold ISBN: 0895261359 Publisher: Regnery Publishing Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren ISBN: 0195151747 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations by Benjamin Netanyahu, Binyamin Netanyahu ISBN: 0446523062 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: January, 2000 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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