From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine

'From Time Immemorial' is not about putting forward "one side" of the argument, or being 'biased'. That would entail having the facts, and spinning them a certain way. This book, as other reviewers have detailed at length, entirely invents facts and consists of an elaborate hoax. All respected historians have panned the book. It received a terribly poor reaction in Israel itself.

It's unfortunate that people feel they must 'support' this book because it furthers 'their' cause. All reasonable people seek peace in the region, and a fradulent thesis that wipes out an entire people will do nothing towards that end. Reading this book is an insult to many years of serious scholarship and writing on the issues of the region, by people of all nationalities (including many Israelis and Palestinians).

This book is only useful as a study in ficticious fraud; but if you plan to conduct such a study, I strongly suggest a visit to the library instead.

Conversion on the road to Damascus (2/7 people found this helpful)

In the first two paragraphs of FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL, author Joan Peters states:

"... The book was originally meant to be solely an investigation of the current plight of the 'Arab refugees,' as that subject was then still generally known ... 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..."

It is inferred that she gave credence to the observation by Pope John Paul II in 1980:

"...the Jewish people ... gave birth to the state of Israel (after) the extermination of so many sons and daughters, (but) at the same time, a sad condition was created for the Palestinian people who were excluded from their homeland. These are facts everyone can see."

Yet, near the end of the book on page 390, Peters states:

"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 'guerilla 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."

Saul of Tarsus himself, on the road to Damascus, hardly experienced such a reversal of beliefs. How did Joan arrive at this place?

Evidently, via exhaustively thorough research. FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL contains 121 pages of Notes and a 13-page Bibliography, both in a small type that challenged my aging vision. As one who hated being tasked with semester-ending research papers in high school, the enormity of Joan's project boggles the mind. The amount of information she presents, consistently referenced by the Notes, is prodigious. At times, it verges on the exhausting.

A convenient starting point for a summary of Joan's narrative can perhaps be taken at the beginning of Chapter 3, "The Arab Jew", when she returns to a time immemorial, circa 622 A.D., with the rise of Muhammad:

"... the Prophet Muhammad's original plan had been to induce the Jews to adopt Islam ... but the Jewish community rejected the Prophet Muhammad's religion ... Three years later, Arab hostility against the Jews commenced, when the Meccan army exterminated the Jewish tribe of Quraiza. As a result of the Prophet Muhammad's resentment, the Holy Koran itself contains many of his hostile denunciations of Jews and bitter attacks on Jewish tradition, which undoubtedly have colored the beliefs of religious Muslims down to the present ... Omar, the caliph who succeeded Muhammad, delineated in his Charter of Omar the twelve laws under which a dhimmi, or non-Muslim, was allowed to exist as a 'non-believer' among 'believers.' The Charter codified the conditions of life for Jews under Islam - a life which was forfeited if the dhimmi broke this law."

So, with Omar's Charter in place, Peters recounts the lives of the Jews in Arab countries - Yemen, Aden, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Arabia - down through the subsequent centuries to the present. It gives lie to the Arab assertion that "their Jews" have been treated well under Islam.

Joan then turns to the Roman principality of Syria Palestina, which was to become "Palestine". In explaining the demographics of the region over the centuries, it's here that the sheer volume of detailed information becomes almost eye-glazing, especially when she enumerates the numbers of Jews that migrated into Palestine from 1882 to 1948, as well as the number of Arabs that migrated, legally and illegally, into the same area during the same period. In short, Joan make crystal clear that the Jews never entirely left the Holy Land, and the number of truly indigenous Arabs in Jewish-settled Western Palestine that were ostensibly displaced by the newcomers has been wildly exaggerated. And, indeed, the number of displaced Arabs is matched by an equal number of Arab Jews that have fled persecution in their home countries to take refuge in what has become Israel. This population exchange is something not acknowledged by the Arab world.

Perhaps, for me, the most revealing chapters were those detailing Britain's handling of the Palestine Mandate, which was assigned to Britain's oversight after WWI by the League of Nations and which originally grew out of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which it was declared:

"His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object ..."

Yet, Britain's ultimate custody of the Mandate was reprehensibly and shamefully duplicitous. Fearful of offending the Arabs, the British government separated the National Home of the Jewish People into eastern and western sectors, the former - roughly three-quarters of the total land area of the Mandate - subsequently closed to Jewish settlement and eventually to become Jordan, and severely limited Jewish immigration into the latter while allowing rampant illegal Arab immigration into the same. The author's verdict on British actions and policy prior to and during WWII is positively scathing:

"... that the British virtually signed the death warrants for countless Jews in mortal danger by engaging the might of the British Empire to enforce strict laws against Jewish immigration; that simultaneously Government declared an excess of jobs amounting to a need of 'emergency' proportions, whereby Government not only encouraged or winked at, but officially enacted the illegal immigration of thousand of Arab indigents from neighboring and more distant lands, to take jobs in the Jewish National Home that might have saved the lives of Jewish concentration camp victims - the whole action, seen in context, matches the barbarism that the Allies were battling to defeat."

Mind you, all of this isn't a figment of Joan's imagination, but is rigorously documented and proved by contemporary records.

Any convert from one belief system to another, be it religious, political or whatever, may become overzealously energetic in espousing the new faith. Here, Peters expends her surge of energy in perhaps going further then necessary to make her bottom-line point, which is that the world is being cynically manipulated by Arab public relations when it comes to the conjoined questions of Palestine and the Palestinian refugees. However, Joan's devotion to her new-found cause doesn't produce in FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL a flawed work when it comes to historical facts, but rather one that provides more information than necessary to make the conclusion. Under the circumstances, this is understandable, but it does make for a long read.

Anti-Semites, Arab or otherwise, will positively loathe FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL for the truths it brings to the table. Israelis and those who sympathize with them should applaud (unless they're otherwise bent on hand-wringing). Those in between should read this superlative book, along with other works representing the opposing view, to arrive at a knowledgeable position. This is perhaps one of the finest pieces of investigatory journalism on the market today.

Disgraceful Fraud (5/7 people found this helpful)

This book is simply a despicable act of deception; a grand fraud from start to finish, and subsequently debunked as such. Thankfully, the author's 'academic' career finished with the exposure of this book for the fictitious libel it truly is. Holocaust denial is a crime: Peters 'decreased' the numbers of people who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 by the State of Israel to zero, and in doing so, she minimised the magnitude of the crime to nothing. The likes of Ernst Zundel and David Irving went to jail for doing something very similar. Joan Peters is a disgrace.

Check the sources (7/12 people found this helpful)

All the five star ratings for this book keep banging on about the sources and "facts" - "oh this book must be accurate because there are so many sources" - well why don't you actually read the sources the author refers to. Most of the quotes and facts are distorted, taken out of context and misrepresented. This has been proven time and time again by many people (Hitchens, Finkelstein, Chomsky, among many others) who checked and re-checked.
Also, why can't anyone justify the reason why the author has been so silent??? If the claims she makes in her book are true, wouldn't she be prepared to stand by them and speak up?

Useful as a text book about fraud and plagerism (9/15 people found this helpful)

This book is only useful if you want to understand the depths of fraud that some authors will go to. It has been proved to be one of the most fraudulent "hostorical" books about twenty years ago but is amazing how it still gets good ratings. I don't think it was even published in Hebrew as it was so inaccurate and discredited itself so much.

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine

Joan Peters

Reader Reviews:

Exposed and worthless (1/1 people found this helpful)

Conversion on the road to Damascus (2/7 people found this helpful)

Disgraceful Fraud (5/7 people found this helpful)

Check the sources (7/12 people found this helpful)

Useful as a text book about fraud and plagerism (9/15 people found this helpful)

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