Books
Whose country is it?
Charles Glass
From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine Joan Peters (Michael Joseph £15) Theodor Herzl, the father of modern I. Zionism, wrote in his 1902 novel Altneuland (Old New Land) that, in a Jewish Palestine, Arab villages and towns would prosper as they never had before. Rechid Bey, an Arab character in the book, tells a European visitor that the Arabs have nothing but warm feelings towards the Jews. 'Would you regard as intruders and robbers those who don't take anything from you, but give you some- thing?' Rechid Bey asks. The Jews have enriched us, why should we be angry then? They live with us like brothers, why should we not love them?'
Herzl was assuaging the consciences of some of his followers whose misgivings about displacing the indigenous population threatened their loyalty to Zionist col- onisation of Palestine. When his deputy, Max Nordau, first learned 'that Palestine was already inhabited by large numbers of Arabs, he told Herzt, 'I never realised this — we are committing an injustice.' Later Zionists were aware of the existence of Arabs in Palestine, and many of them believed they would have to use violence to displace them. 'Has it ever been known that a people would willingly give up its soil?' asked Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Re- visionist Zionist and spiritual father of Menachem Begin. 'No more would the Palestine Arabs yield their sovereignty without force.' In 1938, David Ben Gu- rion, who would become the Jewish State's first prime minister, told a Jewish audi- ence, 'The country is theirs [the Arabs'], because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down.'
Joan Peters, an American who was in 1964-65 a woman's page and feature writer for the Chicago Daily News and in 1977 a consultant to the Carter White House, has written From Time Immemorial, her first book, to recast the historical record. Her conclusions, if true, would tell Herzl that he need not have included Rechid Bey and the thriving Arab villages in his vision of the Jewish State, reassure Max Nordau that no injustice was committed, inform Jabotinsky that there were no Arabs with soil to give up and admonish Ben Gurion that the country was never 'theirs'.
This extraordinary book, so highly praised by the American intellectual com- munity and now in its seventh printing in the US, asserts that there were virtually no Arabs in Palestine before Jewish colonisa- tion began in 1882; that the Arabs who were living in Palestine in 1948 had mi- grated there from neighbouring countries to enjoy the benefits of Zionist develop- ment; that Jews had never lived without persecution under Arab rule; that those Arabs who fled Palestine in 1947-48 did so at the request of Arab leaders or of their own free will; and that most of the Arab refugees were returning to the lands they had originally come from. 'Thus,' in the words of a fulsome review in the American magazine Commentary, 'the "Palestinian problem" lacks firm grounding.' The Guardian Weekly's American reviewer concluded that the Palestinian refugees were 'not the problem, but the excuse. The problem, her book shows clearly, is irra- tional hatred [of Jews by Arabs]: The American historian Barbara Tuchman, in a testimonial which appears on the book's cover and in its advertising, wrote, 'This book is a historical event in itself, a discovery that has lain in the dark until its revelation by Joan Peters' unrelenting re- search.'
Joan Peters began her 'unrelenting re- search', she says in her opening chapter, as an investigation into 'the current plight of the "Arab refugees". During her labours, she discovered that 'the Arabs weren't the only unfortunates who fled from their homes' and that 'looking for official con- sideration of these "other", Jewish re- fugees, I found little or none'. Finally, she writes, she noticed that the standard defini- tion of refugee (one forced from his 'usual' or 'permanent' home) had been 'broadened to include as "refugees" any persons wh.o had been in "Palestine" for only two years before Israel's statehood in 1948' (the italics in this passage, like those which appear on almost every page of the book, are Ms Peters'). This apparent anomaly led her to read, if not to under- stand, Ottoman and British Mandate cen- sus reports and demographic analyses of immigration and emigration. Her uncon- ventional interpretation of the reports, all of which are well known to scholars, led to her startling conclusions.
Ms Peters' discovery that there were Jewish refugees from the Arab countries after 1948 is hardly new. Despite her disclaimer that she found practically no official consideration of these refugees, there is in fact massive documentation on the exile of Oriental Jews (much of which Ms Peters cites in her own footnotes). Her contention that the definition of refugee was 'broadened' in the case of Palestinian Arabs is not true. According to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the definition was 'narrowed' in the case of Palestinian Arabs to exclude people, main- ly Bedouins, who could not prove they had been resident in Palestine for at least two years. The United Nations High Commis- sioner for Refugees' office in London said that the Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are required to give such proof and that, for example, Ethiopian refugees do not have to prove any previous residence in Ethiopia. UNRWA said they plan to write to Ms Peters and her Amer- ican publishers, Harper and Row, about this distortion. But if the experience of Norman Finkelstein, a graduate student at Princeton University who is writing his doctoral thesis on Zionism, is anything to go by, the UNRWA letter will be dismis- sed. Finkelstein confronted Harper and . Row with evidence of a clear instance of plagiarism on pages 158-159, passages which are lifted almost word for word from Ernst Frankenstein's Justice for My People (Dial Press, 1944). Finkelstein pointed oat that Peters not only copied Frankenstem.s words without attribution, she copied his footnotes and even one of his errors (that, an 1844 expedition had found '8,000 Turks in Jaffa). The Harper and Row editor responded only that, had he known what Ms Peters had done, he might have hand- led the 'mechanics of citation' differently. The plagiarised section of the book, interestingly, quotes 19th-century travellers' accounts of Palestine as a waste- land, to prove that it was a land without people waiting only to be reclaimed bY Jewish settlers. But even the unplagiansed references to original sources are selective. For example, she quotes Mark Twain's The, Innocents Abroad on 'these unpeople,n deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness • She does not reveal that Twain found that the Arab town of Nablus was 'under high cultivation, and the soil is exceedinglY black and fertile'. Nor does she tell us that Twain wrote, 'We finally came to the noble groves of orange trees in which the Oneo- tal city of Jaffa lies buried.' That was in 1867, nearly 20 years before Herzl. wrote The Jewish State and well before Zionist colonisation made the desert bloom. . The core of Ms Peters' argument is demographic. She relies on an article bY Professor Kemal Karpat (International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 9, n°' 2, 1978), although she does not say that her conclusions differ sharply from those of Professor Karpat. She says that KarPai 5 analysis confirms that in 1882 there were 60,000 Jews and 92,300 non-Jews (38,000 of whom were Christians) in that portion of Palestine which became the Jewish State 111 1948. She concludes that 'Jews were perhaps actually a marginal majority'. (She must mean plurality.) Karpat's study, however, shows nothing of the kind. The actual figures his article gives are: 371,969 Muslims and 9,817 Jews in all of what became British Mandate Palestine. Even when the subdistricts of Palestine are separated into Jewish-settled and other areas, the figures do not add up. One American reviewer (Bill Farrell, writing in the Journal of Palestine Studies) discussed Ms Peters' use of his work with Professor Karpat, who told Farrell that Peters' con- clusions were wrong and that her assertion that Ottoman district boundaries were the same as British district boundaries (upon which she relies for analysis of population growth) was also incorrect.
Ms Peters says later that there were 141,000 Muslims in Palestine in 1882 and 252,000 in 1895 (relying on two different, non-academic sources, the writer Vital Cuinet and Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine). Her use of these dubious sources is central to her case: 'Even if we assume a high rate of natural increase of 1.5 per cent per annum for that thirteen year period, the popula- tion would not have increased to more than 170,000 or so. . . . The only plausible answer is that [Arab immigration] coin- cided exactly with the time Jewish develop- ment increased.' She then takes the reader into the Mandate period (1919 to 1948), to accuse Britain of preventing the Jews from becoming a majority in Palestine by turn- ing a blind eye to illegal Arab immigration while restricting the entrance of Jews. She uses the Palestine Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development (1930) by John Hope Simpson and the Anglo- American Commission of Inquiry Report (1946) to support her case. (She never mentions the first American inquiry, the King-Crane Commission Report of 1919. Although the Commissioners began their study with a sympathy for Zionism, they concluded that 'the Zionists looked for- ward to a practically complete disposses- sion of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine' and that this `would be a gross violation of the principle [of self- determination] and of the people's rights . . .') She quotes Hope Simpson's statement that `Egyptian labour is being employed' to prove that many so-called Palestinians were Egyptian immigrants without mentioning the next part of the sentence which reads 'in certain individual cases'. She says that Hope Simpson found that Arab illegal immigrants took places meant for legal Jewish immigrants, when the Report clearly meant that illegal Jewish immigrants would be subtracted from the legal Jewish quota. She neglects to men- tion that Hope Simpson, far from drawing the conclusion she draws for him, wrote that the Zionists were dispossessing the Arabs: 'Not only can he [the Arab peasant] never hope to cultivate it [the land sold to Zionists], but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived forever from employment on that land.'
One piece of evidence which she adduces to prove that there was massive Arab immigration during the Mandate is an interview with the governor of the Hauran in Syria (from La Syrie, 12 August 1934), alleging that between 30,000 and 36,000 Hauranis had gone to Palestine in search of work. She refers to this exodus at least seven times in the book and asserts it had been confirmed by the Mandates Commission. However, the Commission did not confirm the report, and one Com- missioner reported that it was a 'gross exaggeration', although this pertinent evi- dence is ignored by Ms Peters. She does not mention the Anglo-American Commis- sion's study, which she quotes approvingly on other subjects, on this issue: 'The depression due to the state of public disorder during 1936-9 led to the return of these people [to the Hauran].'
She attributes the growth of the Arab population in some areas to in-migration, that is, movement of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza areas to that portion of Palestine which became the Jewish State in 1948. That means, to her, that many of the refugees who fled Israel in 1947-48 to the West Bank and Gaza were merely return- ing to the parts of Palestine from which they had come. But her evidence does not support her conclusions.
In footnote 73 on page 528, Ms Peters concedes that 343,000 Arabs in 1948 were genuine refugees. She does not, however, suggest that Israel allow them to return to their homes, since, according to her, they fled on the instructions of Arab leaders. She repeats the old canard that Arab radio broadcasts repeatedly ordered the Arabs to leave, ignoring the study done by Erskine Childers of all the radio broadcasts monitored in 1948 by the BBC. Childers, writing in the Spectator on 12 May 1961, noted, 'There was not a single order, or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio sta- tion, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.'
CChilders found that the Irgun radio told the Arabs that typhus and cholera were about to break out; The Zionist writers Jon and David Kimche (Both Sides of the Hill, 1960) wrote that the Haganati forced 60,000 Arabs out of the towns of Ramle and Lydda. Menachem Begin, in his book The Revolt, said that the psychological effect of the killing by his Irgun troops of 250 villagers in Deir Yassin was decisive in forcing the Arabs to flee: 'In the rest of the country too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces . . . . The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particu- lar in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa.' For Ms Peters, Deir Yassin was 'an Arab village harbouring Iraqi and other Arab troops'. She cites no source for this incredible observation. Jon Kimche wrote: Deir Yassin was one of the few Arab villages whose inhabitants had refused permission for foreign Arab volun- teers to use it as a base for operations . . . nothing they [the Irgun and Stern gang] have said has explained, or can explain away, the murder of some 250 innocent Arabs, among them more than a hundred women and children . . . It was a cheap, ghastly and disgusting publicity • stunt.' Kimche's account is echoed in reports by the Red Cross and by aa eyewitness, Gen. Meir Pail (in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahranot, 20 April 1972). The 'publicity stunt', undertaken a month before Israel declared independ- ence and the neighbouring Arab states began their invasion, caused a general panic among the Palestinians Arabs, as well it might. After the Arabs fled Palestine, the Arab states expelled most of their ancient Jewish populations. For Peters, the expulsions were more a part of age-old anti-Jewish hatred than a reaction to Zionism. Her account of Arab history is replete with examples of persecution of Jews, although she ignores the flowering of Jewish civilisa. tion in Muslim Spain. She calls the Arabs 'schizoid' in two passages, a descriptie'n that would qualify as racist if applied t° another race. She quotes the historian D. Gotein repeatedly on his documenteu, cases of harm done to Jews by Arabs, hilt she leaves out .the other side of that onia (for example, Gotein's observation that 'the Hebrew language developed its gram mar and vocabulary on the model of the Arabic language. The revival of Hebrew la our times would be entirely unthinkable without the services rendered to it bY Arabic in various ways a thousand Years. ago,' in his book, Jews and Arabs: Thar, Contacts Throughout the Ages.) In a list °` Arab crimes against Jews, she mentions that Gamal Abdel Nasser hanged nv°t Egyptian Jews in Cairo in 1955. Tha sounds reprehensible, until one checks the historical record surrounding the L Affair' in which Israeli intelligence‘agael.tils were captured after planting bombs In American and British offices in Egypt in ail effort to sour Egyptian-Western relations. In her account of the Jewish expulstont from Iraq, she neglects to mention Zion's activities in Iraq which helped to spark the • exodus. (The US military attaché in Bag!! dad at the time, Wilbur Crane Evelan,o, wrote in his book Ropes of Sand, attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti- American and to terrorise the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the US Infornla- tion Service library and in synagogues' Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews„ to flee to Israel') She also neglects. t" mention how little Oriental Jewish Ith. migration to Palestine there was befrnt 1948 and that after 1948 this immigration, far from stretching the resources of !he nascent Jewish state, gave it the population base it needed to survive. There are so many errors, distortioods and omissions in this book that it wo°1„ take another book, rather than a review, r" list and explain them all. There is a case t° be made for Zionism, but this is not it. la one sense, however, Barbara Tuchrnan may be right. From Time Immemorial is a, historical event in itself, like Clifford Irving's 'autobiography' of Howar Hughes.
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