From Time Immemorial

Is it true that Arabs and Jews lived harmoniously in Arab lands before 1948? Did “Jewish terrorists” intrude into the Arabs’ traditionally poor but tranquil existence in ‘Palestine’ ....and when Palestine became Israel in 1948, “Jews forced the exodus of millions of Arabs from their plots of land inhabited by them from time immemorial?”

The historical detective work by Joan Peters has produced startling results, which should impact any discussion about the “Palestinian problem.”

The following review of Joan Peters’ landmark book, FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine is one of the most balanced and comprehensive I could find. No discussion of this controversial issue should exclude the factual information in this objective, well-researched account of what has transpired leading up to the volatile situation that exists today. I am wading through the 600 plus pages and finding the book fascinating and highly readable. Here is the Amazon review:

Conversion on the Road to Damascus
By Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA)

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 inconvenient 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 must read this superlative book, along with other works representing the opposing view, to arrive at a knowledgeable position. This is perhaps one of the most informative pieces of investigatory journalism on the market today.