Peters misinterpreted a key passage in a British report and then repeated the mistake in what Isaac termed “a lethal systematic error.” As Isaac notes, the errors in the book called into question Peters’s “ability to evaluate evidence” and highlighted her “carelessness.” She also showed a capacity to ignore evidence that did not back up specific points she was trying to make.
The frustrating aspect of all this is that, as Isaac wrote:
“There was no need for Miss Peters to overstate the precision or importance of her projections because there is overwhelming evidence, some of which (for example, in the studies of Fred Gottheil) she uses in her book, of extensive in-migration from the predominantly Arab to the Jewish-settled areas.”
Indeed, even the most adamant of her Israeli leftist critics – Yehoshua Porath of Hebrew University, who penned a highly influential takedown of From Time Immemorial in the New York Review of Books that essentially sealed its reputation as an unreliable polemic and that was quoted in Peters’s New York Times obituary – did not dispute this basic fact.
If there is a scholarly consensus that “during the Mandate the country absorbed 100,000 legal and illegal Arab immigrants and their offspring – a figure that is not very different from Miss Peters’s estimates,” then as Isaac correctly noted, in spite of some errors, Peters’s thesis was “generally sound.”
But the basic truth at the heart of the book was lost as critics piled on and wrongly accused Peters of constructing a myth that sought to delegitimize and ignore the complaints of Palestinians. That many Palestinians came from other Arab countries in order to take advantage of the enormous economic buildup in the country as the Jews began the process of transforming the place into the modern nation it is today is no myth. But that fact has to be suppressed in order to sustain the false notion that the Palestinians were the ancient and indigenous people who were thrown out to make way for foreign Jewish interlopers.
Indeed, the lesson dished out to Joan Peters and those who tried to defend her was that any doubt about the Palestinian narrative of grievance would be ruthlessly trashed.
Yet, as Isaac rightly noted in 1986, the emphasis on demographic issues missed the main point about the conflict. Palestinian national identity has always been inextricably tied to a denial of the legitimacy of Zionism and opposition to Jewish sovereignty over any part of the country. But Peters chipped away at the myth that their claim was that of a people living on their own soil fighting against alien colonizers. For that she had to be attacked whether she made some mistakes in her book or not. If the facts muddied the waters and made the Palestinian narrative less compelling, then the facts must be ignored or argued out of existence.
More than 30 years after the publication of this book, the Palestinians and their increasingly virulent supporters are still locked into a narrative in which there is little room for compromise. They are no more willing to examine the truth about their origin myths today than they were then and that is the reason they have continued to turn down offers for peace and statehood in order to persist in their futile struggle for Israel’s destruction.
While Joan Peters’s book was far from perfect, it attempted to point the world and the Palestinians in a direction where they might realize that their futile anti-Zionist ideology was built on a foundation of sand that should be replaced with one more compatible with a policy of coexistence. She deserves to be remembered with respect and honor for that effort rather than the smears that were hurled at her.