The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

It has become open season on Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, although Yehoshua Porath’s review [NYR, January 16] is one of the more restrained of the attacks upon it made in the past fifteen months or so. Mrs. Peters has brought this upon herself to a large extent, for, as I wrote in my review of the book in The New Republic of April 23, 1984, “many of its valuable points are buried in passages of furious argumentative overkill,” and too much of its more than 600 pages is given over to very conventional polemics. Since then, some patient researchers have found numerous examples of sloppiness in her scholarship and an occasional tendency not to grasp the correct meaning of a context from which she has extracted a quotation. All in all, her book is marked—and marred—by an over-eagerness to score a huge and definitive polemical triumph, which has caused her too often to leave prudence and responsibility behind.

But the fact remains that there is an original and significant argument at the heart of her book, and this has scarcely been dealt with by critics, apart from Mr. Porath, who only weakly challenged it. He writes:

Much of Mrs. Peters’s book argues that at the same time that Jewish immigration to Palestine was rising, Arab immigration to the parts of Palestine where Jews had settled also increased. Therefore, in her view, the Arab claim that an indigenous Arab population was displaced by Jewish immigrants must be false, since many Arabs only arrived with the Jews.

This is a correct summary of her main point, which, as Mr. Porath justly recognizes, stands on very problematical terrain—the demographic history of modern Palestine, a subject that “cannot be summed up briefly,” according to Mr. Porath, who adds however that “its main features are clear enough and they are very different from the fanciful description Mrs. Peters gives.” But except for mentioning one widely criticized statistic of Mrs. Peters’s regarding Palestine demography in the 1890s—with which I shall deal below—Mr. Porath does not go on to demonstrate any significant difference between her view of that history and his own. On the contrary, he joins her in accepting clear indications of what the British Mandatory authorities deemed an “abnormally high (and possibly unprecedented)” rate of increase in the Arab population in modern times. The difference between them lies simply in the reason assigned for this growth. Mr. Porath agrees with the British authorities in attributing it to “natural increase” at a rate greatly accelerated by improvements in health facilities, whereas Mrs. Peters insists it can only be accounted for in full by the immigration factor.

Unfortunately, the British, while keeping thorough records of Jewish immigration, did not keep any for Arabs migrating overland into the country, so Mrs. Peters has had to resort to circumstantial evidence, inference, and deduction to make her case. As Mr. Porath puts it, “she has apparently searched through documents for any statement to the effect that Arabs entered Palestine.” And it must be granted that she has achieved ample results, though, of course, the statements she has collected are impressionistic and have no statistical value. Mr. Porath therefore maintains that “even if we put together all the cases she cites, one cannot escape the conclusion that most of the growth of the Palestinian Arab community resulted from a process of natural increase.” But he goes no further than this flat assertion of his opinion against hers in challenging Mrs. Peters’s main argument.

Yet neither he nor any of the detractors I have read has taken on the most striking of her demonstrations in favor of her case, dealing with the phenomenon she calls “in-migration”—that is, the movement of Arabs from other parts of Palestine into the main areas of Jewish settlement. She shows that in the years 1893 to 1947, while the Palestinian Arab population slightly more than doubled in areas where no Jews were settled, it quintupled in the main areas of Jewish settlement. How can this difference be accounted for without including Arab migration as a factor?

This particular demonstration, it should further be pointed out, is in no way affected by the debate that has arisen over Mrs. Peters’s use of a source on Palestinian population in the 1890s that some have found questionable (including Anthony Lewis, in a woeful misparaphrase of the relevant passage, in The New York Times of January 13, 1986). Still, it is worth dwelling on that matter for a moment, since Mrs. Peters’s approach to the problem had more merit than her critics have allowed. Pursuing her case back to the earliest significant example for which there was evidence, Mrs. Peters states that in 1893 about 92,000 non-Jews were living within the main areas of Jewish settlement, alongside a Jewish population that she gives as just under 60,000. If correct, these figures would indicate that, as far back as 1893, the Jews not only were already far from being a small minority in the areas where they had settled, but were even—if one divides the non-Jewish population into Muslim and Christian—the largest single group there.

But here is the problem. Whereas her figures for non-Jews in this passage are based on the official Ottoman census of 1893, which is generally considered by scholars to be reliable with certain qualifications, her Jewish population figure does not come from that source—which counts only 9,817 Jews in all of Palestine! Instead, she has turned for her Jewish figure to a French traveler and geographer of that era, Vital Cuinet, whose statistical estimates have undergone some severe scholarly criticism in our own time. Yet Mrs. Peters offers instances in which Cuinet’s figures are not far from those of the Ottoman census, and the only serious discrepancy between the two sources regarding the material she uses is in the Jewish population count. Why, then, in this one instance, has she considered it permissible to eschew the Ottoman statistic in making her case?

Obviously because, in this instance, the Ottoman figure is patently absurd. A good deal of responsible, if impressionistic, counting of the Palestine population had been done by that time, and the general consensus among Western observers was that the Jewish population of Jerusalem alone was something more than double that of the official Ottoman figure for the Jewish population of the whole country. But how could such a huge discrepancy have come about? Mrs. Peters offers an explanation, quoted in all fairness by Mr. Porath, that makes a good deal of sense: “The Ottoman Census,” she writes, “apparently registered only known Ottoman subjects; since most Jews had failed to obtain Ottoman citizenship…, a representative figure of the Palestinian Jewish population could not be extrapolated from the 1893 census.” It is a pity that Mrs. Peters has buried this sound bit of reasoning in an obscure part of her book—as a footnote within an appendix—so that her unheralded switch in the main text from the Ottoman figures to Cuinet’s has the look of a suspect sleight-of-hand maneuver, which has therefore generated a good deal of hostility. I can only add in this connection that, even if Cuinet’s figure for the Jewish population of Palestine in the mid-1890s is not the last word, it is at any rate much closer to correct than the Ottoman one.

But the only place at which I find Mr. Porath’s otherwise fair-minded review descending into the kind of imbalance that has been displayed by Mrs. Peters’s more vehement detractors is in his remarks about “references to the Arabs surrounding them everywhere in Palestine” made in the writings of early Zionist settlers. In the first place, Mrs. Peters has not overlooked Asher Druyanov’s collection of some of these writings, as Mr. Porath suggests she has: she quotes from it on page 252, with full citation in the end notes. But, what is far more important, Mr. Porath’s image of “Arabs surrounding them everywhere” is tendentious. Let me quote two relevant passages from the memoirs of one of those early Zionist settlers, Rachel Yannait Ben-Zvi. Describing her first arrival in Palestine in 1908, she writes of walking through the utterly Arab port town of Jaffa:

The stream of pedestrians pushed us into the main street. Up the street strode a camel, stretching its neck, its nostrils quivering, sniffing, its hump heaving and falling. A Beduin led it on a rope. I felt like greeting the man of the desert because our forefathers had been so like him.

So much for Arab-filled Jaffa and many smaller communities besides. Now here she is a few days later, on the train from Jaffa to Jerusalem, just past the Ramle station:

Desolate stretches of uncultivated fields spread all the way to the horizon, up to the far off Samarian hills visible through a bluish haze. The sight of all the barren ground filled me with a kind of joy—joy that fate had kept the soil of Judea uninhabited and unworked…. In my mind’s eye I saw it brought back to life by the hands of Jews returning from far away.

In the light of richly human observations like these, it seems fatuous to depict a Palestine at the turn of the century either empty of Arabs or covered all over with them, depending on the position one takes in the debate about Mrs. Peters’s findings.

Ronald Sanders

New York City

To the Editors:

Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial has, broadly speaking, been received in two ways at two times. Early reviews treated her book as a serious contribution to the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict and late ones dismissed it as propaganda. Coming almost two years after the book’s publication, Professor Yehoshua Porath’s review in your January 16, 1986 issue probably closes the second round. As one of those who reviewed the book when it first appeared—and who was referred to for this reason in Professor Porath’s review—I should at this time like to comment on the debate.

The difference between the two rounds is not hard to explain. Most early reviewers, including myself, focused on the substance of Miss Peters’s central thesis; the later reviewers, in contrast, emphasized the faults—technical, historical, and literary—in Miss Peters’s book.

I would not dispute the existence of those faults. From Time Immemorial quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts. Much of the book is irrelevant to Miss Peters’s central thesis. The author’s linguistic and scholarly abilities are open to question. Excessive use of quotation marks, eccentric footnotes, and a polemical, somewhat hysterical undertone mar the book. In short, From Time Immemorial stands out as an appallingly crafted book.

Granting all this, the fact remains that the book presents a thesis that neither Professor Porath nor any other reviewer has so far succeeded in refuting. Miss Peters’s central thesis is that a substantial immigration of Arabs to Palestine took place during the first half of the twentieth century. She supports this argument with an array of demographic statistics and contemporary accounts, the bulk of which have not been questioned by any reviewer, including Professor Porath.