Joan Peters, the author of the book From
Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine,
died on January 5th, at 78. As David Samel wrote
following her death,”The bizarre chapter of Joan Peters’s contribution to the
Middle East debate does not end with her death. Her arguments, both those she
adopted from others and those she formulated herself, still constitute a huge
portion of the go-to hasbara repertoire.” I interviewed Norman Finkelstein
and asked him to reflect on her work and legacy, as he played a
central role in debunking much of her work as described in his book Image
and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
1.
Adam Horowitz: Could you start by saying a
bit about how From Time Immemorial was received?
2.
Norman Finkelstein: First of all the important
primary factor is the context. Israel in 1982 took its first major public
relations hit since the 1967 war. It was a public relations disaster for
Israel. One of the reasons being I think, as Robert Fisk pointed out in Pity
the Nation he said unlike all other Arab states Lebanon did not control the
press and so mainstream reporters were able at that time to roam freely
throughout Lebanon. Mainstream reporters, I should say who had
credibility, were able to roam freely through Lebanon during the Israeli
attack, and what they were reporting was quiet horrifying. It’s forgotten now
but even against the Israeli attacks in recent years on Lebanon, on Gaza, they
all pale in comparison to what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982. The usual figures are between sixteen and twenty thousand
Lebanese and Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed during the
Israeli attack. All the Lebanese killed in 2006 plus the three massacres in
Gaza that doesn’t even come to half of the figure that happened in Lebanon. So
now you had credible reportage of what Israel was doing and it was a major
public relations setback for Israel. You could say the first layer of Jewish
support for Israel, the first layer, peeled away and that was the layer of what
you would call the Old Left, mainly those were identified with the Soviet Union
and therefore identified with Israel because the Soviets supported the creation
of the state of Israel in ’48 and also because a lot of the signature
institutions of Israel in that era were of a socialist leftist orientation,
most famously the kibbutzim. And so before 1982 the pro-Soviet, pro-Communist
Old Left even those who were disaffected from the Soviet Union which still fell
within the umbrella of the Old Left, they were still pretty much
pro-Israel, there were just really a tiny handful of exceptions. The best known
being of course Professor Chomsky. There was also Maxime Robinson in France, but in
general the support was totally for Israel, overwhelmingly for Israel. And so
the first layer of support was peeled off, peeled away, but overall Israel took
a public relations hit. There were the usual characters, and the usual liars,
people like Martin
Peretz who went on the Israeli army tour of Lebanon and famously said at
the time that everything you have read in the newspapers and heard in the
media about what happened in Lebanon just didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. As
Professor Chomsky replied in The Fateful Triangle, his account of
the Lebanon war within the broader context, that’s just a very
unusual claim. You don’t usually make the claim that the other side has just
made everything up whole cloth. You usually said they left out context, or
they were selective, but to say that it didn’t happen, as in 16 to 20
thousand people weren’t killed, that’s an unusual claim. And of course it
was an absurd claim, it did happen. And so the basic
purpose of From Time Immemorial was to re-establish Israel’s
image in the West.
3.
And when did it come out in relation to
the war?
4.
It came out in 1984.
5.
Okay, two years later.
6.
Right, where you are still feeling the
repercussions of the Lebanon war. And the Lebanon war was not so quickly
forgotten, as I’m sure you know. First of all it lasted three and a half
months, and second of all it climaxed in Sabra and Shatilla. So it left
its imprint on the public consciousness and they needed something to rally the
stalwarts behind the cause again because people were shook up by
Lebanon especially those who had been reared on the Exodus
version of Israeli history. It all came as a kind of shock. As I said it
was the first public relations hit Israel has taken since 1967 because after
‘67, the next major interaction was, it came to be called, the Yom Kippur War
where Israelis were seen as being on the defensive because they were
“attacked.” So straight through till ’82 Israel’s image
was like teflon in the West. And so it was big setback and they needed
something to rally the stalwarts around the cause. From Time Immemorial
fit the bill because its essential message was the Palestinians have no
legitimate claim whatsoever because the heart of their claim is false, they
don’t even exist. This was an old theme. For
example, right now I am reading through the foreign relations of the U.S.
volumes on the Carter years 1977 through ’80. They are voluminous they run to
3,000 pages. But as you know during that period that’s when the transition
occurred between the Labor party which was ejected from office in 1977 and the
Likud for the first time takes power. The main advisor to Menachem Begin who
won the election in ’77 was a guy named Shmuel Katz, he used to come on the periodic diplomatic trips to the
White House because they were trying to figure out how to end the conflict in
the Carter years. He would come along as basically the court historian, or
the court propagandist, and if you read the transcripts, and I can actually
send you the quotes, he says to Carter you have to understand there are no
Palestinians. Palestine was empty and Jews came
and made the desert a home then all these Arabs came and
they surreptitiously entered Palestine, exploited the economic
opportunities that the Jews created and then pretended to be indigenous to the
land. Then he goes on to say exactly as Joan Peters says, the reason only
150,000 Palestinians remained in Israel after the 1948 war was because they
were the true peasants, they were truly indigenous to Palestine and the rest
were just recent immigrants. That’s why they fled without any incentive, let
alone any military force, by the Israelis. So the thesis itself was old,
what made Joan Peters novel was two things. Number one that she pretended to
prove her thesis with serious scholarship. She used to like to boast, “my book
has 1837 footnotes,” so it wasn’t sort of a propaganda pamphlet or didn’t
appear to be. It had a scholarly apparatus. The second thing which was of equal
moment was it wasn’t churned out by a partisan political operation, it was
Harper & Row which was a very big publishing house back then and it
had all of these scholarly endorsements and an impressive array of people had
lent their names to it. And at least among them, leaving apart the big
names – the Saul Bellows, the Elie Wiesels and so forth – you had this guy
Philip Hauser from the University of Chicago who headed the populations studies
program. There was a letter from him incorporated as an appendix to
the book saying her demographics and findings were accurate. So, you
had the combination of a high-power publishing house, high-power intellectuals
and just a vast scholarly apparatus. So suddenly, as they say, this age
old Zionist legend suddenly had legs and it took off. It was a huge
best seller back then and it received all of these glowing reviews.
7.
In your book you say the glowing reviews were
primarily in the United States. That once it reached Europe, and even in
Israel, it was seen for what it was.
8.
We have to be a little bit careful about that
because here the devil really is in the details, actually it’s usually in the
details, the British reviews came out much later than the American reviews
because the British edition didn’t come out until, maybe my memory could
be wrong, around six months later. By that time I had my findings and Professor
Chomsky had his connections and so we sent the findings to the key people who
were going to review it in the UK. For example Ian and David Gilmour who reviewed it in the
London Review of Books. If you read their review it basically took
everything I said because they were primed. They were actually quite hilarious
reviews. I quote one, I think in Image and Reality, from the
British publication Time Out which described it as the size and
weight of a dried cowpat. They treated it with contempt, but partly because
some of them were primed. There were others of course who knew the truth,
but they didn’t know the truth, I don’t think, in the detail. What I did was I demonstrated not just that as a broad
tableau the book is false, I demonstrated that the evidence was fake,
which is a different thing. The numbers were
faked, the reports she used, the annual British reports to the League of
Nations when they had the mandate over Palestine, and these reports they were
all faked and they were doctored by Peters. One example that stood out was
she took one paragraph from the Hope Simpson report and she mangled it 19
times. It was a real feat what she had done.
9.
And is that the report that Alan
Dershowitz then just took whole cloth?
10.
No what Dershowitz did is different. As I said
this was an old Zionist thesis and she reproduced all the standard Zionist representations
of accounts of Americans and British who visited the holy land in the 19th
century. They are travel accounts and as you can imagine you are coming from
London and you are going to Palestine, Palestine looks empty. That’s not
surprising. You’ve been to the occupied territories and even now if you are
traveling on roads to the West Bank, most of it looks empty and this is now,
the population in the West bank is about two million. Back then the
population in the whole of Palestine — meaning the West Bank, Gaza, Israel and
Jordan, the whole of Palestine — the population was about 300,000. So of course
it’s going to look empty. And so all of these accounts were then used by the
Zionist movement and then by Peters who reproduced the accounts. But she wasn’t
the first. As I said ironically she plagiarized another person, a guy named Ernst Frankenstein, she
plagiarized him because it was just standard Zionist propaganda. What
Dershowitz then did was to proceed and copy her stuff. Frank Menetrez is a
very brilliant scholar, a PhD and a LLD from UCLA, graduated first his class,
editor of the law review and currently up for a federal judgeship. His
definitive expose of the Dershowitz plagiarism is an
Appendix to my book Beyond Chutzpah in the paperback version. I
asked him if I could reproduce it. It’s about forty pages it’s very detailed
and he shows that what he did was he copied Peters, who copied other Zionist
tracts, it was just standard.
11.
In Image and Reality you end your
chapter on From Time Immemorial saying that, despite it all, the book
still clings to life. You quote Netanyahu basically repeating her argument as a
scholarly fact. Reflecting now on the book, and her life, all these
years later, do you see this book living on?
12.
It’s a totally different picture now because
there is just a lot more now known about the conflict. American Jews tend
to be very educated, I think 98% of American Jews have a college degree. So you
go to college you take these courses and it’s a totally different picture. On the
other hand, it’s not a totally different picture in Israel. I think
quite the contrary. I think Israel has now gone more in the direction of Joan
Peters than back in the 1980s. You know, people like Netanyahu and everything
he represents. And remember there is a large
Russian immigrant population who haven’t a clue what happened before they came.
So they hear people like Avigdor Lieberman saying the
land was empty, and now they just want to kill us, and they believe all
that stuff. But the American Jews don’t believe that stuff. They have
gone to school, they read in college. They’ll read Benny Morris, or they’ll
read Avi Shlaim’s standard histories, and they will also read that the Joan
Peters thing was a hoax. So even though it carries in the lunatic fringes
of American Jewish life, the Joan Peters stuff carries no weight. I would say a
good 80% of American Jews recognize, at this point, Palestinians have
legitimate grievance. Now how legitimate, and that’s the trump Israel writes,
now there is an argument but they recognize there is a legitimate grievance
there. The whole point of From Time Immemorial was
to prove that Palestinians had no legitimate grievance because their actual
existence was a myth. So that’s…
13.
That lives on more now in Israel.
14.
I think it’s actually more pervasive now because
of these few immigrants populations which know nothing of the past history
except the propaganda.
15.
There was this quote I found when Peters visited the
settler community in Hebron in 2010 and one of the people she met
was Baruch Marzel who is a leader of some the worst right-wing settlers there.
He told her he was a huge fan and he studied her book cover to cover.
16.
Yeah, I am sure the settlers believe it all.
They do because they think they are like the American west, they think they are
conquering the wilderness. That’s how they can see themselves and no
amount of facts are going to deflate them because, it’s what you might
call, to use a phrase of Professor Chomsky’s, it’s a necessary illusion. If you actually
accepted the fact that there were people living there then you would have to
acknowledge what you are doing is wrong. So
it’s a necessary illusion to believe the place was empty before you came with
your settlers. As I said like the American west and the setters completely
believe it.
Addendum
Following our interview I asked Finkelstein if he
cared to comment on the lawsuit accusing Alan
Dershowitz of sexually abusing a minor. He responded by email:
I prefer not to comment directly on the serious
allegations being leveled against Alan Dershowitz.
It appears that everyone will have their day in
court, which is as it should be.
However, I would want to express an opinion on the letter
signed by 38 Harvard Law School professors (including “radical” Critical
Legal Studies professor Roberto Unger and liberal tribune Laurence Tribe) in
defense of Dershowitz.
They describe him as “courageous” and “outspoken” in
“defending the despised, and attacking the views of important people.”
The journalist Jack Newfield
memorably described former New York City Mayor Edward Koch as a “toady to the
powerful and a bully to the powerless.”
If you multiply this description a thousand fold, you might
begin to approach the real-life Alan Dershowitz.
It is breath-taking to read the Harvard statement in
the context of a sexual slavery case pitting vulnerable minors against
billionaires, celebrities and royalty.
Of particular relevance to your website, no single person in
the U.S. was more responsible than Dershowitz for whitewashing Israel’s brutal
torture of Palestinian detainees. When Israel’s
torture first came under public scrutiny, Dershowitz wrote (with attorney
Monroe Freedman) in the New York Times, “Allegations of systematic
torture and allegations of systematic violations of human rights by Israel must
be viewed with more than a little skepticism.”
Dershowitz repeated his egregious apologetics during
the first intifada (beginning 1987) when, according to B’Tselem, Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch, Israel was “systematically” torturing
Palestinian detainees, deploying methods similar to those recently recounted in
the Senate Report on Torture, but on a vastly greater scale. The Torture Report
documents 39-44 cases of CIA use of torture, whereas HRW estimated that during
the first intifada alone, Israel tortured and ill-treated “tens of thousands”
of Palestinian detainees.
Indeed, Dershowitz misrepresented Israeli torture
practices in testimony sworn to under oath in
a U.S. extradition hearing of a Palestinian resident, Mahmoud el-Abed Ahmad, fearing
torture in Israel. For example, he said that Israel’s “toughest methodology for
eliciting statements” from Palestinian detainees “is to frighten the person
being interrogated into believing that the situation is actually going to be
worse than it would become.” Israel was at most guilty, according to
Dershowitz, of “occasional pushing and shoving…physical touching.” (I go
through the sordid record in detail in my book Beyond Chutzpah.)
Is this what the Harvard Law School professors had in
mind when they praised Dershowitz’s “courageous” and “outspoken” defense of
“the despised”?
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