When Joan Peters went to the Holy Land in the mid-1970s, her aim was to investigate the plight of Palestinian refugees who, she believed, had been unconscionably deprived of their rights by Israel, with the aid of the United States.
A former White House foreign policy consultant for the Middle East and a self-described liberal, she devoted seven years to intensive, original research. She arrived, however, at an unexpected conclusion: Arab political and territorial claims to Israel are based on a myth.
Joan Peters Caro, the author of the controversial bestseller “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict,” died Monday night at her home in Chicago of complications from a stroke at the age of 78. Her funeral was held Thursday at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago.
In a 2002 interview with WND, nearly two decades after her book was first published, Peters contended international efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict largely were based on false premises.
“The problem is truth has taken a back seat, and all of the bogus claims of the Arabs have destroyed the context,” Peters said at the time. “It would be like the Germans saying the Jews had killed 6 million Germans during World War II.”
She reported for the old Chicago Daily News, Harper’s and The New Republic magazines and served as a White House consultant during the Jimmy Carter administration. She is survived by her husband, Dr. William A. Caro, daughter Lori Peters, and stepsons Mark and David Caro.
The Chicago Tribune reported her daughter said that during her mother’s final illness, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, telephoned: “He said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted my mother to know how grateful he was for all she had done for Israel.”
Reacting to her death, WND founder and CEO Joseph Farah said it was a “great pleasure and honor to call Joan Peters a friend and colleague.”
“The world owes her a great debt for her work on ‘From Time Immemorial,'” he said. “It’s sad that her journalistic triumph was attacked for political reasons. Joan, a liberal through and through, in the best sense of the word, never really could understand that.”
Farah said the “unwarranted criticism she faced for this truly great historical work caused her to withdraw from the public spotlight for the rest of her life.”
“Joan Peters and I were seemingly on opposite ends of the political spectrum. But our mutual admiration was based on the fact that we were both truth seekers. I will truly miss her,” he said.
Hal Lindsey, a leading evangelical Christian supporter of Israel and one of the best-selling authors of all time, also reacted to the news.
“It grieves me to hear of her death. I did greatly admire her,” said Lindsey, author of the 1970 blockbuster “The Late Great Planet Earth” and, more recently, Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad.”
Heated debate
In her book – which devotes 189 of its more than 500 pages to footnotes and appendices – Peters concluded the historical record shows Jews are the only continuous residents of the Holy Land. She asserted Palestinian refugees were being sacrificed at the expense of the agenda of Arab states. The “refugee problem,” she maintained, was created as a public relations weapon to help the Arab world justify its goal of annihilating the Jewish state of Israel.
“Contrary to Arab propaganda,” Peters wrote, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries “Arabs or Arabic-speaking migrants were wandering in search of subsistence all over the Middle East. The land of ‘Palestine’ proper had been laid waste, causing peasants to flee. Jews and ‘Zionism’ never left the Holy Land, even after the Roman conquest in A.D. 70.”
Reflecting the criticism of her work in the Arab world, the Arab Daily News, which calls itself “the newspaper of record for the Arab American community, described Peters in an obit as the author of a “racist anti-Palestinian book.
When it was published in 1984, her book drew critical acclaim from historians such as Theodore H. White and Barbara Tuchman, and Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg. Publications such as the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly and Los Angeles Times also gave it favorable reviews.
In 1985, it was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the “Israel” category.
Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Saul Bellow’s endorsement on the cover said: “Millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians.”
The book, he said, serves to “dissolve the claims made by nationalist agitators and correct the false history by which these unfortunate Arabs are imposed upon and exploited.”
While most of the initial reviews were favorable, Peters’ book drew strong criticism from left-leaning scholars such as DePaul University political science professor Norman G. Finkelstein, and later from media in the United Kingdom.
Finkelstein, a Jew whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, took Peters to task in 1984 in the progressive month In These Times and expanded his argument in his 1995 book “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”
Finkelstein wrote in his book: “That a scholarly work meets with critical acclaim would hardly be news, were it not for the fact that ‘From Time Immemorial’ is among the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
He contended that Peters’ documentation of massive illegal Arab immigration into Palestine was “almost entirely falsified” and asserted that conclusions “Peters draws from her demographic study of Palestine’s indigenous Arab population are not borne out by the data she presents.”
Some pro-Israel scholars, such as Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, supported Peters’ main premise but also offered words of caution.
In his 1984 review, Pipes wrote: “The author is not a historian or someone practiced in writing on politics, and she tends to let her passions carry her away. As a result, the book suffers from chaotic presentation and an excess of partisanship, faults which seriously mar its impact.”
However, Pipes said, the faults “do not diminish the importance of the facts presented.”
“Despite its drawbacks, ‘From Time Immemorial’ contains a wealth of information, which is well worth the effort to uncover.”
Two years later, in a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books, Pipes noted that the book had been generally “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.”
Pipes said 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.”
Pipes said that despite its shortcomings, critics had failed to refute the central thesis, 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,” Pipes wrote.
‘Pioneer’
Upon news of her death, Peters received praise from David Bedein, director of the Israel Resource News Agency at the Center for Near East Policy Research, writing in the Jerusalem Post.
Bedein said “From Time Immemorial” was the first academic study published in the modern era that “documented how the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, perpetuates the refugee status of Arabs who were displaced, or left voluntarily, during the War of Independence.”
“Today, as Joan predicted would happen, UNRWA has become an integral part of efforts to undermine Israel’s standing in the eyes of the world and in its own eyes,” Bedein wrote.
Bedein said Peters’ work, after interviewing her in 1987, inspired a “metamorphosis in my career, as a social worker and as a journalist” that has led him to devote the subsequent 27 years to reforming UNRWA.
“Joan Peters should be credited in her passing as the pioneer who generated concern over the fact that a bona fide agency of the United Nations – UNRWA – actually preserves the indignity of Arabs confined to refugee conditions for 66 years under the specious premise of the ‘right of return’ to Arab villages that existed before 1948.”
At the JewishPress.com, Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar wrote that Israel has lost a “heroine.”
“Joan Peters went the entire way with her truth, despite the fact that it entailed a total change in her world view,” they wrote. “With her difficult and taxing work, which took many years, she shattered, in her words, the lies about the size of the population that was in the Land before the War of Independence and she especially shattered the myth of the refugees, as she brought facts, data and numbers showing how UNRWA as well as the Arab League artificially maintain the refugee status and use the refugees as a weapon against Israel.”
The writers said the people of Israel “are extremely grateful for her work and dedication to the People and the Land of Israel. May her memory be blessed.”
