Summary
Author of From Time Immemorial (1984), which in Perceptions of Palestine’s account was a major instrument in the campaign to undermine Palestinian identity: Peters purported to demonstrate that most who claimed to be Palestinians dispossessed by Israel had immigrated from elsewhere in the Arab world only a few years before Israel was created, was initially hailed with jacket endorsements from Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel and others, and was then shown by Israeli, European and a few U.S. scholars to have fabricated and misquoted evidence, omitted contrary evidence, and plagiarized old Zionist propaganda tracts — without retractions from the journals that had praised it (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2288-2299).
Details
- A Palestinian American scholar’s caustic summary of the book’s thesis, as quoted: “If you thought you were a Palestinian, you were wrong” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2292-2293).
- Yehoshua Porath’s January 1986 New York Review of Books analysis labeled Peters’s thesis a set of “tired and discredited arguments” (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2296-2297).
- Richard Haass listed the book as one of four recommended books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, which Christison calls perhaps the most telling clue to his thinking (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 2558-2561).
Related pages
Richard Haass, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Palestinian nationality