dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (06/04/84)
Joan Peters, a former consultant to the Carter White House on Mideast
affairs, claims in a monumental new book on the Mideast conflict that
Arab claims about Palestinians having lived in present day Israel
"from time immemorial" are no more than crude propagandistic fabrications
invented by PLO and other ideologists.
In her 600-page opus, which contains massive documentation to support her
thesis, Peters expresses astonishment over the fact that so many liberal
democracies have swallowed the Arab propaganda line. She also indicts
circles in Israel for having accepted the PLO version of an uninterrupted
Palestinian presence in the land of Israel.
The book, From Time Immemorial (Harper & Row), had its genesis in the
wake of a visit which the writer took to Palestinian refugee
camps in Lebanon after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Peters went to
the camps, she says, out of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians
and the desire to help them assert their rights against Israel.
Ten years of vigorous research in British and other archival materials
altered her posture; she still sympathizes with the refugees
from a compassionate and humanitarian point of view. She no longer
shares, however, their political or ideological views.
Peters came to these conclusions slowly but methodically after observing
a curious clause in the 1948 United Nations resolution pertaining to the
definition of a Palestinian refugee. The definition had as a Palestinian
refugee any one who had lived in Palestine for a minimum of two years prior
to departing the country.
If the Palestinians had lived in the country from time immemorial
(according to Arab claims), why had it been necessary to introduce
such a definition into the UN resolution?
Peters' book answers that question - and a lot of other questions as well.
Before the questions could be addressed, however, Peters found a wall
of obstructionism erected against her. In trying to establish Arab population
figures in Palestine from the time of the British mandate (1917) until
the creation of Israel (1948) she found that British sources were confusing.
The British kept careful note of Jewish immigration into the country;
they did not take similar care to record the influx of Arabs from
adjacent regions into their administered territory. When they did take
population samples of the Arabs in Palestine the British inevitably
attributed growth to "natural increase".
By dint of tireless research, Peters uncovered a picture of Arab
demographics in Palestine totally inconsistent with the "from time
immemorial" hypothesis. In fact Peters discovered that the vast
majority of Palestinians who left Palestine during or before the
War of Independence, immigrated to Palestine or were themselves
the children of immigrants.
Between 1917 and 1948 hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, Syrians
and other Arab-speaking people entered Palestine. They had two
reasons: to profit from the dynamic economy spurred by the Zionist
enterprise and, to assert against the Jewish population of the
country an Arab presence.
Joan Peters claims that the British deliberately obfuscated the question
of the Arab influx into Palestine out of a desire to repudiate the
promises made to the Jewish people under the terms of the Balfour
Declaration. The more Arabs there were in Palestine, the harder it
would be for the Jews to invoke their claim.
According to the author, the idea of "from time immemorial" did not
surface in Arab propaganda against Israel until fairly recent times
and was given special focus only after the Six Day War when the Arab
worls was dispirited by its loss to Israel.
Arab propagandists felt that the only way to maintain the hatred of
the Palestinian refugees against Israel was to invent for them a pedigree
tied to the land. That hatred was useful from the Arabs' long range goal
of eliminating from their midst an anomaly with which they could not
live - a Jewish state.
Why the Arabs cannot tolerate the idea of a Jewish political entity
in their geographical sphere is another question answered by Peters
who presents a clear survey of the Muslim presumption to dominion over
other groups.
Peters, a researcher who has done her homework thoroughly, anticipates
every objection to her thesis:
"When the Arab claim based on fraudulent historical devices
is exposed and thus discarded, another popular argument
surfaces. After all, it is said, it doesn't matter when the
'nationalism' evolved. The important thing is that it exists;
it's a violent nationalism now and the refugees - the
'Palestinians' - exist.
"Yet, a violence born of unworthy incitation, aggravated by
unnatural camp conditions and deliberate indoctrination to
that violence, ought not necessarily command credence or respect
because it calls itself 'nationalism'.
"The movement, whatever its label - terrorism or nationalism -
is no more a legitimate excuse for the attempt to destroy one
small Jewish state than the 'repatriation' of other refugees
around the world would be seen as reason for the destruction
of any other state.
"Throughout the Mandate, the British attempted to gain peace by
appeasing intimidation and terror. It was a self-imposed
intimidation to a perception of oil-power and force that the
Western powers by themselves in fact evoked.
"Yet others are considering a similar course. But the lesson
ought to be clear by now that the West's continuation of the
protected British policy of submission has not brought a peaceful
life. As Winston Churchill cautioned in 1939, the acts that we
engage in for appeasement today we will have to remedy at far
greater cost and remorse tomorrow."
-- reprinted from The Canadian Jewish News,
May 31, 1984. Article by Arnold Ages.
--
dave at Toronto (CSnet)
{allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!dave