In Defense of Joan Peters’ “From Time Immemorial,” and a look at David Samel’s hit job in Mondoweiss…
By Gerald A. Honigman
Many (most?) readers probably have never heard of an amazing broadcast journalist whose in-depth research on major civil rights issues and recorded programs about them had a significant impact on alerting people all over the world to the righteousness of their causes.
Joan Peters passed away in 2015, and her seminal work on the Arab-Israeli conflict fits into this category.
She started deeply empathetic to the Arab side because she too had not yet delved deeply enough into the actual history of it.
Like most others, she fell victim to decades of American “Big Oil” Company and foreign Arab oil potentate billions of dollars of financial contributions which had been greasing the palms of history, political science, and Middle Eastern Studies university courses and those who got to teach them.
Her well documented and researched, “From Time Immemorial,” was soon viciously attacked by the very same duplicitous and hypocritical folks in academia and elsewhere whom she exposed in her work…
What a shock!
While accepting the Arab concocted narrative as “gospel” with little challenge, such folks, especially too many Jews themselves seeking to gain advancement, tenure, and prominence in an Arab petro-potentate and Big Oil greased academia, routinely place Israel, solidly corroborated Jewish history based on written records from over three millennia of both Jewish and non-Jewish sources, archaeological evidence, and so forth, under the high power lens of scrutiny.
In my own advanced graduate studies, I was constantly force fed predominately one-sided sources and Arab history and politics. See here to understand…
A discussion of Peters’ work is below, followed by my own comments and reactions to her detractors.
“Palestinian-Myth Smasher Joan Peters Passes Away”
Source: Israel National News
The following discussion confronts David Samel’s repeated hit jobs not only on Joan, but his major animus, Israel and Zionism in Mondoweiss and elsewhere:
Source: Mondoweiss
What you need to know about Mondoweiss.. and…Here’s another of Samel’s one-sided critiques…
According to Samel and his “Zionism is the equivalent of racism,” oppressor of poor Arab aboriginals, and other such concocted crimes, Jews are not native to the land where their forefathers and foremothers first arrived and developed a thriving, unique culture, kingdom, and society beginning some four millennia ago, and their own very name as a people is derived from: Iudaean/Judaean/Jew.
Open this Note the coin at the link is an Iudaea Capta coin, not a non-existent “Palaestina Capta” one.
Those people, it’s to be surmised from “unquestionable experts” like Noam Chomsky (a linguist with a following), Norman Finkelstein, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, and other “fair and balanced” critics, were actually not Hebrews nor Jews at all, but really “Palestinians” instead.
And I’m the Passover Bunny.
Read about Finkelstein here:
Don’t bother with incidentals like there never ever was in all of recorded history a separate nation, kingdom, language, or culture that was “Palestine” or “Palestinian.”
And we’re supposed to believe that it was them, not Judaeans or Hebrews or Israelites, who are mentioned in numerous non-Hebraic sources in such places as the assorted steles, official correspondence in cuneiform, Egyptian, Moabite, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and other recorded historical records, Tel el-Armana correspondence, and so forth that are referred to when mention is made to “the House of David,” the Kurash Prism or Cyrus Cylinder, and so forth.
Such detractors of Joan Peters tear apart each claim she made, stating what they claim is the unreliability of sources, deliberate lying, etc. as her alleged sins.
Allow me, however, to use just one example to show how accurate Joan really was in her main assertion that most Arabs, who only later in the 20th century renamed themselves “Palestinians,” indeed originated from elsewhere in the region.
The Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations explicitly state that many if not most Arabs who came to be known as “Palestinians” actually were newcomers from other surrounding countries.
They show numerous Arabs immigrating into what would soon be Mandate Palestine in the 19th (with the armies of Muhammad Ali and Ismail Pasha of Egypt) and the first half of the 20th Century…
How do the Norman Finklesteins, Rashid Khalidis, and Noam Chomskys answer the above? They ignore this evidence. Read about Finkelstein here:
Are the accounts recorded by contemporary Roman historians citing repeated revolts by Iudaeans/Judaeans for their freedom and independence, clear up until the 7th century C.E. jihadi settling, colonizing, murderous invasions of Arab hordes pouring out of their fast desiccating Arabian Peninsula into the ancestral homelands of hundreds of millions of native, non-Arab peoples ((Judaeans, Egyptian Copts, black Africans, North African Amazigh “Berbers,”
Hindus, Kurds, and so forth) literally in search of greener pastures to steal, also untrustworthy?
And capping this off with the audacity of next claiming that only Arabs and those whom they forcibly Arabized and Islamized alone had any rights to these lands—and then getting paid spokespersons like David Samel to spread their fiction.
The next time you visit Rome, just a few minutes from the Colosseum, check out the Arch of Titus and take a good look at what’s all over it…
Let’s just say you won’t find Arab and certainly not non-existent “Palestinian” history on this gigantic example of archaeological corroborating evidence for the Jewish People’s ancestral claims to the land. Or in these ancient Persian records either: The Kurash Prism/Cyrus Cylinder…
Just one more example will be offered to contest the hatchet job that’s been done on Joan Peter’s work, “From Time Immemorial…”
Arabs, again claiming to be the aboriginal inhabitants, assert, with their numerous advocates, that Jews were foreign colonizers (flipping historical truths on their heads), instead of the 4,000 year old ancestral people who, by unfortunate circumstances, were repeatedly invaded by foreign imperial conquerors—including Arabs themselves.
In well-known international law, a 4,000 year old ancestral people does not lose its property rights because they were repeatedly invaded by foreign imperial powers and suffered forced exiles.
Despite the claims of Peter’s detractors, it was the Arabs—not Jews—who were the new-coming settlers in the land…
and… “Settlers”
Having read dozens of books and many more articles covering this subject matter, I can honestly say that there is so much one-sided and completely ignored subject matter which is still omitted from a balanced discussion of the Middle East in general and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular.
Where is the university offering courses covering anything other than the promotion of Arab or Turkish interests, more indoctrination than honest education, too often without an uninhibited and free exchange of ideas?
Having guest lectured on numerous campuses, I discovered that even a mention of subjects involving 41 million stateless Kurds, a like number of Amazigh/Kabyle/”Berbers,” and their and others’ murderous oppression by Arabs (Druze, Assyrians, Copts, black Africans, Yazidis, etc.) was universally absent—along with any study of the other side of the refugee coin that folks like David Samel ignore or dismiss as the Jews’ own fault: the half of Israel’s Jews, the Sefardim and Mizrahim refugees, who fled Arab and forcibly Arabized lands.
The bottom line is this…
Joan Peters, who is not alive to defend herself, certainly wrote a book worth reading, and it’s no more imperfect than those of pompous scholars whose own writings are very selective in what is included and what is ignored in promoting their own versions of historical truths.
I debated many of these practitioners of the double standard supreme and left their jaws dropped.
Here’s are my final answers to such selective “experts”…
“Contra Palestinianism”– New English Review
and (Kurdish media—do folks like Samel even know who they are?)