Norman Finkelstein - Academic Career - On From Time Immemorial

On From Time Immemorial

In Finkelstein's doctoral thesis, he examined the claims made in Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, a best-selling book at the time.

Peters's "history and defense" of Israel deals with the demographic history of Palestine. Demographic studies had tended to assert that the Arab population of Ottoman-controlled Palestine, a 94% majority at the turn of the century, had dwindled towards parity due to massive Zionist immigration. Peters radically challenged this picture by arguing that a substantial part of the Palestinian people were descended from immigrants from other Arab countries from the early 19th century onwards. It followed, for Peters and many of her readers, that the picture of a native Palestinian population overwhelmed by Jewish immigration was little more than propaganda, and that in actuality two almost simultaneous waves of immigration met in what had been a relatively unpopulated land.

From Time Immemorial had been effusively praised in mainstream United States media sources by figures as varied as Barbara Tuchman, Theodore H. White, Elie Wiesel, and Lucy Dawidowicz. Saul Bellow, for one, wrote in a jacket endorsement that:

"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."

Finkelstein asserted that the book was nothing more than what he now calls a "monumental hoax". He later opined that, while Peters's book received widespread interest and approval in the United States, a scholarly demonstration of its fraudulence and unreliability aroused little attention:

"By the end of 1984, From Time Immemorial had...received some two hundred notices ... in the United States. The only 'false' notes in this crescendoing chorus of praise were the Journal of Palestine Studies, which ran a highly critical review by Bill Farrell; the small Chicago-based newsweekly In These Times, which published a condensed version of this writer's findings; and Alexander Cockburn, who devoted a series of columns in The Nation exposing the hoax. ... The periodicals in which From Time Immemorial had already been favorably reviewed refused to run any critical correspondence (e.g. The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary). Periodicals that had yet to review the book rejected a manuscript on the subject as of little or no consequence (e.g. The Village Voice, Dissent, The New York Review of Books). Not a single national newspaper or columnist contacted found newsworthy that a best-selling, effusively praised 'study' of the Middle East conflict was a threadbare hoax."

Noam Chomsky later reminisced:

"I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you."

In 1986, the New York Review of Books published Yehoshua Porath's review and an exchange with critics of the review in which he criticized the assumptions and evidence on which Peters's thesis relied, thus lending independent support from an expert in Palestinian demographics to Finkelstein's doctoral critique. In the house journal of the American Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, William B. Quandt, the Edward Stettinius professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and authority on Middle Eastern politics, later described Finkelstein's critique of From Time Immemorial as a "landmark essay" and a "victory to his credit", in its "demonstration" of the "shoddy scholarship" of Peters's book. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim later praised Finkelstein's thesis, saying that it had established his credentials when he was still doctoral student. In Shlaim's view, Finkelstein had produced an "unanswerable case" with "irrefutable evidence", proving that Peters' book was both "preposterous and worthless".

According to Noam Chomsky, the controversy that surrounded Finkelstein's research caused a delay in his earning his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Chomsky wrote in Understanding Power that Finkelstein "literally could not get the faculty to read " and that Princeton eventually granted Finkelstein his doctorate only "out of embarrassment " but refused to give him any further professional backing.

Finkelstein published portions of his thesis in the following publications:

• "Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial." Chapter 2 of Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988); and
• "A Land Without a People (Joan Peters' "Wilderness" Image)." Chapter 2 of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995).