>>Did Peters or anyone else answer Porath or Blair?
>Peters did revise the book, and has spoken about it on various occasions, so it stands to reason she made some sort of defense of her findings. I don’t know how successful she was. A lot of people who come across her book now don’t know about the earlier controversy.
I’m working from the original 1984 printing that is currently available from Amazon. It would be interesting to see her revisions.
I haven’t had time to go through all the info on the sites you named, to reread Peters and to search for criticism of both. From Time Immemorial is long and dense, as are the criticisms. I intend to repost when finished. It will probably take a couple months.
For now, I have a few thoughts.
I suspect Yehoshua Porath of being either an Israeli Leftist Jew or an Israeli Arab, whose criticism might very well have been aimed at the 1986 right wing Israeli Jews. I have no evidence of this yet, but it seems quite possible that he is as tendentious as he accuses Peters of being.
Porath says:
“Mrs. Peters puts great emphasis on the claim that during and after the 1948 war an “exchange of populations” took place. Against the Arabs who left Palestine one had to put, in her view, about the same number of Jews, most of them driven by the Arab rulers from their traditional homes in the Arab world. And indeed there is a superficial similarity between the two movements of population. But their ideological and historical significance is entirely different. From a Jewish-Zionist point of view the immigration of the Jews of the Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was the fulfillment of a national dream—the “ingathering of the exiles.” Since the 1930s the Jewish Agency had sent agents, teachers, and instructors to the various Arab countries in order to propagate Zionism. They organized Zionist youth movements there and illegal immigration to Palestine. Israel then made great efforts to absorb these immigrants into its national, political, social, and economic life.”
Porath implies that the reason that the Jews were thrown out of the Arab countries in 1948 is that Zionists in Israel were forming a Fifth Columns in each of the Arab countries. What he leaves out are all the citations of persecution under dhimmitude that those Jews lived under for 1,200 years that Peters documents. In other words, it is quite likely that those Jews wanted out and to live in a land run by Jews. So what if the. “… ideological and historical significance” of the movement of Jews is entirely different from that of the Muslims? Lastly, which country could the back to Israel movement be organized in? Iran? Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Of course it was centered in Israel by folks who were passionate.
There is also possibly a problem with Peters who admitted to being a liberal when she started the book. I think that she still is. With a quick search, I found out that she works for CBS and was involved in the Jimmy Carter administration. Since her book undercuts the ideologies of the people who now pay her, I am not at all sure that would defend what she wrote 20 years ago.
My overall problem is somewhat exacerbated because I am not an historian. Hence I will never know when I am making a mistake of correctly historically contextualizing my conclusions like the one that Blair points out.
Peters says that much of the land was barren. Porath counters that Jewish writers themselves clearly asserted that there were plenty of Arabs who owned land but would not sell to Jews. Blair contextualizes that with this:
“In Palestine under Ottoman rule, land left uncultivated reverted to the state.5 But Ottoman restrictions prevented Jews from purchasing state lands, which made up a significant proportion of the available land.6 Thus Jews would have been allowed to purchase only land already under cultivation, even if large areas of the country were deserted.”
In another context Blair quotes Pipes:
“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. “
“I would not dispute the existence of those faults. From Time Immemorial quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts. Much of the book is irrelevant to Miss Peters’s central thesis. The author’s linguistic and scholarly abilities are open to question. Excessive use of quotation marks, eccentric footnotes, and a polemical, somewhat hysterical undertone mar the book. In short, From Time Immemorial stands out as an appallingly crafted book. “
However, later in his piece, Pipe’s says (http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1110):
“Granting all this, the fact remains that the book presents a thesis that neither Professor Porath nor any other reviewer has so far succeeded in refuting. Miss Peters’s central thesis is 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, including Professor Porath.”
“Nonetheless, Professor Porath dismisses her argument as “fanciful.” He says that “the main reason” for Arab population growth is that Arab births remained steady while infant mortality decreased. He concludes that the movement of population was not significant in comparison with natural increase.”
“Now, there can be no question that improvements in medical conditions contributed to the increase in Arab population. But it is not immediately clear that declining infant mortality was more important than immigration. Professor Porath asserts this but he does not provide the evidence necessary to convince a reader.”
“The disproof of Miss Peters’s thesis requires a detailed inquiry into birth and death records, immigration and emigration registers, employment rolls, nomadic settlement patterns, and so forth. She may be wrong; but this will be proven only when another researcher goes through the evidence and shows that immigration was unimportant. The existence or absence of large-scale Arab immigration to Palestine has nothing to do, of course, with Miss Peters’s motives or the obvious short-comings of her book. The facts about population change will not be established by heaping scorn on Miss Peters, only by going back to the archives.”
“Faulty presentation notwithstanding, Miss Peters’s hypothesis is on the table; it is incumbent on her critics to cease the name-calling and make a serious effort to show her wrong by demonstrating that many thousands of Arabs did not emigrate to Palestine in the period under question.”
“Until such happens, what is one to think? Is there reason to accept Miss Peters’s version of events? I believe so: even though From Time Immemorial does not place Arab immigration to Palestine in a historical context, it is not hard to find a rationale for their movement. The Arabs who went to Palestine sought economic opportunity created by the Zionists. As Europeans, the Zionists brought with them to Palestine resources and skills far in advance of anything possessed by the local population. Jews initiated advanced economic activities that created jobs and wealth and drew Arabs. Zionists resembled the British, Germans, and other Europeans of modern times who settled in sparsely populated areas—Australia, southern Africa, or the American West—and then attracted the indigenous people to themselves.”
“There is really nothing surprising in all this; and because it makes such good sense, I put credence in the argument that substantial numbers of Arabs moved to Palestine. I will adjust my views, of course, should compelling evidence be found to show otherwise. But this will require that Miss Peters’s critics go beyond polemics and actually prove her thesis wrong.”
My simple question, “Who owns Israel? The Arabs or Jews?” is really asking were the Arabs significantly cheated? Although it is possible that I might change my mind, I don’t expect to. From Time Immemorial details and suggests so many inquiries from which to argue, ultimately it is going to be hard to make the case for the Muslims.
However, all this reading is taking so much of my time that I am probably going to have to elevate it to the status of a hobby.
Now then, to really push a few buttons. How about this argument? In WWI, the Ottoman Muslims tried to kill England. Since the Brits were on the winning side of that war and the Ottomans were on the losing side, why wasn’t the answer to the question of ownership of Isreal the Brits call? If they thought that the best thing to do for both the Arabs and Jews was to create Israel, is it possibly they are wrong only because they weren’t powerful enough to make it happen?
I don't think Porath was saying that Arab Jews were exiled because of an Israeli fifth column. Apparently he does believe that such efforts were made by Israel, but I take his point as simply that the kind of symmetry that some people see between the Arab flight from Israel and the expulsions of Jews from Arab countries is a distortion.
Israelis could argue that there was an element of flight from actual war in the Palestinian case that wasn't true of the expulsions from Arab countries. But it's certainly true that from the point of view of Israel an ingathering of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel was something to be desired, while Palestinians and Arabs in no way desired exile. So in that regard, at least, he's right in arguing that from the point of view of the states concerned -- rather than of the refugees themeselves -- there wasn't a symmetry. It wasn't as though the effects of the two expulsions balanced out for both sides.
It would be interesting to know what Pipes thinks about the book now. In the article you cite he's trying to cover himself for having reviewed the book positively, so he calls for further investigation. Okay, has that further investigation occured and has it been convincing?
As for the British, Germany tried to destroy them, so they took German colonies as trusteeships and gave some to South Africa and New Zealand. But the trusteeships were understood as temporary. They couldn't simply give the land to South Africa or New Zealand permanently to do as they wished.
I'm not interested in hashing this out or making a career out of arguing about it either. I posted the links so that people could make up their own minds.
btt