[Peace-discuss] Finkelstein on Joan Peters’s legacy (and Dershowitz’s legal troubles)

[Robert Naiman]

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/finkelstein-dershowitzs-troubles



*January 28, 2015 *





Joan Peters, the author of the *book **From Time Immemorial: The Origins of
the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine*
<http://books.google.com/books/about/From_time_immemorial.html?id=5EkgDJsaGhMC>*,
died on January 5th, at 78. As David Samel **wrote*
<http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/legacy-peters-immemorial>* following her
death,”The bizarre chapter of Joan Peters’s contribution to the Middle East
debate does not end with her death. Her arguments, both those she adopted
from others and those she formulated herself, still constitute a huge
portion of the go-to hasbara repertoire.” I interviewed Norman Finkelstein
and asked him to reflect on her work and legacy, as he played a central
role in debunking much of her work as described in his book **Image and
Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict*
<http://books.google.com/books/about/Image_and_Reality_of_the_Israel_Palestin.html?id=vNb5VkyxDlYC>
*.*



*Adam Horowitz: Could you start by saying a bit about how From Time
Immemorial was received?*

Norman Finkelstein: First of all the important primary factor is the
context. Israel in 1982 took its first major public relations hit since the
1967 war. It was a public relations disaster for Israel. One of the reasons
being I think, as Robert Fisk pointed out in *Pity the Nation* he said
unlike all other Arab states Lebanon did not control the press and so
mainstream reporters were able at that time to roam freely throughout
Lebanon. Mainstream reporters, I should say who had credibility, were able
to roam  freely through Lebanon during the Israeli attack, and what they
were reporting was quiet horrifying. It’s forgotten now but even against
the Israeli attacks in recent years on Lebanon, on Gaza, they all pale in
comparison to what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982. The usual figures are
between sixteen and twenty thousand Lebanese and Palestinians,
overwhelmingly civilians, were killed during the Israeli attack. All the
Lebanese killed in 2006 plus the three massacres in Gaza that doesn’t even
come to half of the figure that happened in Lebanon.



So now you had credible reportage of what Israel was doing and it was a
major public relations setback for Israel. You could say the first layer of
Jewish support for Israel, the first layer, peeled away and that was the
layer of what you would call the Old Left, mainly those were identified
with the Soviet Union and therefore identified with Israel because the
Soviets supported the creation of the state of Israel in ’48 and also
because a lot of the signature institutions of Israel in that era were of a
socialist leftist orientation, most famously the kibbutzim.

And so before 1982 the pro-Soviet, pro-Communist Old Left even those who
were disaffected from the Soviet Union which still fell within the umbrella
of the Old Left, they were still pretty much pro-Israel, there were just
really a tiny handful of exceptions. The best known being of course
Professor Chomsky. There was also Maxime Robinson in France, but in general
the support was totally for Israel, overwhelmingly for Israel.



And so the first layer of support was peeled off, peeled away, but overall
Israel took a public relations hit. There were the usual characters, and
the usual liars, people like Martin Peretz who went on the Israeli army
tour of Lebanon and famously said at the time that everything you have read
in the newspapers and heard in the media about what happened in Lebanon
just didn’t happen, it didn’t happen.



As Professor Chomsky replied in *The Fateful Triangle*, his account of
the Lebanon war within the broader context, that’s just a very unusual
claim. You don’t usually make the claim that the other side has just made
everything up whole cloth. You usually said they left out context, or they
were selective, but to say that it didn’t happen, as in *16 to 20 thousand
people weren’t killed,* that’s an unusual claim. And of course it was an
absurd claim, it did happen. And so the basic purpose of *From Time
Immemorial* was to re-establish Israel’s image in the West.



*And when did it come out in relation to the war?*

It came out in 1984.



*Okay, two years later.*

Right, where you are still feeling the repercussions of the Lebanon war.
And the Lebanon war was not so quickly forgotten, as I’m sure you know.
First of all it lasted three and a half months, and second of all it
climaxed in Sabra and Shatilla. So it left its imprint on the public
consciousness and they needed something to rally the stalwarts behind the
cause again because people were shook up by Lebanon especially those who
had been reared on the *Exodus* version of Israeli history. It all came as
a kind of shock.



As I said it was the first public relations hit Israel has taken since 1967
because after ‘67, the next major interaction was, it came to be called,
the Yom Kippur War where Israelis were seen as being on the defensive
because they were “attacked.”



So straight through till ’82 Israel’s image was like teflon in the West.
And so it was big setback and they needed something to rally the stalwarts
around the cause. *From Time Immemorial* fit the bill because its essential
message was the Palestinians have no legitimate claim whatsoever because
the heart of their claim is false, they don’t even exist.



This was an old theme. For example, right now I am reading through the
foreign relations of the U.S. volumes on the Carter years 1977 through ’80.
They are voluminous they run to 3,000 pages. But as you know during that
period that’s when the transition occurred between the Labor party which
was ejected from office in 1977 and the Likud for the first time takes
power. The main advisor to Menachem Begin who won the election in ’77 was a
guy named Shmuel Katz, he used to come on the periodic diplomatic trips to
the White House because they were trying to figure out how to end the
conflict in the Carter years. He would come along as basically the court
historian, or the court propagandist, and if you read the transcripts, and
I can actually send you the quotes, he says to Carter you have to
understand there are no Palestinians. Palestine was empty and Jews came and
made the desert a home then all these Arabs came and
they surreptitiously entered Palestine, exploited the economic
opportunities that the Jews created and then pretended to be indigenous to
the land.



Then he goes on to say exactly as Joan Peters says, the reason only 150,000
Palestinians remained in Israel after the 1948 war was because they were
the true peasants, they were truly indigenous to Palestine and the rest
were just recent immigrants. That’s why they fled without any incentive,
let alone any military force, by the Israelis.

So the thesis itself was old, what made Joan Peters novel was two things.
Number one that she pretended to prove her thesis with serious scholarship.
She used to like to boast, “my book has 1837 footnotes,” so it wasn’t sort
of a propaganda pamphlet or didn’t appear to be. It had a scholarly
apparatus. The second thing which was of equal moment was it wasn’t churned
out by a partisan political operation, it was Harper & Row which was a very
big publishing house back then and it had all of these scholarly
endorsements and an impressive array of people had lent their names to
it. And at least among them, leaving apart the big names – the Saul
Bellows, the Elie Wiesels and so forth – you had this guy Philip Hauser
from the University of Chicago who headed the populations studies program.
There was a letter from him incorporated as an appendix to the book
saying her demographics and findings were accurate.



So, you had the combination of a high-power publishing house, high-power
intellectuals and just a vast scholarly apparatus. So suddenly, as they
say, this age old Zionist legend suddenly had legs and it took off. It was
a huge best seller back then and it received all of these glowing reviews.



*In your book you say the glowing reviews were primarily in the United
States. That once it reached Europe, and even in Israel, it was seen for
what it was.*

We have to be a little bit careful about that because here the devil really
is in the details, actually it’s usually in the details, the British
reviews came out much later than the American reviews because the British
edition didn’t come out until, maybe my memory could be wrong, around six
months later. By that time I had my findings and Professor Chomsky had his
connections and so we sent the findings to the key people who were going to
review it in the UK. For example Ian and David Gilmour who reviewed it in
the* London Review of Books. *If you read their review it basically took
everything I said because they were primed.



They were actually quite hilarious reviews. I quote one, I think in *Image
and Reality, *from the British publication *Time Out *which described it as
the size and weight of a dried cowpat. They treated it with contempt, but
partly because some of them were primed. There were others of course
who knew the truth, but they didn’t know the truth, I don’t think, in the
detail. What I did was I demonstrated not just that as a broad tableau the
book is false, I demonstrated that the evidence was fake, which is a
different thing. The numbers were faked, the reports she used, the annual
British reports to the League of Nations when they had the mandate over
Palestine, and these reports they were all faked and they were doctored by
Peters. One example that stood out was she took one paragraph from the Hope
Simpson report and she mangled it 19 times. It was a real feat what she had
done.



*And is that the report that Alan Dershowitz then just took whole cloth?*

No what Dershowitz did is different. As I said this was an old Zionist
thesis and she reproduced all the standard Zionist representations of
accounts of Americans and British who visited the holy land in the 19th
century. They are travel accounts and as you can imagine you are coming
from London and you are going to Palestine, Palestine looks empty. That’s
not surprising. You’ve been to the occupied territories and even now if you
are traveling on roads to the West Bank, most of it looks empty and this is
now, the population in the West bank is about two million. Back then the
population in the whole of Palestine — meaning the West Bank, Gaza, Israel
and Jordan, the whole of Palestine — the population was about 300,000. So
of course it’s going to look empty. And so all of these accounts were then
used by the Zionist movement and then by Peters who reproduced the
accounts. But she wasn’t the first. As I said ironically she plagiarized
another person, a guy named Ernst Frankenstein, she plagiarized him because
it was just standard Zionist propaganda.



What Dershowitz then did was to proceed and copy her stuff. Frank Menetrez
is a very brilliant scholar, a PhD and a LLD from UCLA, graduated first
this class, editor of the law review and currently up for a federal
judgeship. His definitive expose of the Dershowitz plagiarism is an
Appendix to my book *Beyond Chutzpah* in the paperback version. I asked him
if I could reproduce it. It’s about forty pages it’s very detailed and he
shows that what he did was he copied Peters, who copied other Zionist
tracts, it was just standard.



*In Image and Reality you end your chapter on From Time Immemorial saying
that, despite it all, the book still clings to life. You quote Netanyahu
basically repeating her argument as a scholarly fact. Reflecting now on the
book, and her life, all these years later, do you see this book living on?*

It’s a totally different picture now because there is just a lot more now
known about the conflict. American Jews tend to be very educated, I think
98% of American Jews have a college degree. So you go to college you take
these courses and it’s a totally different picture. On the other hand, it’s
*not* a totally different picture in Israel. I think quite the contrary. I
think Israel has now gone more in the direction of Joan Peters than back in
the 1980s. You know, people like Netanyahu and everything he represents.



And remember there is a large Russian immigrant population who haven’t a
clue what happened before they came. So they hear people like Avigdor
Lieberman saying the land was empty, and now they just want to kill us, and
they believe all that stuff. But the American Jews don’t believe that
stuff. They have gone to school, they read in college. They’ll read Benny
Morris, or they’ll read Avi Shlaim’s standard histories, and they will also
read that the Joan Peters thing was a hoax. So even though it carries in
the lunatic fringes of American Jewish life, the Joan Peters stuff carries
no weight.



I would say a good 80% of American Jews recognize, at this point,
Palestinians have legitimate grievance. Now how legitimate, and that’s the
trump Israel writes, now there is an argument but they recognize there is a
legitimate grievance there. The whole point of *From Time Immemorial* was
to prove that Palestinians had no legitimate grievance because their actual
existence was a myth. So that’s…



*That lives on more now in Israel.*

I think it’s actually more pervasive now because of these few immigrants
populations which know nothing of the past history except the propaganda.



*There was this quote I found when Peters visited the settler community in
Hebron <http://www.hebron.com/english/article.php?id=695> in 2010 and one
of the people she met was Baruch Marzel who is a leader of some the worst
right-wing settlers there. He told her he was a huge fan and he studied her
book cover to cover.*

Yeah, I am sure the settlers believe it all. They do because they think
they are like the American west, they think they are conquering the
wilderness. That’s how they can see themselves and no amount of facts
are going to deflate them because, it’s what you might call, to use a
phrase of Professor Chomsky’s, it’s a necessary illusion.

If you actually accepted the fact that there were people living there then
you would have to acknowledge what you are doing is wrong. So it’s a
necessary illusion to believe the place was empty before you came with your
settlers. As I said like the American west and the setters completely
believe it.
Addendum

*Following our interview I asked Finkelstein if he cared to comment on the
lawsuit accusing Alan Dershowitz of sexually abusing a minor
<http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/dershowitz-alleging-underage>. He responded
by email:*



I prefer not to comment directly on the serious allegations being leveled
against Alan Dershowitz.

It appears that everyone will have their day in court, which is as it
should be.

However, I would want to express an opinion on the letter signed by 38
Harvard Law School professors
<http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/1/24/hls-profs-support-dershowitz/>
(including “radical” Critical Legal Studies professor Roberto Unger and
liberal tribune Laurence Tribe) in defense of Dershowitz.



They describe him as “courageous” and “outspoken” in “defending the
despised, and attacking the views of important people.”



The journalist Jack Newfield memorably described former New York City Mayor
Edward Koch as a “toady to the powerful and a bully to the powerless.”



If you multiply this description a thousand fold, you might begin to
approach the real-life Alan Dershowitz.

It is break-taking to read the Harvard statement in the context of a sexual
slavery case pitting vulnerable minors against billionaires, celebrities
and royalty.



Of particular relevance to your website, no single person in the U.S. was
more responsible than Dershowitz for whitewashing Israel’s brutal torture
of Palestinian detainees.  When Israel’s torture first came under public
scrutiny, Dershowitz wrote (with attorney Monroe Freedman) in the *New York
Times*, “Allegations of systematic torture and allegations of systematic
violations of human rights by Israel must be viewed with more than a little
skepticism.”



Dershowitz repeated his egregious apologetics during the first intifada
(beginning 1987) when, according to B’Tselem, Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch, Israel was “systematically” torturing Palestinian
detainees, deploying methods similar to those recently recounted in the
Senate Report on Torture, but on a vastly greater scale.  The Torture
Report documents 39-44 cases of CIA use of torture, whereas HRW estimated
that during the first intifada alone, Israel tortured and ill-treated “tens
of thousands” of Palestinian detainees.



Indeed, Dershowitz misrepresented Israeli torture practices in testimony *sworn
to* *under oath* in a U.S. extradition hearing of a Palestinian resident,
Mahmoud el-Abed Ahmad, fearing torture in Israel.   For example, he said
that Israel’s “toughest methodology for eliciting statements” from
Palestinian detainees “is to frighten the person being interrogated into
believing that the situation is actually going to be worse than it would
become.”  Israel was at most guilty, according to Dershowitz, of
“occasional pushing and shoving…physical touching.”   (I go through the
sordid record in detail in my book *Beyond Chutzpah*
<http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520245983>.)



Is this what the Harvard Law School professors had in mind when they
praised Dershowitz’s “courageous” and “outspoken” defense of “the despised”?

- See more at: Finkelstein on Joan Peters's legacy (and Dershowitz's legal
troubles)
<http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/finkelstein-dershowitzs-troubles#sthash.ih6nW6Co.dpuf>





[image: image]
<http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/finkelstein-dershowitzs-troubles#sthash.ih6nW6Co.dpuf>











Finkelstein on Joan Peters's legacy (and Dershowitz's le...
<http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/finkelstein-dershowitzs-troubles#sthash.ih6nW6Co.dpuf>

Adam Horowitz interviews Norman Finkelstein on the work and legacy of Joan
Peters, the author of "From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the
Arab-Israeli Conflict...

View on *mondoweiss.net*
<http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/finkelstein-dershowitzs-troubles#sthash.ih6nW6Co.dpuf>

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