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From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine
By Joan Peters. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 601 pp. $24.95.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in the June 15, 1969, either of the Sunday Times (London) as fellows"
"There was no such thing as Palestinians...It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Now, 15 years later, Golda has an ex post facto apologist in the person of Joan Peters, author of From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine.
Joan Peter's book falls in the category of what may be called scholarly polemic: scholarly by being heavily researched and documented, polemical by using selective documentation as a battering ram for am ideological position. (The book title is a sarcastic reference to the Palestinian claim of long tenure in Palestine.)
The author attempts to create an aura of objectivity and fair-mindedness at the outset by describing her "ardent" civil rights activism in Mississippi, followed later by travel to the Middle East to report on the Palestinian refugees, whose plight had "seemingly" been prolonged "by a mechanism...