From Time Immemorial:

The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine

by Joan Peters, JKAP Publications, Chicago, IL

review by John Gellner, editor of Canadian Defence Quarterly

This book, scholarly in the truest sense of the word, is a study of the basic reasons for the Arab-Jewish feud - no fewer than 189 pages are taken up by appendices, notes, bibliography and index. Together with 412 pages of text, they amply support the author's thesis that the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who had lived in what became Israel in 1948 is not the reason for the conflict which has now been going on for years.

It is not true, argues author Joan Peters, that if whatever wrongs may have been done were rectified, Arabs and Jews would live side by side in peace and harmony. The fact is that the enmity has been there "from time immemorial." It is an institutionalized enmity: the Charter of Omar, Mohammed's successor, sets down the conditions under which dhimmis - non-Moslems - are allowed to live among the believers, and even that harsh law does no more than introduce a modicum of discretion into the injunction of the Koran to fight non-believers.

In spirit, if not always in letter, dhimma laws have been observed in some Arab communities until recent times, and are indeed still being observed. In the case of the Jews, the laws would have been as harsh as ever had there not been a wholesale Jewish exodus from Arab countries after 1948. These are the Sephardic Jews, descendants of families who had lived among the Arabs for centuries, who now form the majority of the population of Israel.

Readers will not need much convincing to accept the author's contention that it is hatred of Jews, virulent anti-Semitism brought down from generation to generation, and not the fate of the Palestinian Arabs, which makes the existence of a Jewish state difficult to accept if not intolerable to Arab countries. Nor should Western man adopt a "holier than thou" attitude in that respect; the West's own record is rather shocking.

There have been persecutions of the Jews all through the history of the Western world, and even in this century they have not been limited to the abominations of the Nazis. There were bloody pogroms in Czarist Russia; legal restrictions on Jews, such as their exclusion from the civil and the military services, were in force in some European countries right to the end of the First World War. Also, hidden anti-Semitism was widespread, and to a degree it still is.

Peters devotes a part of her book to showing that it was that kind of hidden (or even subconscious) anti-Semitism that made the British authorities, in the days of the Palestine mandate, generally encourage Arab immigration, and put obstacles in the way of Jewish immigration. This continued even after 1933, when many Jewish lives could have been saved - Hitler, in the beginning, wanted the German Jews to leave voluntarily and said so loudly. (Canadian authorities, incidentally, did not show much compassion either. This was brought out by Irving Abella and Harold Troper in their recent book, None Is Too Many: Canada And The Jews Of Europe 1933 - 1948.)

Peters devotes a good deal of space to proving that the Palestinian Arabs' claim against Israel cannot rightly be based on the claim that Arabs are native people displaced by a national and religious group that had not been there for almost 2,000 years and that is now asserting historic rights to the land. She shows that despite the Diaspora, many Jewish settlements had remained in Palestine. At the same time, part of the Arab population was made up of immigrants or descendants of fairly recent immigrants. Perhaps her most interesting figures are those that show that of the Arab "settled population," counting those whose families had been in the areas included in the new state of Israel before 1893 - 140,200 stayed and 342,800 left, while all 170,300 recent Arab immigrants became refugees.

In other words, in the case of the Palestinian Arabs, attachment to the land of their ancestors played a role when it came to making the decision whether to yield to pressures to leave. If there was a difference in the case of the Palestinians, it was one that had little to do with their own attitudes or indeed with Israeli policies.

Contrary to what the rule has been in similar population movements in our times - Greeks from Asia Minor, Germans from Eastern Europe, Moslems from India and Hindus from Pakistan after the partition, French "colons" from Algeria - the Palestinian Arabs were generally not absorbed by the racial and national entities they joined (Jordan excepted). There was a political reason for that. It kept alive a very visible grievance - masses of Palestinians in wretched refugee camps - which helped justify the uncompromising anti-Israeli stand of Arab countries.

Even the most wide-eyed optimist will, after reading Peters' book, have to come to the conclusion that peace in the Middle East is not at hand. Despite the odd hopeful sign, such as the Camp David accord between Egypt and Israel, the best that can realistically be expected is the continuation of the fragile undeclared armistice that has generally prevailed for the last 11 years.