From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine.

PETERS, Joan.

Item Number: 72080

New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1984.

First edition of Peters’ first book. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz: Dear Abe, I am truly moved and gratified by your warm, enthusiastic response to the book. As an ardent admirer of yours over many years, I particularly prize a favorable judicial opinion from your Honor, Fondly, Joan.” The recipient Abraham Lincoln Marovitz was a federal judge, whom President Kennedy nominated to a seat on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The United States Senate confirmed Marovitz on September 25, 1963, and received commission on October 2, 1963. With Judge Marovitz notes in the text in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Irving Freeman.

This monumental and fascinating book, the product of seven years of original research, will forever change the terms of the debate about the conflicting claims of the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East. The weight of the comprehensive evidence found and brilliantly analyzed by historian and journalist Joan Peters answers many crucial questions, among them: Why are the Arab refugees from Israel seen in a different light from all the other, far more numerous peoples who were displaced after World War II? Why, indeed, are they seen differently from the Jewish refugees who were forced, in 1948 and after, to leave the Arab countries to find a haven in Israel? Who, in fact, are the Arabs who were living within the borders of present-day Israel, and where did they come from? Joan Peters's highly readable and moving development of the answers to these and related questions will appear startling, even to those on both sides of the argument who have considered themselves to be in command of the facts. On the basis of a definitive weight of hitherto unexamined population and other historical data, much of it buried in untouched archives, Peters demonstrates that Jews did not displace Arabs in Palestine-just the reverse: Arabs displaced Jews; that a hidden but major Arab migration and immigration took place into areas settled by Jews in pre-Israel Palestine; that a substantial number of the Arab refugees called Palestinians in reality had foreign roots; that for every Arab refugee who left Israel in 1948, there was a Jewish refugee who fled or was expelled from his Arab birthplace at the same time-today's much discussed Sephardic majority in Israel is in fact composed mainly of these Arab-born Jewish refugees or their offspring; that Britain, the Mandatory power, winked at and even encouraged Arab immigration into Palestine between the two World Wars; that by disguising the Arab immigrants as "indigenous native Palestinian Arabs," the British justified their restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement, dooming masses of European Jews to destruction in the Nazi camps.