From Time Immemorial

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

Author	Joan Peters
Language	English
Subject	The demographics of the Arab population of Palestine and of the Jewish population of the Arab world before and after the formation of the State of Israel
Publisher	Harper & Row
Publication date	1984
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print
Awards	National Jewish Book Award, category "Israel" (April 1985)

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a 1984 book by Joan Peters, published by Harper & Row,^[1] about the demographics of the Arab population of Palestine and of the Jewish population of the Arab world before and after the formation of the State of Israel.

It was initially positively received by reviewers such as Barbara W. Tuchman.^[2] A short time later, the book's central claims were contradicted by Norman Finkelstein, then a PhD student at Princeton University, who argued that Peters misrepresented or misunderstood the statistics on which she based her thesis.

Reputable scholars and reviewers from across the political spectrum have since discredited the central claims of Peters's book. By the time the 1985 British edition was reviewed, the book received mixed reviews being regarded by some as wrongheaded at best and fraudulent at worst and by others as groundbreaking. Ian Gilmour, a former British Secretary of State for Defence, ridiculed the book as "pretentious and preposterous" and argued that Peters had repeatedly misrepresented demographic statistics,^[3] while Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath called it "sheer forgery".^[4] In 2004, From Time Immemorial was the subject of another academic controversy, when Finkelstein accused Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz of largely plagiarizing his book The Case for Israel from it.