Reply #36: Peters [View All]

[Lithos]

No, I have not read either David and Ian's Gilmour article in the LRB nor have I read Albert Hourani's earlier article. If you have them on in a textual format, I would be grateful if you send them privately (my own library here does not go back that far). I have read Chomskey's citations of both of these articles.

Here is one of the more lucid commentaries I have found. Note: While I am not a fan of much this site offers (it is Libertarian), I did find this analysis to be fairly good.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2135

While Finkelstein himself did a fair job in pointing out numerous errors in the document (particularly Hope-Simpson), he himself did a shoddy job of back tracking the much more crucial census numbers which were the core of Peter's fantastic assertions that Palestinians immigrated into the Jewish settlement areas to follow the success that they were generating. Discrediting this seemed to come from other people.

So I will give Finkelstein credit for being among the first to point out the hoax in the general press, but it seems to me the real scholarship and real weight that destroyed Peter's work came from others much more deeply involved in the field including Porath, Hourani and Ian and David Gilmour.

As Porath is quoted by Chomskey in his work _Understanding Power_ to have said:

The whole "Palestinian" issue, Miss Peters claims, is a "big lie" that has caused "bewildering, squeamish reactions" of "doubt and guilt" among Israel's supporters. Yehoshua Porath, an Israeli historian of the Palestinian Arabs who teaches at Hebrew University, was asked in a telephone interview from Jerusalem about the book. "I think it's a sheer forgery," he replied. "In Israel, at least, the book was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon," the historian said. Mr. Porath described his politics as centrist. He has written an essay on the book for The New York Review of Books that will be published soon.

This tells me that the Peter's work was immediately discredited by those in the know and that Finkelstein's work was not a crucial element in pointing this out. I suspect the same is true for Albert Hourani as well whose own initial reading provided similar commentary.


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