JW cites the noted authorities Mark Twain and Joan Peters to make his claim that the Palestinians didn’t really exist. Which ignores that Twain wrote his travelog “The Innocents Abroad” as serially exaggerated comedy, and that Joan Peters was discovered to be an academic fraud misrepresenting Ottoman Census numbers and recycling hoary old 50′s Zionist propaganda laughed at even in Israel.
Twain generally gave a good trashing of each country he visited and peppered his book with fabulous lies. It is probably good for SLC’s reputation that he did not put subsaharan Africa on his itinerary, as he was not kindly to most cultures he visited. For example, he wrote that Napolitans were particularly likely to die of diseases like cholera because by the time doctors dug through the dirt that encrusted each resident of Naples, it was too late to save them. Milan was nice enough, Twain “documented” except all the ladies were fat and had full beards and moustaches. And the city crawled with lice.
Zionists citing Twain as a Middle East expert is like citing the Zucker Brothers (Airplane!) as experts on aviation and the “air travel experience”.
His description of Greece mirrored his Holy Land description:
From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw
little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by
three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and
deserted–a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all
Greece in these latter ages. We saw no ploughed fields, very few
villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and
hardly ever an isolated house. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert,
without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently.
Of course, the Turks have no version of their own AIPAC to claim that after the Great Noted Authority Mark Twain’s visit, it was “Italians from elsewhere” that populated Greece.
The Joan Peters book is more important as it was New Age Zionism, concocted out of past discredited lies and with Peters caught out fabricating her own deceit. It was actively pushed by Zionists to the Right-Wing Christians they were busy trying to win over as Christian Zionists. To a large extent, the Zionists succeeded. THe book had 10 printings. It is thoroughly discredited in academia as evidence of Peter’s fraud emerged. But still believed by the target audience, the guillable Christian Zionists.
It contains many Big Lies, such as the Radio Broadcast lie that non-Jews voluntarily left on their own. But the most significant Big Lie she pushed was of Palestinian non-existance prior to the 20′s.
Peters’ central thesis is that a significant portion of the 700,000 Arabs residing in the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 immigrated to the Jewish settled areas of Palestine between 1920 and 1948. Essentially, according to Peters, the Palestinians are a fabrication, like the tooth fairy, for no such people really exist. She implies that during Jewish colonization, Palestine really was a virgin wasteland, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The Arabs that live there now, says Peters, moved to the area during colonial times, attracted to the region by the prosperity brought by the industrious Ashkenazi settlers from across the sea. Or in other words, the Palestinians are a demographic fabrication who have no historic claim or right to the land.
Peters attempts to prove this thesis by documenting a massive wave of illegal Arab migration to Palestine during the colonial period, and more specifically during the 1920s and 30s. However, as a number of more sober-minded scholars have pointed out (Said being the first who comes to mind), the amazing thing about From Time Immemorial is that its own demographic research contradicts this central thesis. The entire legitimacy of the book revolves around the magic number 2.7, for Peters maintains that between 1893 and 1947, in both the Jewish and Arab areas of Palestine, “natural” (i.e. non-immigrant) population growth was 2.7 percent per year. The funny thing is Peters puts the indigenous Palestinian Arab population at 466,600 in 1893. Unfortunately for her, and for her second grade math teacher, 466,600 times 2.7 percent over the 54-year time span turns out to be 1,146,902. And unfortunately again, Peters confirms that the total Arab Palestinian population in 1947 was 1,303,800. This means that according to Peters’ own research, 1,146,902 of the total 1,303,800 Palestinians living in Palestine during 1947 (88%) were not immigrants, were not the descendants of immigrants, but were purely and simply the result of Peters’ magic natural growth rate of 2.7 percent. In other words, only 156,898 (12%) of the Arabs living in Palestine were immigrants, thus rendering Peters’ book, as even Ha’aretz was forced to concede, “one of the more lamentable propaganda efforts in recent years.”
I don’t buy that Jews should remain stateless, nor that Israel is now a “fact” and there is no way to turn back the clock and argue the that Soviet Oblast or Kenyan high plateau offered was a wiser choice. That is moot, now. But that does not obviate that Jews wanted their ancestral lands back and took them from the inhabitants in a way that Germany (the Ostlands) and Serbia (Bosnia, Kosovo) failed to.
The people they cleansed were never compensated for their losses and as time has passed have not grown to accept their fate, but become more and more radicalized.
