From Time Immemorial - Response To Reception

Response To Reception

That a book so widely acclaimed should come to be treated with such disdain by a number of learned scholars and historians generated no small amount of controversy. In the pages of the New York Review of Books (March 1986), Daniel Pipes and Ronald Sanders, two of the book's early supporters, engaged in an exchange with Yehoshua Porath, one of its most vehement critics. Pipes summed up the situation, stating Peters' work had "been received in two ways at two times. Early reviews treated her book as a serious contribution to the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict and late ones dismissed it as propaganda."

In the exchange both Pipes and Sanders accepted some of the charges that had been leveled at the book. In reference to the harsh criticism, Sanders said that Peters had "brought this upon herself" and acknowledged that "patient researchers have found numerous examples of sloppiness in her scholarship and an occasional tendency not to grasp the correct meaning of a context from which she has extracted a quotation." Pipes stated that he would not dispute the technical, historical, and literary faults identified by the book's critics. He described the book as "appallingly crafted" and that Peters "quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts. Much of the book is irrelevant to Miss Peters’s central thesis. The author’s linguistic and scholarly abilities are open to question. Excessive use of quotation marks, eccentric footnotes, and a polemical, somewhat hysterical undertone mar the book." Despite accepting these failings in Peters' scholarship, neither Pipes nor Sanders were willing to repudiate the book's central thesis, which they both defended.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times discussing the reactions of commentators to the book, Anthony Lewis compared the reaction of American commentators to the reaction of Israeli ones:

"Israelis have not gushed over the book as some Americans have. Perhaps that is because they know the reality of the Palestinians' existence, as great Zionists of the past knew. Perhaps it is because most understand the danger of trying to deny a people identity. As Professor Porath says, Neither historiography nor the Zionist cause itself gains anything from mythologizing history."

William B. Quandt, in the June 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs, stated that it had been demonstrated Peters' claims in the book were based on "shoddy scholarship". Quandt praises Finkelstein's "landmark essay" on the subject, crediting him and other scholars with bringing to light the deficiencies in Peters' work. In 2005 Israeli historian Avi Shlaim credited Finkelstein with proving that the book was "preposterous and worthless". Shlaim stated that the evidence adduced by Finkelstein was "irrefutable" and the case he had made against Peters' book was "unanswerable".

Writing in the New Yorker in 2011, David Remnick described the book as "an ideological tract disguised as history", "propaganda" and "pseudo-scholarship". He stated that while the book was a commercial success and had been praised by a number of writers and critics, it had been thoroughly discredited by Israeli historian Yoshua Porath along with many others. He points out that even some right wing critics who had originally favoured the book later accepted the flaws in its scholarship.