From time immemorial: the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine.

THIS BOOK is the intellectual equivalent of the Six-Day War. Indeed, if the pen is mightier than the sword, Joan Peters has done more to destroy Arab claims to Palestine than all the derring-do of the Israeli army since--well, if not from time immemorial, then at least from 1948 to the foreseeable future.

The Jews have an old joke--maybe not altogether a joke--that if Moses had turned right instead of left after leaving Egypt, look who'd have had all the oil. Mrs. Peters started left, her interest being the plight of the Arab refugees who, she assumed, had been ousted by the Zionists from Palestine, this homeland that had been theirs "from time immemorial." But the evidence, which she culled painstakingly and voraciously for seven years, turned her in the other direction. And she hit a gusher.

Everything she knew about Palestine--history, geography, demography, politics--fell before the facts that her research uncovered. Since what she knew, or rather what she possessed, was a received opinion delivered by that wondrous network of Middle East hands at State, dons across the River Charles, and the Anthony Lewis Brigade, what she found skewers nearly every myth dogging the Arab-Israeli conflict. It follows that a lot of important people are not going to like this book.

And why should they like it? What they want, what they have been plugging for years, is a Palestinian state or entity or homeland on the West Bank and in the Gaza district. Since they are reasonable people they base their case on the reasonable-sounding claim of the Palestinian Arabs: that they lived on their ancestral land for thousands of years until they were displaced by the Jews in the act of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. And while surely Israel had a right to exist, she does not have the right to control the whole of Palestine, which she has done ever since the Six-Day War in 1967. Moreover, the Palestinian question lies at the heart of the Arab-Israeli problem, and its solution is the key to peace in the Middle East.

Comes now Mrs. Peters with her documents, her reports, her archives, her interminable footnotes. And she proves that:

1. Far from holding sovereignty over Palestine from time immemorial, Palestinian Arabs never ruled the land, and there was only an extraordinarily short period of time--a matter of decades--in the seventh century that any Arabs ruled Palestine.

2. The Arabs never gave a name to the land they now claims as their own. The word "Palestine" was given to the land of Judaea by the Romans in an effort to humiliate the "stiff-necked" Jews and obliterate their presence from the Holy Land.

3. By the late nineteenth century, when the Jews began to return to settle the land, Palestine was a wasteland under Turkish rule. As Mark Twain reported from the scene: "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes . . . desolate and unlovely."

4. The Jews restored the land and, in so doing, attracted the Arabs, who were no dummies: They saw the money and they showed. Far from displacing the Arabs, the Zionists drew them there. At the turn of the century, there were more Jews than Arabs in the parts of Western Palestine where the Jews had settled.

5. Palestine became a political entity for the first time in 1920, when the Allied governments conferred on Great Britain a "mandate" over the territory. It included the land on both sides of the Jordan River. This mandate was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, and it incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people.

6. A few months after the League confirmed the mandate, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill worked out a "reasons of empire" deal that was to change the map of Palestine. Eastern Palestine, or Trans-Jordan, constituting 78 per cent of the land area of Palestine, was to be administered by the Hashemite Abdullah, grandfather of the present King Hussein. The Zionists agreed to a suspension of Jewish immigration to the East Bank on the promise from the British that they would eventually have Western Palestine to themselves. Of course, this never happened. Instead, Abdullah was crowned King of Trans-Jordan by the British, in total violation of the mandate, in 1946--only two years before Israel won independence. As a result of these maneuverings the world thinks of Jordan as an entity entirely separate from Palestine. Ergo, since 1967 the Israelis have occupied the "whole" of Palestine.

7. Almost from the outset of the mandate, the British undercut its principal raison d'etre, the building of a homeland for the Jews. They did this by severely restricting Jewish immigration into Western Palestine, while encouraging illegal Arab immigration into those areas where the Jews were permitted to settle. The tragic climax of this policy was the White Paper of 1939, which barred virtually all Jewish immigration into the country and thus locked the European Jews in with their Nazi Killers. The Palestinian Arabs, meanwhile, supported Hitler through the offices of the mufti of Jerusalem. The Palestinian Jews served in the British forces.

8. The number of Arabs who left Israel in 1948 was more than offset by the number of Jews who came to the new state from the surrounding Arab countries. It was an exchange of population--with a difference. The Jews in Arab nations had been treated like garbage from time immemorial and were kicked out the moment Israel was established. The Arabs in Palestine were nurtured by the British and armed by them. With few exceptions, those who left were exhorted to leave by their leaders, who fully expected that they would re-enter the country in a matter of days and "throw the Jews into the sea."

These are the basic points of this massive study, which consists of 412 pages of text and nearly two hundred pages of documentation--from records of the Ottoman Empire, the British archives, on-the-scene reports by scholars, historians, and journalists, and numerous interviews of officials and ordinary Arabs and Jews by Mrs. Peters herself.

The most remarkable thing about it all, the scariest thing, is that nearly everything in this book reads like hard news. No area in the world has been so heavily covered by the news media. And yet one woman walks in and scoops them all: 35-year-old scoops, 65-year-old scoops, even hundred-year-old scoops. What the hell is going on here?

What's going on here is that an ideological press has distorted the history of Palestine and Israel and Jordan beyond recognition--to the detriment of Israel in the short run, to the detriment of all concerned in the long run. Does it help the cause of the Palestinian Arabs to sympathize with their homeless, stateless condition, when Jordan is nothing but a Palestinian state, where all but the King's family and the Bedouins are Palestinians? Those Arabs who crossed the river into Jordan over the past 35 years were not refugees entering a host state, they were going into the Arab-run part of their own country, which happens to be three-fourths of historical, mandated Palestine. That's a homeless, stateless people? That many of them don't like the King is hardly to the point--how many people in Eastern Europe or Africa or Asia like their leaders? Yet one one suggests the Hungarians, say, are stateless and homeless.

Those who promote the lie that Israel stole the nationhood of the Palestinians are the real culprits because they destroy all possibility of peace. He who takes your nationhood cannot simply give you part of it back.

The great service provided here by Mrs. Peters--if only attention is paid--is to lay a groundwork for peace by clearing away the farrago of lies that has so long passed for reportage and history.

Once it is seen that two nations already share the land once known as Palestine (and in Biblical days as the Land of Israel) then we have reduced the problem to what it basically is: a border issue. The West Bank and Gaza represent only 4 or 5 per cent of the whole of Palestine. Just look at it that way, forgetting all the bogus claims of the Arabs exposed in this book, and you have to wonder what the fuss has been about all these years. Every boundary disagreement in history has been settled by drawing new lines. But nothing gets settled if one side is encouraged to believe that it has lost everything, including a national identity it discovered for the first time a minute and a half after the Six-Day War.

But Alas, reality has always gone AWOL when people start talking about Israelis and Arabs. Imagine an almost uninterrupted Western attitude that holds the Palestinian Arabs to be the key to peace in the Middle East. If Israel were destroyed tomorrow, there would still be no peace in the Middle East, or what's Iran-IRaq all about?--just to name one ongoing war. Beyond which, not one Arab regime wants an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank.

Obviously, when it comes to distortion, the pen is mightier than the sword. Can the same be said for truth?