Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

In April 1985, a distinguished committee chaired by the renowned Middle Eastern scholar Raphael Patai awarded the prestigious National Jewish Book Award in the "Israel" category to a study that, judging by its reception in the American press, was destined to fundamentally transform contemporary understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The book, From Time Immemorial, by Joan Peters, boldly asserted that several hundred thousand Arabs residing in the part of Palestine which became Israel in 1949 were themselves recent immigrants to the area. Palestinians, in other words, were not indigenous people displaced by Zionist settlement, as they had always claimed, but newcomers who arrived en masse only after Jews had made the region prosperous.

The implications of Peters's thesis were all too obvious: Israel need not recognize Palestinian rights, or compensate the Palestinians for having been displaced, since they were never really there in the first place.

Commentators were quick to tout the book's significance. Martin Peretz, editor of The New Republic, ventured that From Time Immemorial "will change the mind of our generation. If understood, it could also affect the history of the future."

Barbara Tuchman called the book a "historical event in itself."

Novelist Saul Bellow felt that "millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, would be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians."

Elie Wiesel, Daniel Pipes, Jehuda Reinharz (current president of Brandeis University), and a host of other luminaries offered endorsements or favorable reviews. A mere eight months after publication, From Time Immemorial seemed well on its way to changing history, entering its seventh print run, with author Peters booked for 250 speaking engagements.

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Twelve years later, Joan Peters and her book have fallen into utter obscurity. For this we can thank Norman G. Finkelstein, the author of an important new study, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Finkelstein shows why From Time Immemorial qualifies as one of the most "spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict."

Finkelstein exposed Peters's work as a tangle of fudged quotations, miscalculations, and distortions worthy of a professional propagandist.

Finkelstein made this discovery in 1984--a year before Peters was awarded the National Jewish Book Award--but could elicit no interest in his findings from the intellectual community that had just fallen all over itself praising her work. Although he managed to publish an essay debunking Peters in the small Chicago-based magazine In These Times, none of the prominent journals that had run favorable reviews of the book were willing to run any subsequent critical correspondence. Nor did a single national newspaper or columnist find the story of the Peters fraud newsworthy until January 1986, when Anthony Lewis of The New York Times wrote a column appropriately titled, "There Were No Indians."

Even after Peters's loopy thesis was savaged in the British and Israeli press, Peters's American endorsers stuck by their word. Barbara Tuchman attributed the "smear campaign" to "growing anti-Semitism" and "long-term apologists of the Palestine Liberation Organization." Elie Wiesel lent his name to a subsequent paperback, as did all of Peters's original endorsers.

It is pretty much a badge of respectability in American intellectual culture to side ardently with the aspirations of Jewish nationalism, which is perhaps why not one of Peters's boosters has suffered the slightest downgrading in intellectual or moral stature for having endorsed a pro-Zionist fraud.

Finkelstein dares to expose what he sees as Zionism's basic incompatibility with democratic values. As Finkelstein shows, Zionism emerged as a subspecies of European romantic nationalism grounded in the notion that the state, and hence citizenship, belongs to one group. That is why Israel has no written constitution outlining civil rights for Jews and non-Jews. It is why even Israeli leftists speak of an impending "crisis" when the percentage of non-Jews in the population rises too high. And it is why, today, 93 percent of Israeli land can be owned legally only by Jews. As Finkelstein shows, the so-called solution to the presence of Palestinians on what was to be Jewish land was mass "transfer"--displacement by force. Publicly, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion said that peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews was possible. Privately, Israeli ministers like Yosef Weitz stressed that "there is no room in the country for both peoples. The only solution is a Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises."

According to Finkelstein, the attitude has hardly softened over time.

Finkelstein neither poses as nor wishes to be considered a dispassionate or detached scholar. The son of Holocaust survivors, he casts his arguments as challenges to his readers: Shouldn't the memory and experience of Jewish suffering foster sympathy for the victims rather than denials that any harm has been done? And shouldn't the lesson of exclusionary nationalist movements engender total opposition to any ideology that abrogates the rights of minorities?

The counterargument is that since Jews were themselves denied minority rights in Europe, and were eventually faced with mass extermination, they had an under-standable reason for embracing nationalism. Finkelstein's account sometimes too cleanly disentangles Jewish nationalism from the European theater, whose xenophobia and persistent anti-Semitism were certainly critical to Zionism's emergence.

That said, he correctly insists that historical anti-Semitism should never be used to justify subsequent discrimination against Arabs. "One can," he writes, "imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country."

Of what relevance are these questions today, when, on the surface, the current Oslo peace process seems to be resolving the dilemma of competing claims to the land of Palestine? Enormously relevant, says Meron Benvenisti, a distinguished analyst of Arab-Israeli affairs and author of Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land.

Benvenisti is a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem and founder of the West Bank Database Project, which began in 1982 to compile extensive documentation on human-rights violations and the growth of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

His new book is the clearest exposition yet on how the peace process fulfills rather than alters Zionism's traditional goal of separating Arabs and Jews once and for all. "The acute quest `to get rid of the Arabs,' shared by right and left, doves and hawks, has become the driving force and source of public support which brought about the dramatic breakthrough in the peace process in 1993," he writes.

Benvenisti argues that the need for separation was driven home not only by the Intifidah, the Palestinian uprising, but by the closures and deportations ordered by the Rabin government prior to Oslo, which gave Israelis a taste of how separation might actually feel. "What would be nicer," Benvenisti writes mockingly, "than to wake up in the morning and realize that the problem has been solved--that the `others' [Arabs] had disappeared?"

Benvenisti further contends that the notion of a Palestinian state conveniently resolves questions about ethnic discrimination within Israel.

Will separation succeed? Benvenisti argues that it will not. For one, the current division of land and resources is simply too unequal to create lasting peace. Israel still controls one-third of the Gaza Strip and two-thirds of the West Bank, dominates water resources, and has quietly expropriated roughly 40,000 acres of additional land in the West Bank since the peace process began.

Benvenisti calls this "peace without sacrifice." It cannot last, he says, because "the Palestinians will not suffer it for long."

Eventually, Benvenisti envisions the region transforming from two separate and unequal nations into a Confederation of Israel/Palestine.

But, unfortunately, as Benvenisti knows, such a post-Zionist, binationalist arrangement has no chance of becoming the subject of concrete political discourse any time soon. Jews perceive coexistence on such terms as fundamentally at odds with the notion of a Jewish state (as indeed it is). Palestinians see it as a diminution of their national struggle into a civil struggle for equal rights within a larger Jewish entity.

Benvenisti, who is acutely aware of these realities, offers his binationalist vision not as a program but as a dream, insisting "there is a place for that dream" in imagining a future different from the one being planned. However, as both his and Finkelstein's analyses make clear, that dream will not come true unless Israel and its supporters confront the inherent flaw of Zionism, which requires the subordination of Palestinian rights.