Joan Peters
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Joan Peters is a former CBS news producer and author best known for her controversial book, From Time Immemorial, published in 1984.
She has also written for magazines such as Harper's, Commentary, The New Republic, and The New Leader in the 1970s and early 1980s. She also helped to create a series of TV news documentaries for CBS in 1973 regarding a recent war in the Middle East and offered Middle East opinions on PBS programming. Her work exclusively centers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Although it sold millions of copies in the United States the book was never published in Britain because its central thesis (that Arabs only arrived in Palestine to take advantage of the economic boom caused by Jewish immigration) was not taken seriously by the British press who had been reporting on the Palestinian uprisngs throughout the mandate period after the first world war. Norman Finkelstein's Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict systematically refutes the claims made in From Time Immemorial and in particular the demographic statistics upon which they were based The staistics have key inaccuracies, which Finkelstein claims are intentionally misleading. Since Finkelstein publised the book Joan Peters has cancelled all public appearances relating to From Time Immemorial and has never replied to her critics.
During the Carter administration she served in the government as a subject expert on issues releated to the Middle East.
