Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land.

• Author: Press, Eyal

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...