A salute to Joan Peters
Joan Peters is sorely missed right now. Four years after her death and 34 years after the publication of her bestselling book "From Time Immemorial," the U.S. administration is recognizing her claims about so-called Palestinian refugeeism.
Through her thorough research, Peters was the first to expose the lie that is Palestinian refugeeism. Now, when UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, is trying to fool the world into believing there are 5.2 million Palestinian refugees, is the perfect time to return to Peters and her grand opus.
In her 1984 book, Peters exposed for the first time how the United Nations altered the criteria for Palestinians to gain refugee status, thereby exacerbating the problem far beyond its actual scope. She discovered that by changing the definition and allowing the descents of Palestinian refugees to inherit refugee status, Palestinian refugees in large part did not fit the U.N.'s own definition of who is a refugee.
Peters exposed the very document in which the U.N. decided to invent another form of refugeeism, one unlike anything else the world had ever known. She interpreted a series of data and by doing so convinced quite a few people that many of the Palestinians who were afforded refugee status were not residents of the country "from time immemorial," as they had claimed, but were, in fact, migrant workers who had recently arrived in the country. Others would follow in Peters' footsteps, and while they may have corrected her data a bit, she was still the first. Peters' groundbreaking research slaughtered a sacred cow the academic world had avoided at all costs.
Seth Frantzman: Netanyahu is tragically right – the world fails to protect the weak
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was excoriated over the weekend on social media for giving a speech in which he extolled the tragic reality of the world. “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive.” This is “fascism” people shouted on social media.IsraellyCool: MUST WATCH: Palestinians Answer the Question “When Was Palestine Established”
“It left me speechless,” tweeted Julia Ioffe. His comments echo Hitler, claimed one article. Former US Ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder claimed Netanyahu was channeling the Athenian maxim from Thucydides “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” But the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian war Daalder wrote. He forgot to add who they lost it to. Sparta. A city-state that was obsessed with being strong even more than the Athenians were.
For all of those who are outraged about Netanyahu’s statement, I have a question. Where were they in August 2014 when Islamic State launched its attack on the weak, peaceful, defenseless and vulnerable Yazidis in northern Iraq? When ISIS overran their villages and separated men and women, and then systematically machine-gunned the men into mass graves like the Einsatzgruppen did in 1941, where were they? Did they go to Sinjar to help in the fight against ISIS? The wealthy and the strong from the West who are today outraged and offended, were they there to help in the defense of Sinjar? And what have they done since for the 6,000 women and children kidnapped and sold into slavery? For four years now, more than 3,000 women are still missing, enslaved in the years 2014-2018.
These are the weak. Who helped them? Well, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) helped them in 2014. Who was it that formed a human wall against ISIS in 2014 at the gates of Erbil and Baghdad? It was Kurdish Peshmerga and Shi’ite militias aided by US air power. It was the strong. When ISIS came knocking it was tens of thousands of young men from southern Iraq, imbued with religious devotion and flags of Hussein and Ali who went to fight and die, their names never recorded or known in the places where people are offended by the word “strong.” It was poor Kurdish men, underpaid and having to buy their own uniforms, rifles and boots, who went to stop ISIS.
Who joined ISIS? 50,000 people from all over the world, including 5,000 mostly middle class, strong, people from Europe. Did the strongest nations prevent the 5,000 from Europe from joining? No. They let them join. They let them book tickets to Turkey. They even let them return.
Palestinian Arabs are asked when Palestine was established, as well as follow-up questions like: What was the ancient capital? Who was the ruler? What was the currency? What was the flag?
The answers are as illuminating as they are varied.
Form your own conclusions. For me it is clear: a separate palestinian identity was only formed in recent times, after World War I, as a response to the increasing Jewish presence in the land (See my history series for more proof of this). And they are making up their history as they go along.
In contrast, if you ask Israelis similar questions regarding the history of the Jewish people in Israel, they will know, and there will be consistent answers.