Norman Finkelstein on From Time Immemorial

Joan Peters wrote the book From Time Immemorial.|
Norman Finkelstein (1953) claimed to examine it in detail and alleged that the book was a "monumental hoax". A "history and defense" of the state of Israel, Peters' book has been effusively praised in mainstream United States media sources. Finkelstein's charges initially roused little attention in the U.S. According to Finkelstein, "By the end of 1984, From Time Immemorial had...received some two hundred [favorable] notices...in the United States. The only 'false' notes in this crescendoing chorus of praise were the Journal of Palestine Studies, which ran a highly critical review by Bill Farrell; the small Chicago-based newsweekly In These Times, which published a condensed version of this writer's findings; and Alexander Cockburn, who devoted a series of columns in The Nation exposing the hoax....The periodicals in which From Time Immemorial had already been favorably reviewed refused to run any critical correspondence (e.g. The New Republic, The Atlantic, Commentary). Periodicals that had yet to review the book rejected a manuscript on the subject as of little or no consequence (e.g. The Village Voice, Dissent, The New York Review of Books). Not a single national newspaper or columnist contacted found newsworthy that a best-selling, effusively praised 'study' of the Middle East conflict was a threadbare hoax" (Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, pp. 45-6).

However, after a number of reviewers in the British and Israeli media supported Finkelstein's criticisms, a few U.S. journals began publishing more critical reviews of the book. In the magazine Foreign Affairs, William B. Quandt described Finkelstein's criticism of From Time Immemorial as a "landmark essay" and a "victory to his credit." Book review: Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, William B. Quandt, Foreign Affairs, May/June 1996

The controversy that surrounded Finkelstein's research caused a delay in his earning his PhD at Princeton. Noam Chomsky, a friend of Finkelstein, wrote in Understanding Power that Finkelstein "literally could not get the faculty to read [his thesis]." According to Chomsky, Princeton eventually granted Finkelstein his doctorate only "out of embarrassment," though they didn't "even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University." (Understanding Power, New York, 2002, p. 245 [1])