Utolsó frissítés: 2026.05.31. — Szerző: Anti-Propaganda News Blog
Debunking Hasbara Myths
Note: This content is part of the series „What Every Palestinian Should Know,” published on the Palestine Today website and curated by Handala.
A timeless scam
There is no shortage of propaganda targeting Palestinians. If you look hard enough, you can find a myth or slogan for almost every niche. In fact, even if you start from the basic assumption that Palestinians don’t exist at all, you can find a whole arsenal of writings from the era that „prove” that we are just figments of someone’s imagination.
One popular myth that pops up from time to time is that Palestine was largely uninhabited, and that those who call themselves Palestinians only flocked to the area during the British Mandate, driven by the economic boom and prosperity that accompanied Zionist settlement.
Claiming that Palestine was empty before the arrival of the Zionist colonizers is nothing new – in fact, it is a very popular turn of phrase in almost every settler-colonialist movement. The „innovation” here lies in the claim that Palestinians only arrived in the area during the Mandate period to seek work with the industrious settlers, and in fact, most of today’s Palestinians are descendants of these illegal immigrants.
To clear up this confusion, all you need to do is take a look at the Population(the Ottoman census) or the much later British Mandate census data to see that the land was never empty. Moreover, examining these numbers tells a clear story: the growth of a minority settler population alongside a vast indigenous majority.
But why is this myth so popular? The answer is simple: it's a timeless scam.
Although she was far from the first to raise this myth, Joan Peters made it extremely popular. From Time Immemorial (From Timeless Times). Peters attempted to empirically „prove” the claim by examining population data from various sources. Needless to say, the book was a huge success among Zionists in the United States in its time. Finally, a meticulous, seemingly scientific work was published that proved once and for all that the Palestinian people were fictitious, while absolving Israel of any moral responsibility for the creation of millions of refugees.
The book was widely praised. Saul Bellow wrote that „millions of people around the world, suffocated by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear presentation of the origins of the Palestinians.” Theodore White, Barbara Tuchman, Walter Reich, Lucy Dawidowicz, Elie Wiesel, and many others praised the book for its insight and analysis.
Wow, this looks like a real breakthrough!
But before I start packing my things to banish my fictitious self, it might be worth taking a closer look.
Methodological fraud
The main argument of this myth is based on so much misrepresentation, cherry-picking, outright falsification of sources, hasty conclusions, and mere assumptions that I find it hard to imagine that any of the critics have actually read the book. Or, if they have, that they have turned a blind eye to serious academic misconduct that would land them in front of a disciplinary committee at any university. The book was such crude, unsubstantiated propaganda that Noam Chomsky has suggested that it was probably put together by a secret service, with Peters simply adding his name.
Peters's main argument is that the growth of the Palestinian Arab population was not natural, but the result of a clandestine migration that somehow remained undocumented. He achieves this mostly through agonizing distortion of sources, contextualizing statements, and deliberately suppressing data that contradicts his claims.
Of course, I am not the first to write about Peters’s source manipulations and bad faith interpretations of data, and I will not be the last. In this article, I will not list all the contradictions or errors found in Peters’s writings, because that would take up a whole book. Fortunately, that work has already been done for us, and detailed refutations of Peters’s work can be found in the „Further Reading” section.
Perhaps the most famous exposé of Peters' book comes from Norman Finkelstein, who meticulously documented the problems in great detail. For example, Finkelstein illustrates how Peters manipulates quotes and data with the following statement:
Peters Carr-Saunders World Population "Relying on" his work "World Population", he makes the statement that:
„Medical and health developments have so far brought little progress among Palestinian Arabs and cannot explain the significant decline in the mortality rate.”
However, if we are as thorough as Finkelstein and check the cited source, it paints a completely different picture:
„Medical and health developments affecting personal health and habits have so far brought little progress among Palestinian Arabs and cannot explain the significant decline in the mortality rate. But general administrative measures, such as quarantines, were designed and properly carried out in the light of modern knowledge. Such measures could be enforced almost overnight. … We may therefore find in the administrative changes brought about by the British occupation of Palestine a perfectly tenable explanation of the natural increase of the Arab population.”
In other words, there has not been much progress in personal hygiene habits, but the administrative measures that have been introduced – such as quarantines – have been effective, and according to Carr-Saunders, this is the logical explanation for the decrease in the mortality rate.
Notice how the paragraph's conclusion is completely reversed by omitting key context and tearing the information out of its original context. This practice is repeated throughout the book.
Another way he inflated his numbers to make his case was to, to quote Finkelstein, treat any small sign as „just the tip of the iceberg.” He claimed that because the British had turned a blind eye to illegal Arab immigration, deportations had only been carried out in the most egregious cases. This meant, he argued, that for every reported Arab deportation, there were many more who remained hidden. Of course, he arrived at the conclusion that the British had turned a blind eye to immigration through similarly painstaking data manipulation.
What do the real documents say?
It is worth noting that this myth was difficult to argue with on a factual level even when it first emerged. For example, the British-American government investigation, the Anglo-American Survey of Palestine In 1946 he came to the following conclusion:
„It is possible that all [temporary migration to Palestine] leaves behind some illegal permanent settlers, but if this remaining layer were significant, it would be reflected in systematic fluctuations in the Arab population statistics. Such systematic fluctuations are not observed. It is sometimes claimed that the high Arab natural rate is due to large-scale clandestine immigration from neighboring countries. This is a false conclusion. Research reveals, reveals, that the high fertility rate of Muslim Arab women has been unchanged for half a century. The low Arab natural rate before 1914 was due to:
(a) the removal of significant numbers of young men of marriageable age for military service to other parts of the Ottoman Empire, many of whom never returned and others who only returned in late adulthood; and (b) the lack of effective control of endemic and epidemic diseases, which led to a high mortality rate in those years.”
There is also ample evidence that Peters' sources are often completely false or fabricated. Anthony Lewis, for example, points out that Peters is Institute for Palestine Studies (Institute for Palestine Studies) reports that „"68 percent of the Arabs who became refugees in 1948 left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier."” Lewis enlightens us that the report it was actually about refugees from the 1967 war, and the percentage applied to only 37 refugees surveyed.
His other sources are completely useless and unreliable, such as the subjective diaries and stray rumors of European travelers to Palestine, which we would be expected to believe more than a century of official population and census data.
Political gain above all else
Fortunately, the book's craze didn't spread outside the United States. In the UK, it was panned by critics, and it didn't even find traction in Israel itself: Israeli academics and historians simply called it nonsense.
Unfortunately, however, the book is still widely distributed in the United States today, has gone through several reprints, and even now – after its complete professional destruction – has a 4.5-star rating on Amazon and other online bookstores.
At the risk of repeating myself: propaganda is – as always – not interested in facts, but in political utility. In this case, it is quite obvious that only the political message matters. I find it hard to believe that the many „famous” reviewers somehow avoided the book’s obvious flaws. This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that even after the book’s structural problems became apparent, almost none of them retracted their opinions.
Even Elie Wiesel did not withdraw his support when confronted with the forgeries early on; he chose to remain silent, while his recommendation, praise, and name continued to appear on every subsequent edition of the book. I would have liked to remind the late Mr. Wiesel of his own famous saying, „"Silence helps the torturer, never the tortured"” – but it seems he always had a blind spot when it came to the suffering of Palestinians.
Summary
Ultimately, Peters's book was consigned to the dustbin of history, at least in the academic world. It is extremely difficult to quote from this book and be treated as a serious scholar. However, the pseudoscientific illusion of empiricism that characterized his writing still keeps many dehumanizing, anti-Palestinian myths alive in the public consciousness to this day.
Peters falsifies, distorts, and arbitrarily selects for hundreds of pages to deny the existence of the Palestinian people and absolve Israel of its original sin. His attempts were and remain unsuccessful. The truth will find its way, if not now, then in the future. As the popular Arab proverb says:
„"You can't cover the sun with a sieve."”
