Let's start with a passage from Alan Dershowitz's latest book, The Case for Israel, now slithering into the upper tier of Amazon's sales charts. On page 213 we meet Dershowitz, occupant of the Felix Frankfurter Chair at Harvard Law School, happily walloping a French prof called Faurisson, charged by the FF prof from Harvard U as being a fraud and a Holocaust denier: "There was no extensive historical research. Instead, there was the fraudulent manufacturing of false antihistory. It was the kind of deception for which professors are rightly fired--not because their views are controversial but because they are violating the most basic canons of historical scholarship."

Let me now usher into the narrative an important member of the cast: From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, a 601-page book by Joan Peters, published in 1984. Peters's polemical work strove to buttress the old Zionist thesis that the land of Israel had been "a land without people, awaiting a people without land." Peters's book was soon discredited as a charnel house of disingenuous polemic. The coup de grâce was administered by Professor Yehoshua Porath in The New York Review of Books for January 16 and March 27, 1986.

Though neither Peters nor her book appears in the index to The Case for Israel, they both get a mention in note 31 of chapter 2, where Dershowitz cites the work of a nineteenth-century French geographer called Cuinct [sic], and adds, "See Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (Chicago: JKAP Publications, 1984). Peters's conclusions and data have been challenged. See Said and Hitchens, p. 33. I do not in any way rely on them in this book." "Them" clearly refers to Peters's conclusions and data.

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