[2] A short time later, the book's central claims were contradicted by Norman Finkelstein, then a PhD student at Princeton University, who argued that Peters misrepresented or misunderstood the statistics on which she based her thesis.

Ian Gilmour, a former British Secretary of State for Defence, ridiculed the book as "pretentious and preposterous" and argued that Peters had repeatedly misrepresented demographic statistics,[3] while Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath called it "sheer forgery".

[4] In 2004, From Time Immemorial was the subject of another academic controversy, when Finkelstein accused Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz of largely plagiarizing his book The Case for Israel from it.

When the book came out in the US in 1984, it was initially lauded by American writers and public figures including Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Bernard Lewis, Martin Peretz, Alan Dershowitz, and others.

Saul Bellow's endorsement on the cover of the book stated: Every political issue claiming the attention of a world public has its "experts"—news managers, anchor men, ax grinders, and anglers.

[14] Walter Reich wrote on the book "fresh and powerful ... an original analysis as well as a synoptic view of a little-known but important human story".

"[15] Daniel Pipes in Commentary (July 1984) initially stated that Peters' "historical detective work has produced startling results, which should materially influence the future course of the debate about the Palestinian problem."

As a result, the book suffers from chaotic presentation and an excess of partisanship", and said that critics of her hypothesis should feel obliged to 'make a serious effort to show her wrong by demonstrating that many thousands of Arabs did not emigrate to Palestine in the period under question.

Two years later Pipes wrote in a letter to The New York Review of Books explaining positive initial reactions and later academic reviews, with the latter showing technical deficiencies of her book, but adding that Peters' central thesis, of large-scale Arab immigration into Palestine, had still not been refuted:From Time Immemorial quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts.

In short, From Time Immemorial stands out as an appallingly crafted book.Granting all this, the fact remains that the book presents a thesis that neither Professor Porath nor any other reviewer has so far succeeded in refuting.

[10] Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, professor of religion at Dartmouth College and vice president of the World Jewish Congress remarked that he thought Peters had "cooked the statistics" and that her scholarship was "phony and tendentious", recycling ideas promoted by right-wing Zionists since the 1930s.

[18] Finkelstein claimed that at an international conference on Palestinian demography at Haifa University in Israel in mid 1986, the theses of her book were, citing Haaretz as his reference, almost unanimously ridiculed by the participants.

[22] Firstly, in a number of lists, tables and examples Finkelstein juxtaposes the historical evidence Peters presents with extended quotations of the primary and secondary source material showing its original context.

For example, Peters cites the Hope Simpson Enquiry as having said that "Egyptian labor is being employed" in supporting her thesis of Arab immigration to Palestine.

Finkelstein asserts that the study "is marred by serious flaws: (1) several extremely significant calculations are wrong; and (2) numbers are used selectively to support otherwise baseless conclusions".

[24] His primary contention is that Peters divided up Palestine into five regions for her demographic study to confuse the reader, assigning regions I, II, and IV as Israel and III and V as the West Bank, then claiming that most of the refugees from 1948 had actually emigrated from the West Bank and Gaza (Area V) a year earlier, when Finkelstein argues they just as well could have come from northern Israel (Area IV).

Finkelstein's deconstruction of the evidential basis for what had become a best-selling book, hailed for its quality by numerous American intellectuals, initially encountered difficulties in securing a publishing venue that might have given his findings a wider airing.

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.

On the occasion of Peters' death, Finkelstein, in a long interview with Adam Horowitz, contextualized the thesis and the book's reception within Israel's emerging image problem after its invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

They accuse Peters of basic errors in scholarship, such as the citation of Makrizi, who died in 1442, to support her statements about mid-nineteenth century population movements.

Peters was criticized for relying on different sources for establishing the Jewish and non-Jewish population in 1893, but Isaac defended this on the grounds that the Ottoman census would have excluded most Jews as non-citizens, while the figures cited from French geographer Vital Cuinet were likely close to the truth.

All Finkelstein had managed to show was that in a relatively small number of instances, Peters may have misinterpreted some data, ignored counter-data, and exaggerated some findings—common problems in demographic research that often appear in anti-Israel books as well.

In reference to the harsh criticism, Sanders said that Peters had "brought this upon herself" and acknowledged that "patient researchers have found numerous examples of sloppiness in her scholarship and an occasional tendency not to grasp the correct meaning of a context from which she has extracted a quotation."

Ronald Sanders argued that all of that does little to undermine the central thesis of Peters: But the fact remains that there is an original and significant argument at the heart of her book, and this has scarcely been dealt with by critics, apart from Mr. Porath, who only weakly challenged it.