Joan Peter's research is faultless.
It isn't. I'm sorry but it isn't faultless.
Daniel Pipes, whose credentials as a defender of Israel require no elaboration, wrote this in the New York Review of Books in 1986(!):
It has become open season on Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, although Yehoshua Porath's review [NYR, January 16] is one of the more restrained of the attacks upon it made in the past fifteen months or so. Mrs. Peters has brought this upon herself to a large extent, for, as I wrote in my review of the book in The New Republic of April 23, 1984, "many of its valuable points are buried in passages of furious argumentative overkill," and too much of its more than 600 pages is given over to very conventional polemics. Since then, some 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. All in all, her book is marked—and marred—by an over-eagerness to score a huge and definitive polemical triumph, which has caused her too often to leave prudence and responsibility behind.But the fact remains that there is an original and significant argument at the heart of her book [...]
I am not mentioning this to rain on your parade, but you should know there are problems with Peters' research before you get blindsided in a discussion with a well-prepared PLO sympathizer.
It is unfortunate that Peters has not seen fit to publish an updated, revised edition of her book which would fill in gaps in the demographical data and correct errors. The story isn't as simple as she makes it out to be.
For my part, during the same time that I was finding out how indeed hundreds of thousands Palestinian Arabs were dispossessed and treated badly by the Israelis, I also learned of the 1400 years persecution of Jews by Muslim Arabs, starting with Moe Ham Head his own self and culminating in the 1948 war of extermination and the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries. The same Arab genocidal mindset that continues to this day and is so twisted and perverse that it accuses the other side of the crime it is planning and implementing. So my compassion for the Arabs ... let's say it has its limits.
It takes nothing away from the accomplishments of the Israelis to admit that real injustices against Palestinian Arabs were committed (some of whom had indeed been living there for many generations). That is how nation-states are born - in blood and tears - and Israel has tragic history like all other nation-states (but much less than most of them).