Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a potboiler which romanticises the birth of the State of Israel. Leon Uris had more writing power than Dan Brown. He was a yarn spinner writing in the shadow of the Holocaust. It was a time, particularly in the West, when people thought that Israel was the least that could be done for the Jews after the horrors of the Holocaust.
At the time, your next book, Exodus, was the biggest international bestseller since Gone with the Wind.
Yes, it was. This is a potboiler which romanticises the birth of the State of Israel. Leon Uris had more writing power than Dan Brown. He was a yarn-spinner writing in the shadow of the Holocaust. It was a time, particularly in the West, when people thought that Israel was the least that could be done for the Jews after the horrors of the Holocaust.
The book was structured in such a way that it dealt with the Holocaust and the politics of establishing Israel. It tried to show the interests of the local Arab population which wasn’t called Palestine yet. They were just Arabs. It showed the friendships between the Jews and the Arabs. It was even rumoured that the hero played by Paul Newman in the film was modelled on Ariel Sharon as a young man. The main thing with this book is that when you read columns by neo-con Likudniks, you are reading analysis first formed by their adolescent reading of Exodus.
In the book the hero’s father made his way from Russia, fought against the Turks, was tortured, still survived and is a mountain of a man. He looks down on his son and says: ‘He’s not a ghetto Jew.’ And I think that all of this plays into some massive fantasy about what Israel means. It shaped American Jews’ vision of Israel. It has nothing to do with Israel and a lot more to do with a post-Holocaust fantasy.
There is this idea that the next time around we are going to fight. You really can’t imagine just how popular the book was. The theme music of the film was the number one record in the late 60s for weeks on end. And this all fed into this desire for it never to happen again and for there to be a world of Jews who were tough and hardy.
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Michael Goldfarb is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He has covered conflicts and conflict resolution from Bosnia to Iraq, primarily for America’s public radio system. His work has been given the highest honours, including the DuPont-Columbia Award, on both sides of the Atlantic. He has also been a Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government. His first book, Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.
Your next choice is Leon Uris’s blockbuster, Exodus. Why is that on your list of books to understand US-Israel relations?
Exodus is a book that had a profound impact on how many Americans thought about Israel. It was originally published in 1958, and was soon made into a hit movie starring Paul Newman and a number of other stars that had a far-reaching cultural impact. I even remember learning the Exodus theme song in my childhood piano lessons. People who didn’t know anything about Middle Eastern history or the creation of Israel took Uris’s story to be an accurate depiction of what had really happened in the years just before Israel’s founding. And, of course, it is, as we would say in the US, a rattling good yarn: an engaging story with lots of interesting characters that adds up to a wonderful page-turner. But it’s a terrible version of history: one in which virtually all of the Zionists/Israelis are noble and heroic and all of their supporters, whether Jewish or not, are equally praiseworthy. At the same time, all of those who oppose them, and especially the Arabs, are dirty, conniving and vicious. Due to its popularity, this book helped shape a certain image of Israel in the minds of many Americans, particularly Americans who otherwise weren’t engaged by this issue. So it played a key role in fostering a favourable image of Israel, based on a very inaccurate depiction of what really happened in 1947-8. I don’t think one can overstate the book’s importance in contributing to a broadly sympathetic portrait of Israel in mainstream America.
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Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he served as academic dean from 2002-2006. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. Professor Walt is the author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (W. W. Norton, 2005), and, with coauthor J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). He writes a blog at the Foreign Policy website.
