In an article on the Fox News website, an American writer addressed the issue of the stereotypical image of Arabs and Muslims in Jewish literature, through the book “Exodus,” published in 1958 by novelist and screenwriter Leon Uris, a work that was turned in 1960 into an epic movie starring Paul Newman, in which he played a “Jewish freedom fighter.”
Author Marjorie Ingall – a literary critic and author of fantasy novels – says in her article that the novel “Exodus” topped the best-selling book lists at the time and was translated into 50 languages, before it became a popular film in the early 1960s, adding that its impact on the world’s view of Israel was Big.
She quotes Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Reeve Ellen Brill, as saying that another work that rivals “Exodus” in its great influence on American foreign policy is American author Pearl Buck’s novel “The Good Earth,” which dealt with life in China.
The greatest propaganda about Israel
“The book was not just a drive for Jewish identity. State Department employees at all levels who were known to be anti-Semitic read it,” Brill asserts.
University professor and Israeli historian M. Silver wrote in his book, “Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story,” that the “Exodus” narrative was a gift to Israel’s tourism industry.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was quoted as saying, “I don’t usually read novels. But I read (Exodus), and it is, as a literary work, an ordinary novel. But as a propaganda work, it is the greatest thing ever written about Israel.”
Sense of Jewish identity
In her article, Marjorie Ingall believes that the novel is completely consistent with the vision that her father kept giving her about Israel. “When my parents were growing up, American Jewish identity was in transition. The Holocaust was a devastating collective experience, not only because it killed 6 million Jews, but because it also reminded American Jews that they were merely guests in their own country.”
By this, Ingall meant that Jews suffered under immigration quotas to America and elsewhere, before the newly established state of Israel at that time offered them real refuge. The narrative of exodus stemming from the Jewish popular imagination – in Brill’s opinion – was credited with establishing a deep sense of Jewish identity.
The author of the article – herself a Jew – said that, as she grew older, she wanted to formulate her own sense of American Jewish identity that did not depend on “endless” stories of Israeli heroism and the horror of the Holocaust, and the dual narrative that seems to be the greatest guide to the Jewish education system and its contributor. In shaping Jewish identity.
Israel is not the source of identity
She continues that she no longer sees Israel as the source of Jewish identity, after her government began to lean more and more towards the right and gradually expanded the establishment of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.
Ingall criticized “Exodus” in its fictional and cinematic forms, and said that the Jewish characters in the novel and film are “truly noble” despite their political differences. As for Arabs and Muslims, the novel and film portray them as “evil puppets.”
A bleak picture for the Arab
She says that Oris enjoys repeating phrases in which he describes Arabs as “very illiterate and very backward,” “a sex-obsessed recluse,” and “the scum of humanity.”
The novel excludes two “good” Arabs, one of whom is a village leader named Kamal, who says in the novel that “the Jews are the only saviors of the Arabs, and the Jews are the only ones who brought light to this part of the world a thousand years ago.”
As for the other, the author of the novel calls him Musa, a Druze, “anonymous but with a sense of dignity, and lives in a clean village compared to the filth and decadence of most Arab villages.”
A vivid image of a Jew
The film portrays the Jews as a people who only want to live in peace, and that the only time they did anything bad was the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948. Ingall mocks this and calls it strange.
The author of the article points out that “Exodus”, a novel and a film, touched on that massacre and claimed that Arab leaders, whether in Palestine or in the wider world, at that time asked the residents to flee while the Jews were pleading with them to stay.
Ingall commented by saying that this claim is not true, and that “the Palestinians have the right to call their exodus from their villages and towns the Nakba,” stressing that the argument that Uris invokes and which the modern Jewish right shares with him, which is that the Palestinians – unlike the Jews – chose to leave, is not correct.
Ingall concluded that the Jews deserve a homeland of their own, just as the Palestinians deserve a homeland of their own.
