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wwatts1734 's review for:
Exodus
by Leon Uris
Leon Uris takes his telling of the story of 20th Century Jews from the holocaust theme of Mila 18 to the Zionist theme in Exodus. The story opens in the Auschwitz concentration camp with a team of Zionists who are planning to move the survivors to Palestine in anticipation of the founding of the Jewish state there. The survivors move to Cyprus where they are bottled up and harassed by the new enemy of the Jewish people, the British Empire. Hundreds of Jews board a boat intending to sail to Palestine, but the boat is not allowed to leave the Cypriot harbor. For several days the holocaust survivors stage a hunger strike to motivate the British to allow the boat to sail, and eventually they do. The refugees eventually make their way to Palestine in time for the 1948 independence of Israel.
"Exodus" follows the typical theme of Leon Uris - the struggle of the Jewish people against everyone else in the world. Now, granted, in Mila 18 the villains are the Nazis, and the Nazis make very natural and logical villains. But in "Exodus" the villains are the British, and later the Palestinian Arabs. Both the British and the Arabs practice inexplicable hatred against the Jews in this novel, and the new Israeli state did what they did in 1946-1948 only because they were forced to do so by these villains. It is an over simplictic portrayal of these very complicated events, and I can certainly see how many people are offended by it. Now, I am not a big fan of the PLO or the Arab wars against Israel, but I am also not naive enough to believe that the Israelis are simply victims of an international conspiracy. Perhaps a more accurate portrayal of the complications of this situation would have made a more compelling story as well as making this novel a bit less of a fairy tale.
Despite this, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the events surrounding the foundation of Israel, as long as the reader bears in mind these caveats.
"Exodus" follows the typical theme of Leon Uris - the struggle of the Jewish people against everyone else in the world. Now, granted, in Mila 18 the villains are the Nazis, and the Nazis make very natural and logical villains. But in "Exodus" the villains are the British, and later the Palestinian Arabs. Both the British and the Arabs practice inexplicable hatred against the Jews in this novel, and the new Israeli state did what they did in 1946-1948 only because they were forced to do so by these villains. It is an over simplictic portrayal of these very complicated events, and I can certainly see how many people are offended by it. Now, I am not a big fan of the PLO or the Arab wars against Israel, but I am also not naive enough to believe that the Israelis are simply victims of an international conspiracy. Perhaps a more accurate portrayal of the complications of this situation would have made a more compelling story as well as making this novel a bit less of a fairy tale.
Despite this, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the events surrounding the foundation of Israel, as long as the reader bears in mind these caveats.