Our American Israel 2 FOUNDING ISRAEL IN AMERICA

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CONTENTS

0 Introduction
1 Lands of Refuge
2 Founding Israel in America
3 Invincible Victim
4 “Not the Israel We Have Seen in the Past”
5 The Future Holocaust
6 Apocalypse Soon
7 Homeland Insecurities
8 Conclusion
9 NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
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2 

 

FOUNDING ISRAEL IN AMERICA 

 

DAN WAKEFIELD’S REVIEW of the bestselling novel Exodus appeared in The Nation in April 1959. It began this way: “A friend 

recently told me about an elementary school class in East Harlem, composed mainly of Negro and Puerto Rican children, who were 

asked by their teacher to vote for their ‘favorite country.’ The results of the voting were Ghana, first; Israel, second.” Kwame Nkrumah, 

president of the newly independent nation of Ghana, had recently visited Harlem to cheering crowds. Wakefield noted a comparable 

“fascination with the birth and growth of the new Israel” around the globe that “has crossed about every line of age, race, creed, color, 

language, culture and character—with the exception of Arabic—and, ironically, that violent exception is one of the prime contributing 

factors in the strength of the fascination.” Although the Jewish state may have been an anomaly in the Middle East, it was the Arabs 

whom Wakefield labeled as anomalous—the “violent exception” to the worldwide enthusiasm for Israel. It was the “fact of eight million 

surrounding enemies” that made Israel such a popular “underdog.” With its victory in 1948, Israel took its place in the rank of modern 

democratic movements, including African nations throwing off the yoke of European colonialism, and the youth of East Harlem over- 

coming racial discrimination.¹ 

Israel was “the stuff of fiction,” wrote Wakefield, who had spent six months there in 1956 as a correspondent. It had “every conceiv- 

able element of drama—‘conquest of the desert,’ ‘return to the soil,’ ‘ingathering of exiles,’ ‘conflict of cultures,’ ‘the Promise and Ful- 

fillment’ of Biblical prophecy.” Yet no novelist—not even an Israeli one—had really captured this drama until Leon Uris, a “war- 

hardened, bestseller-proved American author,” wrote his blockbuster novel about “Israel’s war of statehood.” Despite some reser- 

vations about the literary merit of Exodus, Wakefield applauded Uris’s “skillful rendering of the furiously complex history of modern Is- 

rael” in popular form. Reviewers and readers alike embraced Exodus as “a brilliant history of the dreaming of, the founding of, and the 

making of Israel.”² 

To tell his story of Israel, Uris built on the progressive narratives of the Zionist project told earlier by Bartley Crum and his liberal col- 

leagues. This, too, had been a story of liberation, but Uris showed less interest in their humanitarian vision of Israel as a social exper- 

iment, and he shared none of their occasional moral qualms. Starting with the origins of Zionism in eastern Europe, Uris penned a na- 

tionalist saga for Cold War America. The novel extolls a militant Israel founded by tough Jewish warriors fighting for a righteous cause. 

In an epic struggle between good and evil, a persecuted minority heroically overcomes crushingly powerful foes to restore its ancient 

birthright in the triumph of a modern state. 

Exodus fits into a type of foundational fiction that nations tell about themselves. Such popular novels do for nations what Virgil’s 

Aeneid did for Rome: they yoke the state to the land in a mystical eternal unity, and they narrate the birth of the nation as the apex of an 

inevitable historical trajectory. Exodus has often been compared in its epic scope and massive sales to Gone with the Wind, which trans- 

formed the history of the Civil War into a shared national past. But Exodus is different in that it is not a story told by Israelis about their 

own country, but one told by an American author for American readers. Uris saw himself as writing “for the average American who 

shares a tremendous moral heritage with the Jews of Israel.”³ Millions of Americans would not have known of this shared heritage until 

they had read a novel about Israel’s founding that resonated with myths of American origins. Exodus converted a foreign history set in 

Europe and the Middle East into a familiar narrative of settling the frontier and rebelling against a tyrannical Old World empire. As its 

title proclaimed, the novel grounded its modern narrative of revolution in the equally familiar biblical story of the Promised Land. 

One cannot overestimate the influence of Exodus in Americanizing the Zionist narrative of Israel’s origins. Its publication was a 

benchmark event in mass-market publishing, breaking records in print runs and sales. The fastest-selling work ever published by Ban- 

tam, it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, sold more than twenty million copies in the next twenty years, 

and has never gone out of print.⁴ Otto Preminger directed an equally popular star-studded film, based on the novel, in 1960. Critics 

lauded its “dazzling, eye-filling, nerve-tingling” power as “a fine reflection of experience that rips the heart.” Like the novel, the film 

struck many as “living, documented history” and as a “powerful instrument of contemporary truth.”⁵ 

Exodus had an enormous impact on shaping the mainstream historical narrative—and the attendant moral lessons—of Israel’s birth. 

Across the political spectrum, scholars, journalists, and activists agree that it provided “the primary source of knowledge about the Jews 

and Israel that most Americans had.”⁶ By transmuting history into the timelessness of myth on a grand scale, Exodus achieved great 

staying power. It forged the popular American identification with Israel for decades to come, in the face of alternative narratives that told 

different versions of that history. Both the novel and the film conveyed a double image of Israel, as a symbol of social justice through 

the rebirth of an ancient land, and as a source of redress for particular injustices through the rejuvenation of Jewish masculinity. Exodus 

had such a profound impact on the Americanization of Israel’s origins because it seamlessly interwove seemingly contradictory stories: 

of a universal mission with a particular national triumph, and of the redemption of humanity with ethnic regeneration through violence. 

 

Remaking the Exodus, 1947–1960 

 

Exodus transformed a historical failure into a fictional success. The novel opens in 1947, a time of international debate and violent con- 

flict about the plight of Jewish refugees and the future of Palestine. Uris based his story on the SS Exodus, a ship carrying 4,500 illegal 

immigrants, mostly from displaced persons (DP) camps, that tried to breach the British blockade of Palestine. Before the ship neared 

the coast, six Royal Navy destroyers surrounded and rammed it. Sailors forced their way on board with live ammunition, killing three 

crew members while unarmed passengers resisted with little more than tin cans and bottles. After towing the damaged ship to Haifa, 

the British forcibly transferred the refugees to three dilapidated prison-like vessels and deported them back to Europe. When the 

refugees refused to disembark at their French point of origin, the British transported them to occupied Germany. An international outcry 

arose against returning Jews to the country that had tried to exterminate them. 

 

 

SS Exodus with Jewish immigrants on board in the port of Haifa, 1947. 

 

The organizers of the expedition did not aim to land thousands of refugees surreptitiously on the moonlit shores of Palestine. Rather, 

they aspired to shine light on the inhumane restrictions of the British quota system, which limited Jewish immigration into Palestine. 

They succeeded in turning the plight of the Exodus into a much-needed public relations coup for the Zionist cause. Newspaper head- 

lines from Palestine had been filled with reports of bloody terrorist raids, sabotage, and assassinations by Jewish militias against the 

British. The most notorious was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed ninety-one people in July 1946. In 

American editorials at the time, antipathy toward Jewish terrorism vied with sympathy for illegal Jewish immigration. When news of the 

Exodus reached the front pages, however, the Zionist cause captured the moral high ground, as journalists turned their gaze from Jewish 

terrorism to British brutality. 

The journey of the SS Exodus directed public attention away from Jews wielding guns and dynamite. It showcased instead the long- 

suffering refugees, desperate for a homeland and resolute about not returning to Europe, armed with nothing but food tins and bitter 

taunts to toss at British sailors, and singing spirited rounds of “Hatikvah.” International reporters were already on-site in Haifa to report 

on the investigation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which would soon recommend partition to the 

General Assembly. One of those journalists was Ruth Gruber, who had accompanied the Anglo-American Committee to the DP camps 

the year before. Her shocking photographs of the damaged ship and dazed refugees were published in Life, and she would later gather 

her reports in a book with an introduction by Bartley Crum. The Exodus affair is credited with swaying some of the UNSCOP members to 

vote in favor of partition.⁷ 

In 1947, the story of the Exodus played a key role in a contest for the public face of Zionism in the international arena. Who would be- 

come its emblematic figure—the refugee or the terrorist? American liberals identified these figures with opposing Zionist organizations 

and political strategies. I. F. Stone, for one, praised the Haganah for its struggle to lead clandestine immigration to Palestine, but he 

joined other liberals in condemning the right-wing paramilitary groups the Irgun and the Stern Gang for perpetrating acts of terror that 

betrayed Zionist ideals. 

In fictionalizing this story, Uris merged the image of the suffering refugee with that of the ruthless terrorist, interwove the process of 

illegal immigration with that of armed struggle, and united the Haganah and the Irgun in a common narrative of anticolonial revolt. The 

novel deviates dramatically from the historical record by landing the passengers safely ashore in Palestine. The mastermind of the ship 

exploit, Ari Ben Canaan, the ruggedly handsome Jewish protagonist, leads the refugees out of a DP camp in Cyprus under the watchful 

eyes of the modern pharaoh, the British high commissioner. Ari succeeds in delivering them to the Promised Land, fulfilling the cry, 

“Let my people go!” 

Unlike the historical ship, which carried mostly adults, Uris’s fictional ship is full of orphans, who commit themselves to a hunger 

strike until they are permitted to sail for Palestine. Every hour, unconscious youngsters weakened by starvation are laid out on the deck, 

as newspapers around the world cry out for the British to relent. At the fortieth hour of the strike, when Ari’s lieutenants confront him 

with their doubts about watching children starve to death, he responds gruffly that children this age are “already fighters” in Palestine 

and that “this is only another way of fighting.” His zealous lieutenant contrasts their public deaths with that of the “six million Jews” 

who “died in the gas chambers not knowing why,” proclaiming that “if three hundred of us on the Exodus die we will certainly know why. 

The world will know too.”⁸ Starving children might not have gone over well on the screen, so in the film version, Preminger included 

feisty adults on board. The moral authority of innocent children, though, does inform a powerful opening scene, when two mothers 

holding their babies refuse to obey Ari’s orders to leave the ship. They defiantly choose death over returning to a life behind barbed 

wire. Children play major roles in the novel and film as both innocent victims and dedicated fighters. 

Uris invented his child warriors as a rebuke to the most famous Jewish child of the 1950s, Anne Frank, whose bestselling diary be- 

came a prizewinning Broadway play that Uris attended. Her story repelled him with its focus on Jews hiding in attics. He insisted that 

there was “something far more decent about dying in dignity which is, of course the choice that every Jew had. They did this in the War- 

saw Ghetto.” Uris resented the Frank family for showing no anger toward the Nazis, and he hoped “this type of Jew has ceased to exist 

forever.”⁹ A strong motivation for writing Exodus was to dislodge the image of Jews as passive victims. Uris wanted to believe that the 

Jews of Europe did indeed have the “choice” to die fighting. 

Uris was convinced that Israelis disliked Anne Frank as much as he did, because of their “strong feelings about Jews who will not 

fight back.”¹⁰ In creating his young protagonists, he rejected the figure of the Jewish child as a universal symbol of peace and human- 

istic forgiveness. He remade Anne Frank in the character of the idealistic Karen Hansen Clement, daughter of a professor from Berlin 

who sends her to Denmark to be raised by a Christian family during the war. Escaping assimilation into European society, Karen feels 

drawn to Palestine to search for her Jewish identity. With rifle in hand, she dies defending a dangerous outpost of the new nation at the 

end of the novel. But first, she falls in love with the hard-bitten Dov Landeau, a child veteran of the Warsaw Ghetto. He grudgingly 

boards the Exodus only for the purpose of exacting revenge by joining the terrorists in Palestine. In creating these characters, Uris man- 

aged to let his readers have it both ways. Karen’s gentle innocence invites the kind of sympathy accorded to the adolescent Anne Frank, 

while Dov’s vengefulness evokes the righteous anger Uris found disturbingly lacking in the Frank family. 

Uris made another revealing change in the historical record by expunging the central role that American Jews played in the 1947 saga. 

“The Exodus story had begun in America,” wrote Ruth Gruber, “for the ship was an American excursion boat and the crew were GIs and 

sailors and Merchant Marine men.”¹¹ American Friends of the Haganah purchased the original ship in Baltimore, and they met at I. F. 

Stone’s house for one of their planning meetings.¹² Most of the crew were Jewish veterans, and a young Protestant minister with a New 

England accent became the media spokesman for the ship after the British attack. 

Given Uris’s desire to reach a broad American audience, it might have made sense to highlight the fighting spirit of American volun- 

teers to create a bridge of identification for his readers. But excluding American Jews from Israel’s founding epic had the canny effect of 

presenting its origins as a universal struggle for freedom and not as the special interest of a particular ethnic group. By kicking Amer- 

ican Jews off the Exodus, Uris made his Zionist characters appear both more and less familiar—less like stereotypical Jews and more like 

archetypical Americans. 

In place of the American Jews who had actually been on the Exodus, Uris invented a non-Jewish romantic heroine, a nurse named 

Kitty Fremont—“one of those great American traditions like Mom’s apple pie, hot dogs, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.”¹³ Having lost her 

husband to war and a young daughter to polio, Kitty feels no purpose in life until she grows attached to Karen and follows her to Pales- 

tine, intending to adopt her. Kitty then falls in love with the irresistible Ari. She learns to overcome her genteel anti-Semitism and com- 

mits herself to living with him and, in a sense, to adopting the entire new nation. 

In the film, Preminger enhanced Israel’s American qualities by casting the main characters with actors whose whiteness stood out 

luminously on the screen. Ari Ben Canaan was played by the blue-eyed Paul Newman, one of the hottest young male stars of the decade, 

whose father was Jewish. Ari’s sister, Jordana, was played by Alexandra Stewart, a statuesque blue-eyed blond. Karen, played by Jill Ha- 

worth, appeared blonder and fairer than her potential adoptive Protestant mother Kitty, the willowy Eva Marie Saint. On screen Karen’s 

whiteness has an aura that casts light on the darkest Jewish character, Dov, played by a brooding Sal Mineo, looking like he just walked 

off the set of Rebel without a Cause. The film paints in Technicolor what earlier visitors, like Crum, described as a “mutation” to the 

physical features of Jews in Palestine, making them fairer and less stereotypically Jewish than their eastern European parents. The main 

characters in the film, because of their whiteness, are easily seen as Euro-Americans. Meanwhile, when this film appeared in 1960, the 

majority of Jewish immigrants coming to Israel were from Arab and North African countries.¹⁴ 

In Americanizing the founding of Israel, Exodus also added a Christian dimension. Kitty represents the American who discovers in 

Zionism the mystical qualities of the Holy Land that she heard about in Sunday school. “I have learned that it is impossible to be a 

Christian without being a Jew in spirit,” she tells Karen in a settlement in Galilee on Christmas Day. Kitty speaks the language of the re- 

cently invented Judeo-Christian tradition, which embraced Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in a shared American identity and, during 

the Cold War, united them in faith against “godless communism.” In Exodus, it also unites them against Arabs. The novel’s copious Old 

Testament references with particular Zionist meanings took on broader significance to readers in this Judeo-Christian context. 

The Christian appeal of Exodus resulted in the famous lyrics of the movie’s soundtrack. Exodus won an Oscar for best original score 

in 1960, but the sonorous instrumentals did not have lyrics until Pat Boone wrote the refrain that would become inseparable from the 

memory of the film: “This land is mine, God gave this land to me.” Boone was one of the most popular white rock-and-roll crooners of 

the 1950s, and his recording of the Exodus song topped the charts. A clean-cut alternative to Elvis Presley, Boone was a born-again 

Christian. His lyrics would not have raised eyebrows in an America that had undergone a religious revival in the 1950s, the decade when 

“one nation under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. The song resonated with a Cold War American identity by evoking a 

God-given land where children play freely and dedicated pioneers bravely sacrifice their lives to defend it.¹⁵ 

Although Uris was the driving force behind what became the Exodus phenomenon, the idea for the novel did not originate with him 

but in Hollywood, with the vice president of MGM, Dore Schary. A political progressive and an observant Jew, Schary did not hide his 

affiliations in an industry where many Jewish executives were secretive about their religion and shied away from screening Jewish sub- 

jects. Schary thought the time had come to tell Israel’s story. He selected Uris, who was not particularly knowledgeable about Israel or 

dedicated to Jewish causes, because of his reputation as a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. Uris appreciated Schary as “the one 

man who will gamble on ‘message pictures’ ” at a time when Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts had made political films risky. The subject 

of Israel could breach this taboo without seeming un-American. Uris negotiated two lucrative contracts, one with MGM for a 

screenplay, and the other with Random House for a novel, and in 1956 he headed to Israel to do research for both.¹⁶ 

For Israel’s tenth anniversary in 1958, Uris hoped to re-create the public relations sensation that the original Exodus voyage had gener- 

ated in 1947. The Israeli government eagerly welcomed the promise of positive publicity. The Foreign Ministry worried about its cool 

reception from the Eisenhower administration, which did not have the personal and sentimental connections to the Zionist movement 

that had existed under President Truman. The government feared negative public opinion about the controversial and unresolved issues 

of the Palestinian refugees and the internationalization of Jerusalem. It was also receiving widespread condemnation for making military 

raids across its borders, where reprisals against Palestinian infiltrators struck many as disproportionately violent against civilians. In 

1954, the Foreign Ministry launched concerted campaigns to improve Israel’s image in the media, churches, schools, and businesses, 

and in the halls of Congress. When Uris contacted the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles to prepare for his trip, he received a hearty wel- 

come, a hefty stack of recommended books to read, and offers of assistance.¹⁷ 

In Israel, officials treated him as a minor celebrity. They gave him a guide, a car, a hotel room, and “unlimited access into all places 

and to all people.” He believed the Israeli government embraced this opportunity to “get perhaps their best book on Israel.” He also 

hoped the arrival of a major film company would boost the economy and broadcast Israel’s message “to a billion people around the 

world on film.” A well-connected Foreign Ministry official, Ilan Hartuv, served as his guide and introduced him to veterans of the 1948 

war and to high-level members of the government and the military, including Yigal Allon, Teddy Kollek, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, and 

Yigal Yadin. Hartuv accompanied Uris to battle sites from 1948 and included him on a patrol through the Negev Desert with a squad of 

paratroopers. He arranged a tour of a DP camp on Cyprus and passage on a secret flight to Iraq to bring back Jewish immigrants.¹⁸ 

Three years later, Israel greeted Otto Preminger with even more fanfare when he arrived to direct the first major American film shot 

entirely on location in Israel. Preminger was at the peak of his career as an independent director and producer of popular serious films, 

and though he had never been involved with the Zionist movement, his upper-class Viennese Jewish background gave him connections 

to the Zionist elite. Hartuv again served as the liaison to a government that was eager to help Preminger turn the country into a stage 

set. The army transported cast and crew, the navy lent three destroyers, and twenty thousand extras appeared on the streets of 

Jerusalem for the filming of the UN vote. The Israeli government rightfully anticipated that the Hollywood film would generate more 

publicity and tourism on the heels of the novel’s runaway success.¹⁹ 

In 1956, Uris had not been in Israel long before he developed a pretty clear picture of the story he wanted to tell. As he wrote to his fa- 

ther from a hotel room in Tel Aviv, “I am writing a book for Americans … Gentiles … not for Jews.” Nor was he writing for those New 

Deal liberals who idealized Zionism’s humanitarian mission: “I must show her as a human place and not as an ultra-glorious utopia.” 

Uris was captivated by Israel’s military prowess. “The real Israel,” he wrote, “is a nation of young marines.… This is Israel … the fighter 

who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares him.”²⁰ 

Uris had been a young marine himself. Joining up at seventeen immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he served as a radio 

operator in the South Pacific. The war provided an escape from a desultory adolescence shuffling between his divorced working-class 

parents in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Uris’s father, William, had gone to Palestine in 1920, leaving Poland with his brother to join a so- 

cialist youth group. But he found the environment too harsh, the ideology too nationalistic, and the employment opportunities too 

scarce. Disillusioned, he left and joined his large family in Pittsburgh. In the United States, he worked as an editor and organizer for sev- 

eral Jewish socialist organizations, but never with much success. His son Leon, raised in a secular and radical household, wanted to 

make it in America rather than change the world. In a letter from Israel in 1956, Leon warned his father that he would not comprehend 

its youthful warrior spirit: “Israel was won by a gun and it will be saved by a gun. If you think this spirit was gained here by old scholars, 

you are sadly mistaken. The spirit of Israel is the strength of her fighters.”²¹ 

Uris had first written about American fighters in Battle Cry, a novel about his experience in the Marine Corps. Published in 1953, the 

book competed against a formidable list of World War II bestsellers: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones’s 

From Here to Eternity (1951), and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951). Uris despised these authors’ negative portrait of war and 

military authority. He rejected “the degradation and slime of Mailer, Jones, Wouk the ‘ain’t war hell’ school of writers” by writing a gung- 

ho novel “about an outfit of men who loved each other and believed in what they were fighting for.”²² Battle Cry became a bestseller, 

and Uris wrote the screenplay for an equally popular film, thus launching a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. In his sec- 

ond novel, The Angry Hills (1955), Uris first broached the topic of fighting Jews in the Middle East. He based the novel on the memoir of 

an uncle who had fought in the Palestine Brigade—a unit of Jewish soldiers in the British army in World War II. The novel was not well 

received, and soon afterward Uris turned to the popular genre of the Western. He wrote the screenplay for the box-office hit Gunfight at 

the O.K. Corral (1957), where lawman Wyatt Earp (Kirk Douglas) kills a gang of outlaws on the main street of Tombstone, Arizona. 

Based on a true story, this was the most frequently filmed showdown during the golden age of the Hollywood Western. 

The American marine and the Western gunslinger would provide the prototypes for the Zionist protagonist of Exodus. And the heroic 

narrative of Israel’s War of Independence would provide an antidote to the cynicism of modern war novels. Uris described his work on 

Exodus in the mold of the tough soldiers he extolled. He spoke of his research trip as though it were a military campaign, boasting of his 

intense physical and mental preparation, and relishing the dangers of being shot at and trekking across the desert.²³ His main publicity 

photo displays his military ideal: dressed in battle fatigues and boots, he holds a machine gun and leans cockily on an army jeep, star- 

ing confidently into the camera against the blinding desert background. 

 

 

Leon Uris “with a patrol in the Negev Desert,” author jacket photo from the first edition of Exodus. 

 

One of the unexpected highlights of Uris’s journey was a relatively young kibbutz at the border of Gaza, Nahal Oz, founded by sol- 

diers and joined by civilians to farm land previously owned by Palestinians. Expelled in 1949, many of the families resettled in Shejaiya, 

Gaza, close enough to look over at their land across the border. Nahal Oz was a prized dateline for foreign journalists. With its prox- 

imity to a dangerous border and its photogenic young soldiers, who had left behind comfortable lives in modern Tel Aviv to found a 

kibbutz, it was the quintessential frontier town. Edward R. Murrow compared it to a “stockade,” or American army barracks, on an 

episode of the acclaimed television news magazine See It Now. Uris viewed this episode, called “Egypt-Israel,” while writing his novel. 

“Egypt-Israel,” which aired in 1956, offered a daring exploration of the conflict between Israel and Egypt from both sides of the bor- 

der. The first half starts with Howard K. Smith interviewing Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. It ends in Gaza with interviews of 

Palestinians—aided by a translator—in a crowded refugee camp. Of different ages and backgrounds, each man, pointing across the 

border, describes where in Israel his ancestral lands were. Angrily shaking fists in the air, the refugees express their determination to 

fight to return to their homes. The second section starts across the border, with Murrow’s visit to Nahal Oz. Visually it appears to Amer- 

ican viewers as though they are returning home from a foreign country. The camera enters the modest apartments and scans book- 

shelves filled with titles in English, a radio playing classical music in the background. Murrow then climbs a watchtower in the dead of 

night to interview an Israeli guard. A handsome young soldier with an informal slouch, he answers Murrow’s questions in halting Eng- 

lish: no, he doesn’t want to take anyone’s land, and he doesn’t understand politics; he just wants to live in peace as a farmer, yet he has 

no choice but to defend innocent lives. Murrow was justly proud of “Egypt-Israel” as a rare example of balanced broadcast journalism. 

But the episode ends with the Israeli perspective on the dark, menacing frontier, beyond the well-lit perimeters of the settlement.²⁴ 

Uris happened to arrive in Nahal Oz at an important moment in Israeli history and national mythmaking. There he heard Moshe 

Dayan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, deliver a memorable graveside eulogy for a slain kibbutz member. On April 29, 1956, 

Roi Rothberg, a kibbutz security officer, was killed and mutilated by Palestinians from Gaza while he was patrolling the fields. His mur- 

der followed a long chain of violent events, in which Palestinian infiltration across the border was met by severe Israeli reprisals, culmi- 

nating in the killing of fifty-eight Arab civilians during shelling of Gaza City on April 5.²⁵ 

Dayan’s oration became an immediate national classic; broadcast and reprinted frequently, it achieved an iconic status in Israeli na- 

tional memory similar to that of the Gettysburg Address in the United States. Dayan’s eloquent lament elevated the loss of the “lean 

blond youth” into a symbol of collective mourning. Rothberg’s ultimate sacrifice obligated the community to sanctify him with a re- 

newed call to arms. A main trope of the eulogy is the failure of vision. Blinded by his desire for peace, “by the quiet of a spring morn- 

ing,” Rothberg—and by extension all of Israel—did not see the severity of the threat right in front of him. Dayan called on the mourners 

to see themselves through the eyes of the Palestinian refugees: “Why should we complain at their fierce hatred of us? For eight years 

they have been dwelling in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes we are turning the land and the villages where their forefa- 

thers dwelt into our home.” Israeli commentators have noted the unusual candor of this statement, which acknowledged the claims of 

Palestinians forced from their land. What is so striking now is the apparent contradiction between Dayan’s understanding of the 

refugees’ situation and the militant conclusion of the eulogy. For Dayan, acknowledging Palestinian grievances demanded acting with 

vigilance and force: “Without the steel helmet and the cannon’s mouth, we cannot plant a tree nor build a house.” To no longer “shrink 

from seeing this enmity” meant to be “ready and armed, strong and hardy, for if the sword slips from our fists—our lives will be cut 

short.” The headline of the story in the Jerusalem Post read, “We Must Not Be Lulled by Peace Talk—Dayan.”²⁶ 

The funeral made an impression on Uris, who wrote admiringly to his father of the mourners’ fortitude: “Not one tear, not one word 

of revenge against the poor ignorant Arabs. Such tragedies only strengthen the young Israelis in their determination to defend and settle 

their land.” He emphasized the bravery and innocence of Rothberg, claiming that he had been killed defending the children’s house, 

and comparing him to the biblical Samson, who, because of his gentleness, failed to bring down the gates of the Philistines. Though 

Uris attended the funeral and read the translation of Dayan’s eulogy in the Jerusalem Post, he disregarded the references to Arab 

refugees. Similarly, in his comments on the Murrow show “Egypt-Israel,” he referred only to the Nahal Oz section.²⁷ 

In Exodus, Uris drew on a reservoir of cultural images from Nahal Oz for the climactic scene of Karen’s murder in a fictional border 

settlement he called Nahal Bidbar. Uris relied especially on material from a photo essay in the magazine The Coronet. Founded on “bar- 

ren desert” in 1953, Naha Oz was, according to the magazine, threatened by over two hundred thousand Arab refugees who were lin- 

gering in “filthy tent camps, unwanted by their host country,” where they spent their time “in resentful reverie.” Their idleness produced 

hatred, and “the energetic settlers of Nahal Oz are the closest objects of their hatred.” Photographs of young Israeli farmers toiling on 

the land with smiles on their faces and rifles on their shoulders are accompanied by the caption, “On the explosive Gaza strip, where 

Arabs and Jews are separated by inches of land and chasms of hatred, Israel’s potent defense weapon is the spirit of its youthful kibbutz 

pioneers who defy infiltrating marauders, bombings and even ambush, and refuse to be bullied off their land.”²⁸ 

The narrative of Israeli innocence and self-defense precluded viewing Arab refugees as motivated by a desire to recover their homes. 

In Exodus, this narrative framed Uris’s entire history of Zionist settlement, from flashbacks about Ari’s family arriving from Russia in the 

1890s, to the War of 1948, through Karen’s murder in 1956. 

 

The New Jew on the American Frontier 

 

Building a new nation entailed creating a new man. In his protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan, Uris fashioned the prototype of the “tough Jew” 

as an amalgam of American and Israeli masculine archetypes.²⁹ One such Israeli type appeared in Dayan’s eulogy: the warrior-farmer 

risking his life to defend his land, with one hand on the plow and the other on his gun. In choosing the name Ari, which means “lion” in 

Hebrew, Uris alludes to one of the earliest examples of this figure in Zionist mythology, the Roaring Lion Monument at Tel Hai, which 

Uris visited in 1956. In the novel, Ari’s father and uncle enter Palestine through Tel Hai in the northern Galilee. A hallowed site in Zionist 

historiography, Tel Hai was an isolated outpost of young Jewish settlers that fell to an Arab attack in 1920. Its celebrated military leader, 

Joseph Trumpledor, left a legacy of final words, crafted to instruct future generations: “It is good to die for your country.” The story of 

Tel Hai represented a symbolic break from the theme of Exile, a central myth of Israeli national origins that presented the Jews as having 

been exiled from their original homeland. The repudiation of Exile fueled Zionist ideology, which rejected the image of the weak Jew of 

the Diaspora as a long-suffering victim submissively entrusting his fate to God. The heroic fighters of Tel Hai represented “the antithe- 

sis of the exilic Jew.”³⁰ 

This Zionist credo has striking parallels with the myth of the American frontier as a crucible of rebirth, where pioneers merge with the 

land to strip themselves of the garments of Old World oppression. Whereas the myth of the New World frontier entails a rejection of 

the past, Zionism imagines rebirth as the return to an ancient land, to a time that preceded the Diaspora. The New Jew—a term in- 

tended to distinguish the Zionist pioneer from the European Jew—not only renewed the land as a biblical birthright, but revived the 

muscular body of the ancient Hebrew warrior through his martial skills. This lineage extends from the biblical conquest of Canaan— 

hence Ari’s surname, Ben Canaan, meaning son of Canaan. In Exodus, Old World victims of pogroms and extermination camps cast off 

their identity as persecuted subjects and transform themselves into New Jews by mastering the land and fighting the British and Arabs. 

For Ari to become an American hero, he had to shed the stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. Kitty finds herself magnetically attracted 

to this “big Palestinian,” a “gorgeous man” with a “hard handsome face,” who does not “act like any Jew I’ve ever met.” As a “strapping 

six-footer with black hair and ice-blue eyes,” Ari “could be mistaken for a movie leading man.” In the movie, a glistening, bare-chested 

Ari emerges god-like from the Mediterranean in the night to carry out his secret mission. When wounded in battle, he stoically bears the 

pain that “could have killed an ordinary human being.” His emotional toughness matches his robust physique, so unlike a typical man 

of the Diaspora. A “scorner of sentiment,” he has bemused tolerance for the biblical idealism of his comrades. “We have no Joshua to 

make the sun stand still or the walls to come tumbling down,” he reminds them, and he works with “superhuman stamina” because “he 

does not believe in miracles.” Of the prayers of Orthodox Jews, he says dismissively, “They don’t quite realize that the only Messiah that 

will deliver them is a bayonet on the end of a rifle.”³¹ 

Ari may not have resembled the Jews Kitty met at home, but readers would have recognized a typical American hero from a Holly- 

wood Western—with his extreme individualism and preference for action over words. Reviewers wrote of “the Jewish Western,” in 

which “glorification of courage in Jews” looked like “Shane turning on his tormentors and winning.” (In Shane [1953], a lone gunslinger 

protects struggling farmers from a ruthless cattle baron.) Uris knew the genre well from writing the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. 

Corral, and one of his favorite reviews of the film was titled “When Men Were Men—and Killers.” In 1976, he would claim that “You can 

write westerns in any part of the world,” and in 1958, he transposed the western frontier onto Palestine and mapped its terrain through 

the symbolic geography of the border between civilization and savagery.³² On the screen, the setting of Exodus nostalgically revived the 

grandeur of sweeping panoramic landscapes, wide open for heroic pioneers—a view that was already receding from the Hollywood 

screen. 

 

 

Poster for the film Exodus,1960, starring Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan. 

 

Exodus reenacted the primal myth of the American frontier as a tale of “regeneration through violence.”³³ The hero in a Western ven- 

tures across the border of the civilized world to the wilderness in order to colonize dark, chaotic regions and learn the way of the Indi- 

ans, thereby ridding himself—and the society he represents—of darkness. It is the barbarism of the Other—whether Indian or Arab— 

that forces the hero to become violent; he adopts their methods in order to defeat them, and to establish a border between legitimate 

and illegitimate violence. Ari forges his character in his encounter with Arabs, in the same way as an Indian fighter in the typical West- 

ern. Living among the Arabs when young, he learns to speak fluent Arabic and to scout the land from his “adopted brother,” Taha, the 

son of the friendly local mukhtar, who has voluntarily sold his land to Ari’s father to help civilize his own people. In later military ex- 

ploits against the British, Ari easily disguises himself as an Arab. His familiarity with Arabs allows him to better enforce the hierarchy 

between himself and them. Fighting Arabs is an essential rite of passage for Ari as he comes of age in a hardscrabble new settlement. 

After a group of Arab youth ambushes Ari with stones, his father blames himself for naïvely believing in the possibility of coexistence 

with his Arab neighbors. He teaches Ari how to use a bullwhip, the same one he used to subdue the first Arab merchant who tried to 

cheat him. When Ari confronts his youthful tormentors, he expertly throws the whip “with a lightning flick” around the neck of the lead- 

er; the lash “snapped so sharply it tore his foe’s flesh apart.” The boys of the village never attack him again.³⁴ 

Ari, though, never becomes enamored of violence for its own sake, and he follows his father’s advice to use his whip judiciously: 

“You hold in your hand a weapon of justice. Never use it in anger or revenge. Only in defense.” This early lesson in violence against 

Arabs forms the crucible for Ari’s individualism. As Kitty explains, when she feels rebuffed by his steely cool, he “comes from a breed of 

supermen whose stock in trade is their self-reliance. Ari Ben Canaan hasn’t needed anyone since the day he cut his teeth on his father’s 

bull whip.”³⁵ 

In this morality tale, Uris portrays Arabs less as noble savages than as uncivilized hordes who exist outside the realm of law and 

must be kept in line by frontiersmen wielding the “weapon of justice.” Indeed, it is impossible to read Exodus today without taking of- 

fense at its overtly racist stereotypes. Uris’s depictions came from a vast menu of Orientalism and colonialism. He portrays indigenous 

Arabs as squalid remnants of an ancient Islamic civilization and blames them for despoiling the Promised Land, turning it into “fes- 

tering stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth.” Arab neglect made it necessary for Zionist settlers, 

like Ari’s father, to laboriously drain the swamps of the Huleh Valley and redeem “a land that had lain neglected and unwanted for a 

thousand years in fruitless despair until Jews rebuilt it.”³⁶ 

In contrast to Ari’s fierce individualism, Uris lumps Arabs together as “mobs” and “gangs.” Jews exercise violence with restraint; 

Arab violence is irrational, excessive, and vengeful. Unscrupulous Arab leaders ignobly whip up their followers into shrieking frenzies by 

promising them “easy victories, loot, and rape.” Throughout the novel Uris transforms political resistance on the part of Arabs into irra- 

tional sexual violence. Ari’s formative trauma was the rape and murder of his thirteen-year-old girlfriend during the Arab Revolt of 1936– 

1939. His erstwhile Arabic “brother,” Taha, turns against the Jews in 1948 only because Ari forbids him to marry his sister. Such a union 

would threaten the sexual boundary between Arabs and Jews, a boundary that is as vigilantly policed as that between American fron- 

tiersmen and Indians. This recurring theme of sexual violence and vengeance makes it impossible for Ari—or the reader—to imagine 

Arab opposition to a Jewish state as politically motivated. Exhibiting the contradictions of most stereotypes, the Arabs of Exodus are 

both aggressive and spineless; they do not wield arms for a higher cause but rather revel in violence for its own sake, and Uris blames 

their refusal to defend their own homes in 1948 on their cowardice.³⁷ 

Furthermore, Uris projects onto his Arab figures the stereotypes of Jewish timidity that he was trying to undo. By exaggerating Arab 

cowardice, he purges from the brave New Jew the taint of those submissive Jews who “chose” not to fight their Nazi persecutors. In the 

character of Dov, Uris turns the concentration camp survivor into a hardened warrior. As a child in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dov 

shot a German soldier point-blank and was then captured and sent to Auschwitz. In Zionist mythology, the exceptional Diaspora Jews of 

the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took their place in the pantheon of Jewish rebels, and Israelis celebrated the story of valiant resistance at a 

time when survivors of the camps were shunned for their powerlessness. Exodus dramatizes this contrast between the New Jew as fight- 

er and the Diaspora Jew as victim when Karen finds her father in a mental institution. He had survived a concentration camp but is too 

debilitated to recognize her; he had doomed himself by naïvely believing that Jews could assimilate into German society. Karen’s future 

lies with Dov, the youngest incarnation of the fighting Jew, who joins a terrorist organization that Uris calls the Maccabees, after the an- 

cient Jewish rebels who liberated Judea from Syrian rule. To dramatize this contrast in the film, Preminger compresses the order of his- 

torical events so that smoke is seen billowing from the King David Hotel explosion just as Karen unsteadily walks out the door of the 

mental hospital. (The actual bombing had occurred a year before the Exodus incident.) 

By focusing on retribution rather than suffering, Exodus diverged from the liberal arguments for a Jewish state as a safe haven and as 

moral reparation for fascism, which would redeem Western civilization as a whole. The novel presents the violent struggle for a state as 

vengeance for Nazi atrocities and retribution for a long history of Jewish persecution, including Arab brutality in Palestine. In the words 

of Ari’s uncle, “Nothing we do, right or wrong, can ever compare to what has been done to the Jewish people. Nothing the Maccabees 

do can even be considered an injustice in comparison to two thousand years of murder.”³⁸ 

In its depiction of Jewish masculinity, the film version of Exodus takes a different course from one of the few earlier films about 

refugees in Israel, The Juggler (1953), directed by Stanley Kramer. In that film, Kirk Douglas plays a former entertainer from Munich, a 

concentration camp survivor who has been psychologically traumatized by the loss of his home and family. Paranoid and distrustful, he 

flees from every effort to make a home in the new state. Israel does finally rescue him, through the love of a blonde, buxom Israeli who 

carries a rifle and dances the hora with him. The viewer is left, however, with the overall impression of the juggler’s irrevocable psychic 

damage that a new nation cannot fully repair. 

When Dov arrives in Palestine, a scarred and brooding soul, he also bears deep psychological scars, yet he is healed by his commit- 

ment to take up arms in a harsh masculine communion. In an emotionally searing scene of initiation, Dov descends into a dimly lit 

basement to undergo a ritual induction into the Maccabees. Surrounded by his elders, he breaks down when confessing that he was re- 

peatedly raped by Nazis in Auschwitz: “They used me like you use a woman!” After this admission of shame, a candlelit ceremony puri- 

fies him. Holding a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, he swears to sacrifice his life for the cause. Dov’s renewed masculinity 

thrusts aside his feminized victimhood, and he emerges into the Palestine sunlight as a toughened New Jew. 

Uris freely adapted Zionist myths of national origins for his American audience. His personal rejection of the Diaspora mentality, so 

central to Zionist beliefs, targeted contemporary American Jewish writers. He despised what he saw as the self-absorption of Jewish 

writers, who psychoanalyzed their personal neuroses and whined about their parents in print. “I’m made ill by those beatnik writers who 

degrade the Jews,” he said to an interviewer, and by beatnik, he meant Jewish. He hoped the publication of Exodus would be a literary 

turning point, when “Jewish writers would stop apologizing for their Jewishness” and “stop with the neurotic ghetto characters.” It 

would be “like a breath of spring air for the American people to meet Mr. Ari Ben Canaan,” he wrote in a letter to his father—“the fight- 

ing Jew who won’t take shit from nobody … who fears nobody. He will be a departure from the Mailer … [Marjorie] Morningstar apolo- 

getics. He will be a revelation for America and I believe America will love Ari Ben Canaan just as they loved the Marines in Battle Cry.”³⁹ 

Zionist mythology created the New Jew by repudiating his Diaspora predecessors. In his own brand of American Zionism, Uris cre- 

ated the “fighting Jew” and a “nation of marines” to expunge the images of contemporary Jews in the cultural repertoire of American 

Jewish writers. The subject of Israel allowed Uris to treat his writing as a virile art and to promote himself as novelist to the rank of his 

tough Israeli fighters. 

The theme of toughness was not just a personal obsession of Leon Uris; it had broad cultural resonance at the time. In 1958, the year 

Exodus was published, the editors of Look titled a special edition “The Decline of Masculinity.” That November, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. 

published “The Crisis of American Masculinity” in Esquire. Ten years earlier, he had sounded an early warning about “flabby” American 

political thought in The Vital Center. Postwar American men were “soft,” complained critics throughout the decade. Former war heroes 

were surrendering their individualism en masse to the pressure of conformity, the routine of office work, the seduction of affluence, and 

the apron strings of suburban domesticity. The “crisis of masculinity” bundled many social and political anxieties into an overall fear of 

softness.⁴⁰ 

As an antidote to this malaise, Schlesinger called for “a new virility in public life.” Tough-minded” realism would serve as a bulwark 

against “the utopian sentimentality of left-wing progressivism.” The cult of toughness soared to rhetorical heights in a young senator’s 

clarion call to the New Frontier. John F. Kennedy, a model of masculinity, rallied modern Americans to emulate “the pioneers of old” 

who stoically “gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West.”⁴¹ 

For Uris, the Israeli hero perfectly embodied this new virility, and the land of Israel epitomized the New Frontier. Uris joined the lib- 

eral Cold Warriors who rejected the soft idealism of progressives in the name of realism. His Israel was not an “ultra-glorious utopia” 

that would model a New Deal for the world, as Eleanor Roosevelt had hoped. The kibbutz in Exodus is a military outpost, not the social- 

ist experiment that thrilled I. F. Stone and Bartley Crum. Ari tends his private farm with no aspiration to start a Jordan Valley Authority, a 

project that had delighted liberals a decade before. In Exodus, the UN partition vote creates an “abortion of a state,” and it does not 

imbue Israel with the higher authority of internationalism claimed by Freda Kirchwey and Sumner Welles. The international community, 

in Uris’s view, had betrayed the Jews, who “stood alone and with blood and guts won for themselves what had legally been given them 

by the conscience of the world.”⁴² 

Uris did share with progressives the view of Zionism as an anticolonial struggle. For him, though, that opposition to colonial ex- 

ploitation was not an opportunity for an alliance between Jews and Arabs. Instead, he portrayed the revolt against empire as a heroic 

vehicle for Jewish nationalism. 

 

Zionism as Anticolonialism 

 

“It’s the story of our own Revolutionary War against the British, transposed to Palestine.” That’s how a reviewer for the Los Angeles 

Times explained the “extraordinary success” of Exodus, which had been read by “millions of Americans” and had “enormous appeal for 

non-Jewish readers.”⁴³ That appeal stemmed from the familiarity of this national narrative. 

The slogan “It’s 1776 in Palestine” had been used to muster American support for Zionism since World War II. In the 1950s, Israel’s 

American advocates revived the 1776 analogy to encourage the United States to sell arms to the new nation. Uris kept in his scrapbook 

an editorial from the 1956 Congressional Record that likened “the courage and stamina of the Israelis to that of the courageous Americans 

who declared their independence in 1776”; it concluded that “to help Israel today is to help ourselves.”⁴⁴ In 1958, Israel’s tenth anniver- 

sary was celebrated at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Declaration of Independence had been signed. Many lumi- 

naries who attended, including former president Truman, called attention to the location’s symbolism. 

The image of Britain as the evil empire was relatively new in Hollywood. When the first American movie about Israel, The Sword in the 

Desert, came out in 1949, its unsympathetic portrayal of the British offended some viewers who honored the alliance of World War II. 

The New York Times reviewer criticized the portrayal of the British as “pip-pip old chaps, killers, unmerciful policemen.”⁴⁵ A decade 

later, the British Empire was losing its luster in a rapidly decolonizing world. The trailer for Preminger’s Exodus included a signature 

scene in which Kitty worriedly exclaims to Ari, as they look out over a magnificent landscape, “You can’t fight the whole British Empire 

with six hundred people. It isn’t possible.” He responds with a question: “How many Minute Men did you have in Concord, the day 

they fired the shot heard around the world?” She doesn’t know the answer, but he does. Viewing Israel’s founding as a revolt against 

empire, Americans could look in a mirror to imagine their own heroic past writ large. 

The “Israeli Minutemen” of Exodus, as one reviewer called them, were given a revolutionary lineage in the novel that predated 1776.⁴⁶ 

“Right in the same place we fought the Roman Empire we now fight the British Empire two thousand years later,” proclaims one of 

these fighters.⁴⁷ The British Empire in Exodus appears as an amalgam of ancient Rome and biblical Egypt. Exodus maps Jewish liberation 

onto the biblical narrative of freedom from slavery in the scene where Ari leads the displaced persons out of British camps in Cyprus. At 

the same time, this liberation replays the shot heard round the world. In Uris’s history, the plot of Jewish revolution moves inexorably 

from the pharaohs to the Roman Empire, to culminate in the struggle against the British Mandate. 

These far-flung connections would have come easily to an American audience schooled in the popular Roman and biblical epics of 

the late 1950s, such as The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and Spartacus. Dalton Trumbo started working on Exodus while finishing the 

screenplay for Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick’s Oscar-winning epic about a slave revolt in ancient Rome. Both films follow a similar plot 

about the struggle for freedom against a decadent empire. In the Cold War milieu, the Egyptian or Roman movie sets loom above the 

actors like twentieth-century totalitarian architecture. What’s more, the Roman and Egyptian overlords speak with British accents. The 

revolutionary heroes in each case—Moses, Judah Ben-Hur, Spartacus—all speak with American accents as they fight for independence 

from tyranny. Sharing the epic dimensions of these films, Exodus presented a Jewish revolt against the British Empire that was identi- 

fiably American. 

Viewed in an American mirror, a nation founded in revolt against empire could not be regarded either as a conquering power or as 

one rooted in colonialism. The word “conquest” appears in Uris’s novel only in reference to the Zionist idea of “national land and the 

conquest of self-labor.” Working the land precludes the subjugation of others: “The Haganah would not try to conquer the Palestine 

Arabs. ‘Palestine will be conquered with our sweat.’ It was an army of restraint.”⁴⁸ The idea of restraint implies that Jews use violence 

only defensively, to protect their work on the land, and allows them to disavow any violence previously committed against Arab 

denizens of that same land. 

The narrative of revolt rhetorically displaces those inhabitants and replaces them with Jewish settlers, who are now seen as the in- 

digenous population. In a ten-page statement that Uris wrote, titled “Outstanding Action of the Jewish Underground,” he applauded the 

Irgun’s 1944 declaration that “the real enemy facing the Jews in this struggle of a Jewish state were not the local gangs of Palestine 

Arabs, but Great Britain. Not a battle between warring tribes, but a full scale revolt.” According to this logic, Jewish settlers play the role 

of colonized subjects rising up against foreign rule. “Here for the first time in centuries,” wrote Uris, “a race of so-called ‘natives’ had 

dared to face the British ruler with the same medicine which British colonial rule had applied to others.” This narrative made Jewish 

resistance the prototype of modern anticolonial rebellion. At the same time, it erased the history of Zionist settlement under the aegis of 

the British Empire. In the same account, Uris described the 1948 attack on Jaffa, which decimated the population of the largest Arab city 

in Palestine, as a military operation against the British: “The Irgun demolished houses to create rubble to block British tanks, and attack 

gangs in their base.” By “gangs” he meant “the 100,000-odd inhabitants reinforced by Arab troops.”⁴⁹ Uris’s narrative elevated the Jew- 

ish struggle above ethnic tribalism to the universal politics of revolution, while it relegated the resistance of Palestinian Arabs to apolit- 

ical criminal activity. 

While Uris adopted this version of Israeli history as a revolt against a venal empire allied with local bandits, Preminger and Trumbo 

wished to portray a more liberal view of Israel. They found Uris too unsympathetic to the British and the Arabs. As Preminger explained 

in an interview, Exodus is “an American picture, after all, that tries to tell the story, giving both sides a chance to plead their side.”⁵⁰ For 

ex-marine Uris, the scrappy fight for Jewish liberty made Exodus an American tale. For the cosmopolitan Preminger, it was the liberal 

tolerance of opposing viewpoints that gave the film its American character. When Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to write the final 

screenplay, Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Com- 

mittee in 1947. (Bartley Crum was one of their attorneys.) Trumbo and other blacklisted writers had continued to work under pseu- 

donyms, but Preminger garnered attention when he openly named Trumbo in a New York Times interview as the screenwriter for the 

film. 

Trumbo was aware that Preminger’s profession of fairness to both sides nevertheless served to reinforce a partisan perspective on 

historical events and cast Israel in a positive light. In a note to the director about the final screenplay, Trumbo described how this per- 

spective informed his drafting of the climactic scene, in which twenty thousand extras in Jerusalem tensely await the results of the UN 

vote on the partition of Palestine: 

 

By their willingness to compromise and to accept partition the Jews persuaded the world of their reasonableness as opposed to the 

unreasonableness of the Arab claims. This is regardless of the fact that actually the Jews, too, wanted the whole land for themselves. 

I choose to dramatize their perhaps reluctant acceptance of partition as a desire for it. It is better dramatically and better for Israel that 

it be that way, rather than to dramatize their desire for all of it (which would place them on the level of the Arabs in the audience’s 

mind).⁵¹ 

 

Concerned, however, about appearing “unjust historically,” even while acknowledging the dramatic and political need to elevate the Is- 

raelis above the Arabs, Trumbo pressed Preminger to include speeches about the need for justice for both Arabs and Jews. 

The film combines Uris’s hard-core nationalism with Preminger’s and Dalton’s more liberal concerns. It showcases the interna- 

tionalism of the UN vote to legitimate the quest for Jewish sovereignty. But the film’s most exciting action scenes center on the break- 

out from Britain’s Acre Prison, the Irgun’s “greatest feat,” as Uris described it. As in most historical fiction, tensions between family 

members represent broader social conflicts. Through his masterminding of this feat, Ari reconciles his right-wing uncle of the Irgun 

with his labor-Zionist father of the Haganah, whose opposing positions on terrorism had been keeping them apart. In their version of 

this prison escape, Uris and Preminger did not simply give credit to the Haganah that duly belonged to the Irgun, as detractors com- 

plained. Exodus resolved the internal Zionist rivalry in a vision of national harmony, even as it Americanized the narrative of Jewish revolt 

against colonialism as the mainstream story of Israel’s founding. 

Both film and novel effaced the violent dispossession of Palestinians, with a glorified interpretation of Israel’s founding as an event 

“unparalleled in human history.” In addition to recounting the particular history of Jewish persecution and national restoration, Exodus 

presents the establishment of Israel as a universal good—as the embodiment of human aspiration and the fulfillment of the noblest im- 

pulses of mankind. The novel quotes from the 1948 Declaration of the State of Israel, which intertwines the particular and the universal: 

“the Land of Israel … was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and national identity was formed. Here they 

achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world.” In 

the novel, Uris proclaims, “Young Israel stood out as a lighthouse for all mankind.” The story of a particular nation becomes “an epic in 

the history of man.”⁵² 

Karen is the character in Exodus who best articulates the universal significance of Israel. She decides not to go to America with Kitty, 

rejecting a soft life of suburban comfort in favor of a tougher idealistic path. Karen explains that “this little land was chosen for us be- 

cause it is the crossroads of the world, on the edge of man’s wilderness. This is where God wants His people to be … on the frontiers, 

to stand and guard His laws which are the cornerstones of man’s moral existence.” Kitty at first responds despairingly that the new na- 

tion is surrounded by “savages trying to destroy you.” But she then feels uplifted by Karen’s insistence that “Israel is the bridge between 

darkness and light.”⁵³ Even though Karen remains in Israel, Uris translates her reasoning into the American idiom of the frontier. In this 

mythology, the frontier marks not only the geographic border between nations, but also a Manichean opposition between civilization 

and savagery. 

Jewish children in Exodus represent the progress of civilization, from the orphans aboard the ship to the young people who are suc- 

cessfully evacuated from Gan Dafna in a dangerous mission during the war. When Kitty compares this youthful colony to the neigh- 

boring Arab village, Abu Yesha, she laments, “How pathetic the dirty little Arab children were beside the robust youngsters of Gan 

Dafna. How futile their lives seemed in contrast.… There seemed to be no laughter or songs or games or purpose among the Arab chil- 

dren. It was a static existence—a new generation born on an eternal caravan in an endless desert.”⁵⁴ This passage does the rhetorical 

work of displacement, transporting the Arab children from their homes to a metaphorical desert. The portrayal of their existence as both 

static and nomadic removes them from the progressive arc of history and thus from a future rooted in the land. 

If, according to the exceptionalist logic of Exodus, the Jews revolted against the British to establish not only earthly boundaries but 

also a moral frontier, then the Palestinian Arabs who claimed their own land could only embody the forces of darkness. In describing 

the UN partition vote in the novel, Uris writes that universal “truth” supported the cause of the Jewish State: “It was the truth that the 

neutral UNSCOP [United Nations Special Committee on Palestine] had found in Palestine: the truth that Palestine was a tyranny-ridden 

police state; the truth, seen through the thin veil of Arab deception, of the Arab failure to advance culturally, economically, and socially 

from the Dark Ages; the truth apparent in the Jewish cities that had sprung from the sand and the Jewish fields that had been made to 

grow from desolation; the truth of industry and ingenuity; the truth—implicit in the DP camps—of the humanity of the Jewish case.”⁵⁵ 

The concept of “truth” here works as a weapon. It expunges Arabs from the map of modern nations by driving them across the frontier 

between civilization and barbarism. They are identified as antiquated—in their authoritarian rule—and stunted—in their “failure to ad- 

vance”—and thus not worthy of political measure. The weapon of truth transforms an exclusive story of a particular people into a narra- 

tive of humanity that equates Israel with the inexorable march of progress. 

As the antithesis of enlightenment, the Arabs in Exodus bear the major responsibility for their own destruction, as though their back- 

wardness inevitably caused them to give way before progress. In the novel, the village of Abu Yesha invites “occupation” by an invading 

Iraqi army. Taha, who rules the village after his father’s death, allows the Iraqi forces to operate freely, even though his villagers would 

rather live in a benevolent Jewish state. In the logic of the novel, Taha’s refusal to side with the Jews—with the universal forces of 

humanity and modernity—gives Ari no choice but to forcibly evacuate the village and expel its inhabitants, and then level it to the 

ground house by house. This destruction is represented not as a choice made by the novel’s hero, but as an act forced upon him by the 

refusal of his “adopted brother” to accept Zionism as a means for Arabs to liberate themselves from their own darkness. 

In the movie, in contrast, Taha behaves like a “good Indian,” and he does make the enlightened choice to side with the Jews. Pre- 

minger added a stock Hollywood Nazi to lead the reluctant local Arab resistance, thinking, apparently, that this would make the Arabs 

appear less villainous than they do in the novel because they are being forced to follow an evil outsider rather than developing animus 

to Jews by themselves. Wittingly or not, Preminger associates the Arabs with Nazis and denies them a political will of their own. In a 

shocking scene that evokes an American lynching, Ari finds Taha’s corpse hanging from a noose, with a Jewish star branded on his 

chest and a swastika painted on the wall. This iconography makes Taha, who is killed for collaborating with the Jews, a Judaized victim 

of Nazism rather than a victim of Jewish violence in Palestine. Ari buries Taha alongside Karen in the same grave, in a gesture to a future 

when Jews and Arabs will be able to live side by side. After Ari speaks the film’s final word, shalom (peace), in his eulogy, the camera fol- 

lows the armed mourners—including Kitty—as they board a convoy of trucks going off to fight Israel’s War of Independence. 

In the longer time frame of the novel, Uris includes a fictionalized reference to the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, even while he shows 

irrational violence as almost always being committed by Arabs. Although he makes a reference to the “unforgivable massacre of inno- 

cent people,” Uris was primarily concerned that the story of Deir Yassin might tarnish Israel’s humane reputation, so he presents it as 

an aberration on the part of otherwise restrained Jewish fighters. He uses the grammatical indirection of the passive construction to 

imply that Jewish troops did not intentionally target their victims: “In a strange and inexplicable sequence of events panic broke out 

among Maccabee troops and they opened up a wild and unnecessary firing. Once started it could not be stopped. More than two hun- 

dred Arab civilians were massacred.” The narrator regrets that this event, “the blackest blot on the Jewish record,” had “fixed a stigma 

on the young nation that it would take decades to erase.” Uris tries to hasten this erasure by framing the massacre as an exception and 

arguing that it had nothing to do with the fear that drove Palestinian Arabs to flee. Other than this one exceptional episode, the “Arabs 

who remained in Palestine were completely unmolested,” and the Arab leaders bore full responsibility for forcing their people from their 

homes. To reassert the exceptional nature of Jewish suffering, he writes, “This one example of Jewish excess—in the heat of war, one 

must remember—pales beside the record of scores of Arab-led massacres in over three decades.”⁵⁶ Israel may have vanquished the 

British Empire, but its identity relies on this ongoing narrative of victimization. 

In the novel, Uris ends his account of the 1948 war at the Suez Canal not with a confrontation between Israel and Egypt, but with the 

Israeli Air Force shooting down six British fighter planes: “It only seemed fitting somehow that the last shots of the War of Liberation 

were against the British.”⁵⁷ Fitting, because it fit an Americanized narrative of Israelis refighting the 1776 American Revolution, elimi- 

nating Arabs from the political landscape as historical actors either in their resistance against Zionist settlement or in their own revolt 

against the British Empire. 

“Lots of people around the world have decided they want to run their own lives,” explains an American reporter in the opening of the 

novel. “Colonies are going out of vogue this century.”⁵⁸ Exodus placed Israel at the vanguard of this global trend. As a historical novel, it 

reveals as much about the time of its production as about the history it recounts. In the late 1950s, Asian and African countries were 

rapidly declaring their independence from European colonial rule. In the context of the Cold War, Americans viewed these struggles for 

decolonization with admiration, but also with ambivalence and paranoia in cases where they feared that communists were backing inde- 

pendence movements. The story of Israel’s revolutionary origins offered a reassuring image of stability amid these bewildering changes. 

Israel’s anticolonial origins grew all the more important after it had joined forces with its former colonial overlord, Great Britain. 

When Egyptian president Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Israel secretly colluded with Britain and France to launch a 

massive invasion of Egypt. The Sinai-Suez War represented the nadir of Israel’s early diplomatic relationship with the United States. 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with UN support, pressured Great Britain and France to halt their occupation of the Canal Zone. Soon 

after, he forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai and Gaza, under threat of sanctions. 

America’s global image as an opponent of colonialism was one of the many strategic concerns at stake for the administration during 

this crisis. Defending Egypt’s sovereignty was not Eisenhower’s primary goal; in fact, he feared that Nasser’s nationalization of the canal 

would inspire similar moves in the oil fields of the region. A more important consideration was that the United States was engaged in a 

Cold War struggle for the allegiance of newly decolonized nations in Africa and Asia. These nations had rallied behind Nasser, and the 

United States was eager to resist the Soviet Union’s labeling of America as imperialist. “Vice President Calls It Declaration of Indepen- 

dence from Colonialism,” proclaimed a headline in the Washington Post. “For the first time in history,” stated Vice President Richard 

Nixon, “we have shown independence of Anglo-French policies toward Asia and Africa which seemed to us to reflect the colonial tradi- 

tion. That declaration of independence has had an electrifying effect throughout the world.”⁵⁹ 

Nixon’s hyperbole expressed a wish to share in, if not appropriate, the limelight shining on Nasser, whose actions in standing up to 

colonialism did indeed have an electrifying effect on the new nations of Africa and Asia. Nixon evoked the Declaration of Independence 

at a time when it was being deployed by national movements across the globe and the political spectrum. In 1945, Ho Chi Minh mod- 

eled the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence on the American one, seeking American support to no avail. In 1951, Time named 

Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Man of the Year, and in his U.S. tour, he identified Iran’s 

independence with the 1776 struggle for freedom from “the chains of British Imperialism.”⁶⁰ In 1960, the “Year of Africa,” an article in 

Life compared Ghana’s formation of a new government to the “first perilous steps taken by the American colonies.”⁶¹ In 1965, the white 

minority government of South Rhodesia patterned its Unilateral Declaration of Independence on the American declaration of 1776. 

For Americans during the Cold War, their own revolution became a rhetorical touchstone for evaluating national independence 

movements, and for distinguishing anticolonialist uprisings from nationalist revolutions that posed a communist threat. When non- 

aligned nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, Eisenhower tried to cast the conference in American terms as bearing witness to 

Emerson’s vision of the 1776 shot heard round the world.⁶² When Hungarian demonstrators stood up to Soviet tanks in 1956, he com- 

pared them to the Minutemen repelling the British.⁶³ The spectacle of British paratroopers landing in the Canal Zone, though, pulled 

global attention away from the Soviet incursion into Hungary. The Eisenhower administration hoped that once the invasion of Egypt 

had been halted, Afro-Asian support for Nasser would turn toward condemnation of the Soviet “imperialism by the bayonet.” The ten- 

sion between supporting American-style independence and opposing radical revolution was expressed by Secretary of State John Foster 

Dulles as the problem of “how to guide the new nations from colonialism to independence in an orderly way.… We must have evolution 

not revolution.”⁶⁴ 

Israel appeared to fit this model to a tee. While Exodus was entertaining readers and viewers with its story of Israeli independence, the 

American press was heralding Israel’s foreign aid policy as a nonimperial model for encouraging development in Africa. Israel was not 

invited to Bandung, but it did actively cultivate relationships, through economic and military aid, with newly independent African na- 

tions such as Ghana. Newspapers reported on Africans studying in Israeli universities and kibbutzim, and Israeli technicians “going out 

to assist the newly independent Africans, who find in Israel a welcome alternative to the great powers of East and West.”⁶⁵ Articles por- 

trayed Israel as a paradigm for decolonization; as one journalist put it, Israel was “the strongest link between the white nations and the 

chaotic African situation.”⁶⁶ These stories characterized Israel as a force for orderly modern development, firmly inside the Western 

world but opposed to European colonialism. This image of Israel as a developmental bridge between East and West offered a Cold War 

version of Theodore Herzl’s 1896 idea that a Jewish state in Palestine could serve the West as “part of a wall of defense for Europe in 

Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”⁶⁷ Although this bulwark may have turned into a bridge during the era of decolo- 

nization, Israel was still seen as policing the same border—fostering American theories of development while guarding against both 

communism and revolution. 

Exodus did not directly address policy dilemmas, but on a popular level, it offered a symbolic resolution of the American ambivalence 

toward decolonizing nations. Israel’s “War of Liberation,” as Uris called it, was connected with emancipation from European colonial 

rule, while Israel’s enemies, especially Egypt, were associated with revolution as anarchy or communism. Arab revolutions are unthink- 

able in Exodus except as irrational violence stemming from an inferiority complex, a resentment of modernity, and hatred of Jews. In the 

Sinai-Suez War, Israel may have chosen the wrong side of history by colluding with European colonialism. But by 1958, Exodus was 

offering a vision of the nation as an anticolonial exemplar, one that sought what Dulles had referred to as “independence in an orderly 

way.” Exodus aligned Israel with America not by treaty or formal alliance but by telling a story that reflected America’s view of itself as a 

champion of national independence. The novel contributed to the mystique of Israel’s anticolonial founding and helped to obscure its 

colonial origins. 

Exodus ends in 1956 with Israel on the verge of war with Egypt, in a final scene at a Passover Seder commemorating the exodus from 

Egypt. By means of this biblical trope, Uris presents modern Egypt not in terms of its twentieth-century struggle against colonialism, 

but as the modern incarnation of ancient tyranny: “The Egyptians, the original oppressors, had become the symbol of all the oppressors 

of all the Jews throughout all the ages.” The Seder takes place right after news arrives that Karen has been murdered “by a gang of feday- 

een from Gaza.”⁶⁸ In Uris’s fictionalized border town, based on Nahal Oz, he renders Palestinian fighters who crossed the border from 

refugee camps as criminal agents of the modern pharaoh through a narrative that sanctifies Israel’s birth as anticolonialist, while eras- 

ing the Arab struggle for self-determination. 

 

The Other Exodus 

 

Exodus succeeded in bringing Americans to the Promised Land. “As a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Is- 

rael,” opined Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The head of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism said that “we could have thrown away 

all promotional literature we printed in the last two years and just circulated Exodus.” In 1959, El Al Airlines sponsored a twelve-day “Exo- 

dus Tour of Israel,” which paired scenes from the novel with sites from antiquity or Israeli history. Fiction supplanted history, as 

tourists would ask to visit places where events from the novel occurred. Tourist guides reported that Exodus rivaled the Bible as back- 

ground reading for visiting the Holy Land: one visitor, for example, asked to see the Galilee, a place he “read about in Exodus.” If Exodus 

replaced the Bible as the onsite guide to the contemporary Israeli landscape, it served a similar function for millions of Americans who 

stayed at home.⁶⁹ 

Exodus did have its detractors, though. In a 1961 essay, the young Philip Roth delivered a scathing attack on its historical amnesia, 

suggesting that the popularity of the book and film among Americans had to do with the focus on the tough Jewish fighter in an attempt 

to remove “from the nation’s consciousness … nothing less than the memory of the holocaust itself, the murder of six million Jews in 

all its raw, senseless, fiendish horror.” Roth compared Exodus to the inane prospect of a popular movie that would “enable us to dis- 

pose of that other troublesome horror, the murder of the citizens of Hiroshima.” Such a movie celebrating “the beautiful modern city 

that has risen from the ashes of atomic annihilation” would serve to exonerate Americans of their guilt.⁷⁰ 

Exodus teaches that “you don’t have to worry about Jewish vulnerability and victimization after all, the Jews can take care of them- 

selves.” If Life magazine presents Adolf Eichmann on the cover one week, and a few weeks later a picture of Sal Mineo as a Jewish free- 

dom fighter, writes Roth, then “the scales appear at last to begin to balance, [and] there cannot but be a sigh of relief.” Roth believed 

that Uris’s portrayal of the founding of Israel as violent retribution for Nazi extermination meant relinquishing the moral authority of the 

Jew: “The Jew is no longer looking out from the wings on the violence of our age, nor is he its favorite victim; now he is a participant.” 

To Roth, Exodus demonstrated not exceptionalism but a nationalistic norm, because “a man with a gun and a hand grenade, a man who 

kills for his God-given rights (in this case, as the song informs us, God-given land) cannot sit so easily in judgment of another man 

when he kills for what God has given him.”⁷¹ The tough Jews of Exodus represented to Roth the ultimate form of assimilation into Amer- 

ican society. No longer outsiders or victims burdened with moral insight, the Jews of Exodus have been Americanized through a call to 

arms that effaces their history of suffering, and their nation’s responsibility for the suffering of others. 

In his critique of “new Jewish stereotypes,” Roth showed no interest in the old Arab stereotypes that pervade the novel and film. To 

Arab readers, though, Exodus represented what Aziz S. Sahwell called a “distortion of truth.” In a pamphlet published by the Arab Infor- 

mation Center in 1960, Sahwell detailed the prejudiced portrayal of Arabs and their way of life, and he judged the novel to be propa- 

ganda masquerading as history. One of the only critics to point out that the novel ends in 1956 with a “justification of aggression 

against Egypt,” Sahwell interprets Exodus as not only narrating retrospectively the history of Israel’s birth, but also predicting the future 

of Israel’s strategy of preemptive war.⁷² 

Many American Jews have testified that Exodus inspired them, motivating some to feel pride in their Jewish identity, some to fight for 

social justice, and some even to imitate the tough Ari Ben Canaan and enlist in the Israeli army.⁷³ It is less common, however, to read of 

reactions to Exodus by Arab Americans. To convey one response, I draw on personal correspondence with Albert Hazbun, the father of a 

colleague, Professor Waleed Hazbun, who remembers as a child wondering about Exodus after finding it on his father’s bookshelf. 

In 1959, as a young Palestinian from Bethlehem, Albert Hazbun moved from the American University of Beirut to San Francisco to 

work as an engineer-in-training at the Bechtel Corporation. A few days after his arrival he bought a copy of Exodus. Having heard about 

the book in Beirut, he wanted to read it himself to be able to respond to its claims. He recognized its similarity to other popular Amer- 

ican genres with tough-guy heroes: “I read the book quite carefully and managed to do it by isolating my thoughts from the politics and 

read it as an adventure story same as a Mickey Spillane or Perry Mason.” But this familiarity did not dampen his indignation: “The 

events in the book were so false and outrageous to me that I thought that intelligent people would see through that and not accept it at 

face value. There were several sentences in the book that were so outrageous to me that they stayed with me many years to come.” 

When the film came out a few months later, Hazbun followed the reviews avidly and was shocked when the Bechtel employee social 

group put up a large poster announcing, “Bechtel Evening at Exodus”—an exclusive engagement for the company at the San Francisco 

theater that was screening the movie before its wide distribution. Hazbun contacted the Bechtel manager in charge to protest: “I was 

surprised that Bechtel, the company with so much work in the Arab countries, which should have known better, was allowing such bla- 

tant Israeli propaganda for the employees instead of educating them to the true facts and events. He actually agreed with me, but said 

that it was too late for him to cancel the event. He then suggested that I was free to provide the employees with better facts.” Hazbun 

printed copies of a review that criticized the novel for its distortion of history, and he posted it on all the bulletin boards in his building 

next to the announcement regarding Exodus. 

“Next morning I noticed that all my papers were missing. So I made it my task to show up early every morning to inspect all bulletin 

boards and replace any missing revue papers. I did this every day until the day the movie was shown.” Hazbun and his wife attended 

the movie with the other Bechtel employees. “It was hard not to feel with and support Ari Ben Canaan, but the viciously anti-Palestinian 

message was difficult to watch. I have never forgiven Paul Newman or Eva Marie Saint.”⁷⁴ 

The review Hazbun posted on the bulletin boards came from the journal Issues, published by the American Council for Judaism 

(AJC), an anti-Zionist organization headed by Rabbi Elmer Berger. The ACJ had shrunk in numbers and influence after Israel’s estab- 

lishment had stilled the debates about Zionism in the 1940s. But the organization decided to publish a slim volume called 

“Exodus—Unhistorical Novel,” containing two essays on Uris’s novel, reprinted from Issues. Addressing the portrayal of both Jews and 

Arabs, the essays objected to the exceptionalism championed by this popular narrative. “Exodus distorts” concluded one review, “be- 

cause it separates Jews out of the stream of history, establishes them as virtually the only victims of mankind’s abysmal side, and then 

projects this role of perpetual scapegoat into the future. Except that Israel is now created to serve as a savior of the Jews.” Irwin Her- 

mann’s “A Historical Appraisal” opened with the claim that “the inadequacy of the book (and of the Zionist interpretation of these 

events) lies in the refusal to recognize the integrity of the fundamental Arab grievance.” He saw parallels between Zionist land and labor 

policies and those of other settler colonial projects. Using a word that may sound jarring because of today’s debates, he blamed the 

“thoroughness of the Zionist colonial ‘apartheid’ ” for preventing “a peaceful solution of all the problems.” Condemning the novel’s 

“glorification of Jewish terrorist activity,” the review concluded that the novel “is not a book of hope but of despair, not one of assertion 

but resignation; for its principal theme that a Jew cannot live an honorable life except in Israel is nihilism of the worst sort.”⁷⁵ 

These were indubitably minority views at the time, for they criticized, in different ways, the exceptionalist narrative of Israel’s revolu- 

tionary origins. That foundational story achieved authority as history by mirroring the anticolonial image of the American nation in a de- 

colonizing world. For the Exodus story to hold sway for so long as the dominant narrative of Israel’s founding, it would have to do battle 

with alternative narratives that placed Israel and the United States within a history of colonial settlement and imperial power. But when 

war erupted in the Middle East in 1967, the popularity of Exodus provided a ready-made template for journalists to use in their portrayals 

of Israel’s fighting Jews. 

2

FOUNDING ISRAEL IN AMERICA

DAN WAKEFIELD’S REVIEW of the bestselling novel Exodus appeared in The Nation in April 1959. It began this way: A friend recently told me about an elementary school class in East Harlem, composed mainly of Negro and Puerto Rican children, who were asked by their teacher to vote for their ‘favorite country.’ The results of the voting were Ghana, first; Israel, second. Kwame Nkrumah, president of the newly independent nation of Ghana, had recently visited Harlem to cheering crowds. Wakefield noted a comparable fascination with the birth and growth of the new Israel around the globe that has crossed about every line of age, race, creed, color, language, culture and character—with the exception of Arabic—and, ironically, that violent exception is one of the prime contributing factors in the strength of the fascination. Although the Jewish state may have been an anomaly in the Middle East, it was the Arabs whom Wakefield labeled as anomalous—the violent exception to the worldwide enthusiasm for Israel. It was the fact of eight million surrounding enemies that made Israel such a popular underdog. With its victory in 1948, Israel took its place in the rank of modern democratic movements, including African nations throwing off the yoke of European colonialism, and the youth of East Harlem overcoming racial discrimination.¹

Israel was the stuff of fiction, wrote Wakefield, who had spent six months there in 1956 as a correspondent. It had every conceivable element of drama—‘conquest of the desert,’ ‘return to the soil,’ ‘ingathering of exiles,’ ‘conflict of cultures,’ ‘the Promise and Fulfillment’ of Biblical prophecy. Yet no novelist—not even an Israeli one—had really captured this drama until Leon Uris, a war-hardened, bestseller-proved American author, wrote his blockbuster novel about Israel’s war of statehood. Despite some reservations about the literary merit of Exodus, Wakefield applauded Uris’s skillful rendering of the furiously complex history of modern Israel in popular form. Reviewers and readers alike embraced Exodus as a brilliant history of the dreaming of, the founding of, and the making of Israel.²

To tell his story of Israel, Uris built on the progressive narratives of the Zionist project told earlier by Bartley Crum and his liberal colleagues. This, too, had been a story of liberation, but Uris showed less interest in their humanitarian vision of Israel as a social experiment, and he shared none of their occasional moral qualms. Starting with the origins of Zionism in eastern Europe, Uris penned a nationalist saga for Cold War America. The novel extolls a militant Israel founded by tough Jewish warriors fighting for a righteous cause. In an epic struggle between good and evil, a persecuted minority heroically overcomes crushingly powerful foes to restore its ancient birthright in the triumph of a modern state.

Exodus fits into a type of foundational fiction that nations tell about themselves. Such popular novels do for nations what Virgil’s Aeneid did for Rome: they yoke the state to the land in a mystical eternal unity, and they narrate the birth of the nation as the apex of an inevitable historical trajectory. Exodus has often been compared in its epic scope and massive sales to Gone with the Wind, which transformed the history of the Civil War into a shared national past. But Exodus is different in that it is not a story told by Israelis about their own country, but one told by an American author for American readers. Uris saw himself as writing for the average American who shares a tremendous moral heritage with the Jews of Israel.³ Millions of Americans would not have known of this shared heritage until they had read a novel about Israel’s founding that resonated with myths of American origins. Exodus converted a foreign history set in Europe and the Middle East into a familiar narrative of settling the frontier and rebelling against a tyrannical Old World empire. As its title proclaimed, the novel grounded its modern narrative of revolution in the equally familiar biblical story of the Promised Land.

One cannot overestimate the influence of Exodus in Americanizing the Zionist narrative of Israel’s origins. Its publication was a benchmark event in mass-market publishing, breaking records in print runs and sales. The fastest-selling work ever published by Bantam, it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, sold more than twenty million copies in the next twenty years, and has never gone out of print.⁴ Otto Preminger directed an equally popular star-studded film, based on the novel, in 1960. Critics lauded its dazzling, eye-filling, nerve-tingling power as a fine reflection of experience that rips the heart. Like the novel, the film struck many as living, documented history and as a powerful instrument of contemporary truth.⁵

Exodus had an enormous impact on shaping the mainstream historical narrative—and the attendant moral lessons—of Israel’s birth. Across the political spectrum, scholars, journalists, and activists agree that it provided the primary source of knowledge about the Jews and Israel that most Americans had.⁶ By transmuting history into the timelessness of myth on a grand scale, Exodus achieved great staying power. It forged the popular American identification with Israel for decades to come, in the face of alternative narratives that told different versions of that history. Both the novel and the film conveyed a double image of Israel, as a symbol of social justice through the rebirth of an ancient land, and as a source of redress for particular injustices through the rejuvenation of Jewish masculinity. Exodus had such a profound impact on the Americanization of Israel’s origins because it seamlessly interwove seemingly contradictory stories: of a universal mission with a particular national triumph, and of the redemption of humanity with ethnic regeneration through violence.

Remaking the Exodus, 1947–1960

Exodus transformed a historical failure into a fictional success. The novel opens in 1947, a time of international debate and violent conflict about the plight of Jewish refugees and the future of Palestine. Uris based his story on the SS Exodus, a ship carrying 4,500 illegal immigrants, mostly from displaced persons (DP) camps, that tried to breach the British blockade of Palestine. Before the ship neared the coast, six Royal Navy destroyers surrounded and rammed it. Sailors forced their way on board with live ammunition, killing three crew members while unarmed passengers resisted with little more than tin cans and bottles. After towing the damaged ship to Haifa, the British forcibly transferred the refugees to three dilapidated prison-like vessels and deported them back to Europe. When the refugees refused to disembark at their French point of origin, the British transported them to occupied Germany. An international outcry arose against returning Jews to the country that had tried to exterminate them.

SS Exodus with Jewish immigrants on board in the port of Haifa, 1947.

The organizers of the expedition did not aim to land thousands of refugees surreptitiously on the moonlit shores of Palestine. Rather, they aspired to shine light on the inhumane restrictions of the British quota system, which limited Jewish immigration into Palestine. They succeeded in turning the plight of the Exodus into a much-needed public relations coup for the Zionist cause. Newspaper headlines from Palestine had been filled with reports of bloody terrorist raids, sabotage, and assassinations by Jewish militias against the British. The most notorious was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed ninety-one people in July 1946. In American editorials at the time, antipathy toward Jewish terrorism vied with sympathy for illegal Jewish immigration. When news of the Exodus reached the front pages, however, the Zionist cause captured the moral high ground, as journalists turned their gaze from Jewish terrorism to British brutality.

The journey of the SS Exodus directed public attention away from Jews wielding guns and dynamite. It showcased instead the long-suffering refugees, desperate for a homeland and resolute about not returning to Europe, armed with nothing but food tins and bitter taunts to toss at British sailors, and singing spirited rounds of Hatikvah. International reporters were already on-site in Haifa to report on the investigation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which would soon recommend partition to the General Assembly. One of those journalists was Ruth Gruber, who had accompanied the Anglo-American Committee to the DP camps the year before. Her shocking photographs of the damaged ship and dazed refugees were published in Life, and she would later gather her reports in a book with an introduction by Bartley Crum. The Exodus affair is credited with swaying some of the UNSCOP members to vote in favor of partition.⁷

In 1947, the story of the Exodus played a key role in a contest for the public face of Zionism in the international arena. Who would become its emblematic figure—the refugee or the terrorist? American liberals identified these figures with opposing Zionist organizations and political strategies. I. F. Stone, for one, praised the Haganah for its struggle to lead clandestine immigration to Palestine, but he joined other liberals in condemning the right-wing paramilitary groups the Irgun and the Stern Gang for perpetrating acts of terror that betrayed Zionist ideals.

In fictionalizing this story, Uris merged the image of the suffering refugee with that of the ruthless terrorist, interwove the process of illegal immigration with that of armed struggle, and united the Haganah and the Irgun in a common narrative of anticolonial revolt. The novel deviates dramatically from the historical record by landing the passengers safely ashore in Palestine. The mastermind of the ship exploit, Ari Ben Canaan, the ruggedly handsome Jewish protagonist, leads the refugees out of a DP camp in Cyprus under the watchful eyes of the modern pharaoh, the British high commissioner. Ari succeeds in delivering them to the Promised Land, fulfilling the cry, Let my people go!

Unlike the historical ship, which carried mostly adults, Uris’s fictional ship is full of orphans, who commit themselves to a hunger strike until they are permitted to sail for Palestine. Every hour, unconscious youngsters weakened by starvation are laid out on the deck, as newspapers around the world cry out for the British to relent. At the fortieth hour of the strike, when Ari’s lieutenants confront him with their doubts about watching children starve to death, he responds gruffly that children this age are already fighters in Palestine and that this is only another way of fighting. His zealous lieutenant contrasts their public deaths with that of the six million Jews who died in the gas chambers not knowing why, proclaiming that "if three hundred of us on the Exodus die we will certainly know why. The world will know too."⁸ Starving children might not have gone over well on the screen, so in the film version, Preminger included feisty adults on board. The moral authority of innocent children, though, does inform a powerful opening scene, when two mothers holding their babies refuse to obey Ari’s orders to leave the ship. They defiantly choose death over returning to a life behind barbed

wire. Children play major roles in the novel and film as both innocent victims and dedicated fighters.

Uris invented his child warriors as a rebuke to the most famous Jewish child of the 1950s, Anne Frank, whose bestselling diary became a prizewinning Broadway play that Uris attended. Her story repelled him with its focus on Jews hiding in attics. He insisted that there was something far more decent about dying in dignity which is, of course the choice that every Jew had. They did this in the Warsaw Ghetto. Uris resented the Frank family for showing no anger toward the Nazis, and he hoped this type of Jew has ceased to exist forever.⁹ A strong motivation for writing Exodus was to dislodge the image of Jews as passive victims. Uris wanted to believe that the Jews of Europe did indeed have the choice to die fighting.

Uris was convinced that Israelis disliked Anne Frank as much as he did, because of their strong feelings about Jews who will not fight back.¹⁰ In creating his young protagonists, he rejected the figure of the Jewish child as a universal symbol of peace and humanistic forgiveness. He remade Anne Frank in the character of the idealistic Karen Hansen Clement, daughter of a professor from Berlin who sends her to Denmark to be raised by a Christian family during the war. Escaping assimilation into European society, Karen feels drawn to Palestine to search for her Jewish identity. With rifle in hand, she dies defending a dangerous outpost of the new nation at the end of the novel. But first, she falls in love with the hard-bitten Dov Landeau, a child veteran of the Warsaw Ghetto. He grudgingly boards the Exodus only for the purpose of exacting revenge by joining the terrorists in Palestine. In creating these characters, Uris managed to let his readers have it both ways. Karen’s gentle innocence invites the kind of sympathy accorded to the adolescent Anne Frank, while Dov’s vengefulness evokes the righteous anger Uris found disturbingly lacking in the Frank family.

Uris made another revealing change in the historical record by expunging the central role that American Jews played in the 1947 saga. "The Exodus story had begun in America, wrote Ruth Gruber, for the ship was an American excursion boat and the crew were GIs and sailors and Merchant Marine men."¹¹ American Friends of the Haganah purchased the original ship in Baltimore, and they met at I. F. Stone’s house for one of their planning meetings.¹² Most of the crew were Jewish veterans, and a young Protestant minister with a New England accent became the media spokesman for the ship after the British attack.

Given Uris’s desire to reach a broad American audience, it might have made sense to highlight the fighting spirit of American volunteers to create a bridge of identification for his readers. But excluding American Jews from Israel’s founding epic had the canny effect of presenting its origins as a universal struggle for freedom and not as the special interest of a particular ethnic group. By kicking American Jews off the Exodus, Uris made his Zionist characters appear both more and less familiar—less like stereotypical Jews and more like archetypical Americans.

In place of the American Jews who had actually been on the Exodus, Uris invented a non-Jewish romantic heroine, a nurse named Kitty Fremont—one of those great American traditions like Mom’s apple pie, hot dogs, and the Brooklyn Dodgers.¹³ Having lost her husband to war and a young daughter to polio, Kitty feels no purpose in life until she grows attached to Karen and follows her to Palestine, intending to adopt her. Kitty then falls in love with the irresistible Ari. She learns to overcome her genteel anti-Semitism and commits herself to living with him and, in a sense, to adopting the entire new nation.

In the film, Preminger enhanced Israel’s American qualities by casting the main characters with actors whose whiteness stood out luminously on the screen. Ari Ben Canaan was played by the blue-eyed Paul Newman, one of the hottest young male stars of the decade, whose father was Jewish. Ari’s sister, Jordana, was played by Alexandra Stewart, a statuesque blue-eyed blond. Karen, played by Jill Haworth, appeared blonder and fairer than her potential adoptive Protestant mother Kitty, the willowy Eva Marie Saint. On screen Karen’s whiteness has an aura that casts light on the darkest Jewish character, Dov, played by a brooding Sal Mineo, looking like he just walked off the set of Rebel without a Cause. The film paints in Technicolor what earlier visitors, like Crum, described as a mutation to the physical features of Jews in Palestine, making them fairer and less stereotypically Jewish than their eastern European parents. The main characters in the film, because of their whiteness, are easily seen as Euro-Americans. Meanwhile, when this film appeared in 1960, the majority of Jewish immigrants coming to Israel were from Arab and North African countries.¹⁴

In Americanizing the founding of Israel, Exodus also added a Christian dimension. Kitty represents the American who discovers in Zionism the mystical qualities of the Holy Land that she heard about in Sunday school. I have learned that it is impossible to be a Christian without being a Jew in spirit, she tells Karen in a settlement in Galilee on Christmas Day. Kitty speaks the language of the recently invented Judeo-Christian tradition, which embraced Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in a shared American identity and, during the Cold War, united them in faith against godless communism. In Exodus, it also unites them against Arabs. The novel’s copious Old Testament references with particular Zionist meanings took on broader significance to readers in this Judeo-Christian context.

The Christian appeal of Exodus resulted in the famous lyrics of the movie’s soundtrack. Exodus won an Oscar for best original score in 1960, but the sonorous instrumentals did not have lyrics until Pat Boone wrote the refrain that would become inseparable from the memory of the film: This land is mine, God gave this land to me. Boone was one of the most popular white rock-and-roll crooners of the 1950s, and his recording of the Exodus song topped the charts. A clean-cut alternative to Elvis Presley, Boone was a born-again Christian. His lyrics would not have raised eyebrows in an America that had undergone a religious revival in the 1950s, the decade when one nation under God was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. The song resonated with a Cold War American identity by evoking a God-given land where children play freely and dedicated pioneers bravely sacrifice their lives to defend it.¹⁵

Although Uris was the driving force behind what became the Exodus phenomenon, the idea for the novel did not originate with him but in Hollywood, with the vice president of MGM, Dore Schary. A political progressive and an observant Jew, Schary did not hide his affiliations in an industry where many Jewish executives were secretive about their religion and shied away from screening Jewish subjects. Schary thought the time had come to tell Israel’s story. He selected Uris, who was not particularly knowledgeable about Israel or dedicated to Jewish causes, because of his reputation as a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. Uris appreciated Schary as the one man who will gamble on ‘message pictures’  at a time when Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts had made political films risky. The subject of Israel could breach this taboo without seeming un-American. Uris negotiated two lucrative contracts, one with MGM for a

screenplay, and the other with Random House for a novel, and in 1956 he headed to Israel to do research for both.¹⁶

For Israel’s tenth anniversary in 1958, Uris hoped to re-create the public relations sensation that the original Exodus voyage had generated in 1947. The Israeli government eagerly welcomed the promise of positive publicity. The Foreign Ministry worried about its cool reception from the Eisenhower administration, which did not have the personal and sentimental connections to the Zionist movement that had existed under President Truman. The government feared negative public opinion about the controversial and unresolved issues of the Palestinian refugees and the internationalization of Jerusalem. It was also receiving widespread condemnation for making military raids across its borders, where reprisals against Palestinian infiltrators struck many as disproportionately violent against civilians. In 1954, the Foreign Ministry launched concerted campaigns to improve Israel’s image in the media, churches, schools, and businesses, and in the halls of Congress. When Uris contacted the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles to prepare for his trip, he received a hearty welcome, a hefty stack of recommended books to read, and offers of assistance.¹⁷

In Israel, officials treated him as a minor celebrity. They gave him a guide, a car, a hotel room, and unlimited access into all places and to all people. He believed the Israeli government embraced this opportunity to get perhaps their best book on Israel. He also hoped the arrival of a major film company would boost the economy and broadcast Israel’s message to a billion people around the world on film. A well-connected Foreign Ministry official, Ilan Hartuv, served as his guide and introduced him to veterans of the 1948 war and to high-level members of the government and the military, including Yigal Allon, Teddy Kollek, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, and Yigal Yadin. Hartuv accompanied Uris to battle sites from 1948 and included him on a patrol through the Negev Desert with a squad of paratroopers. He arranged a tour of a DP camp on Cyprus and passage on a secret flight to Iraq to bring back Jewish immigrants.¹⁸

Three years later, Israel greeted Otto Preminger with even more fanfare when he arrived to direct the first major American film shot entirely on location in Israel. Preminger was at the peak of his career as an independent director and producer of popular serious films, and though he had never been involved with the Zionist movement, his upper-class Viennese Jewish background gave him connections to the Zionist elite. Hartuv again served as the liaison to a government that was eager to help Preminger turn the country into a stage set. The army transported cast and crew, the navy lent three destroyers, and twenty thousand extras appeared on the streets of Jerusalem for the filming of the UN vote. The Israeli government rightfully anticipated that the Hollywood film would generate more publicity and tourism on the heels of the novel’s runaway success.¹⁹

In 1956, Uris had not been in Israel long before he developed a pretty clear picture of the story he wanted to tell. As he wrote to his father from a hotel room in Tel Aviv, I am writing a book for Americans … Gentiles … not for Jews. Nor was he writing for those New Deal liberals who idealized Zionism’s humanitarian mission: I must show her as a human place and not as an ultra-glorious utopia. Uris was captivated by Israel’s military prowess. The real Israel, he wrote, is a nation of young marines.… This is Israel … the fighter who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares him.²⁰

Uris had been a young marine himself. Joining up at seventeen immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he served as a radio operator in the South Pacific. The war provided an escape from a desultory adolescence shuffling between his divorced working-class parents in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Uris’s father, William, had gone to Palestine in 1920, leaving Poland with his brother to join a socialist youth group. But he found the environment too harsh, the ideology too nationalistic, and the employment opportunities too scarce. Disillusioned, he left and joined his large family in Pittsburgh. In the United States, he worked as an editor and organizer for several Jewish socialist organizations, but never with much success. His son Leon, raised in a secular and radical household, wanted to make it in America rather than change the world. In a letter from Israel in 1956, Leon warned his father that he would not comprehend its youthful warrior spirit: Israel was won by a gun and it will be saved by a gun. If you think this spirit was gained here by old scholars, you are sadly mistaken. The spirit of Israel is the strength of her fighters.²¹

Uris had first written about American fighters in Battle Cry, a novel about his experience in the Marine Corps. Published in 1953, the book competed against a formidable list of World War II bestsellers: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), and Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951). Uris despised these authors’ negative portrait of war and military authority. He rejected the degradation and slime of Mailer, Jones, Wouk the ‘ain’t war hell’ school of writers by writing a gung-ho novel about an outfit of men who loved each other and believed in what they were fighting for.²² Battle Cry became a bestseller, and Uris wrote the screenplay for an equally popular film, thus launching a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. In his second novel, The Angry Hills (1955), Uris first broached the topic of fighting Jews in the Middle East. He based the novel on the memoir of an uncle who had fought in the Palestine Brigade—a unit of Jewish soldiers in the British army in World War II. The novel was not well received, and soon afterward Uris turned to the popular genre of the Western. He wrote the screenplay for the box-office hit Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), where lawman Wyatt Earp (Kirk Douglas) kills a gang of outlaws on the main street of Tombstone, Arizona. Based on a true story, this was the most frequently filmed showdown during the golden age of the Hollywood Western.

The American marine and the Western gunslinger would provide the prototypes for the Zionist protagonist of Exodus. And the heroic narrative of Israel’s War of Independence would provide an antidote to the cynicism of modern war novels. Uris described his work on Exodus in the mold of the tough soldiers he extolled. He spoke of his research trip as though it were a military campaign, boasting of his intense physical and mental preparation, and relishing the dangers of being shot at and trekking across the desert.²³ His main publicity photo displays his military ideal: dressed in battle fatigues and boots, he holds a machine gun and leans cockily on an army jeep, staring confidently into the camera against the blinding desert background.

Leon Uris with a patrol in the Negev Desert, author jacket photo from the first edition of Exodus.

One of the unexpected highlights of Uris’s journey was a relatively young kibbutz at the border of Gaza, Nahal Oz, founded by soldiers and joined by civilians to farm land previously owned by Palestinians. Expelled in 1949, many of the families resettled in Shejaiya, Gaza, close enough to look over at their land across the border. Nahal Oz was a prized dateline for foreign journalists. With its proximity to a dangerous border and its photogenic young soldiers, who had left behind comfortable lives in modern Tel Aviv to found a kibbutz, it was the quintessential frontier town. Edward R. Murrow compared it to a stockade, or American army barracks, on an episode of the acclaimed television news magazine See It Now. Uris viewed this episode, called Egypt-Israel, while writing his novel.

Egypt-Israel, which aired in 1956, offered a daring exploration of the conflict between Israel and Egypt from both sides of the border. The first half starts with Howard K. Smith interviewing Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. It ends in Gaza with interviews of Palestinians—aided by a translator—in a crowded refugee camp. Of different ages and backgrounds, each man, pointing across the border, describes where in Israel his ancestral lands were. Angrily shaking fists in the air, the refugees express their determination to fight to return to their homes. The second section starts across the border, with Murrow’s visit to Nahal Oz. Visually it appears to American viewers as though they are returning home from a foreign country. The camera enters the modest apartments and scans bookshelves filled with titles in English, a radio playing classical music in the background. Murrow then climbs a watchtower in the dead of night to interview an Israeli guard. A handsome young soldier with an informal slouch, he answers Murrow’s questions in halting English: no, he doesn’t want to take anyone’s land, and he doesn’t understand politics; he just wants to live in peace as a farmer, yet he has no choice but to defend innocent lives. Murrow was justly proud of Egypt-Israel as a rare example of balanced broadcast journalism. But the episode ends with the Israeli perspective on the dark, menacing frontier, beyond the well-lit perimeters of the settlement.²⁴

Uris happened to arrive in Nahal Oz at an important moment in Israeli history and national mythmaking. There he heard Moshe Dayan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, deliver a memorable graveside eulogy for a slain kibbutz member. On April 29, 1956, Roi Rothberg, a kibbutz security officer, was killed and mutilated by Palestinians from Gaza while he was patrolling the fields. His murder followed a long chain of violent events, in which Palestinian infiltration across the border was met by severe Israeli reprisals, culminating in the killing of fifty-eight Arab civilians during shelling of Gaza City on April 5.²⁵

Dayan’s oration became an immediate national classic; broadcast and reprinted frequently, it achieved an iconic status in Israeli national memory similar to that of the Gettysburg Address in the United States. Dayan’s eloquent lament elevated the loss of the lean blond youth into a symbol of collective mourning. Rothberg’s ultimate sacrifice obligated the community to sanctify him with a renewed call to arms. A main trope of the eulogy is the failure of vision. Blinded by his desire for peace, by the quiet of a spring morning, Rothberg—and by extension all of Israel—did not see the severity of the threat right in front of him. Dayan called on the mourners to see themselves through the eyes of the Palestinian refugees: Why should we complain at their fierce hatred of us? For eight years they have been dwelling in refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes we are turning the land and the villages where their forefathers dwelt into our home. Israeli commentators have noted the unusual candor of this statement, which acknowledged the claims of

Palestinians forced from their land. What is so striking now is the apparent contradiction between Dayan’s understanding of the refugees’ situation and the militant conclusion of the eulogy. For Dayan, acknowledging Palestinian grievances demanded acting with vigilance and force: Without the steel helmet and the cannon’s mouth, we cannot plant a tree nor build a house. To no longer shrink from seeing this enmity meant to be ready and armed, strong and hardy, for if the sword slips from our fists—our lives will be cut short. The headline of the story in the Jerusalem Post read, We Must Not Be Lulled by Peace Talk—Dayan.²⁶

The funeral made an impression on Uris, who wrote admiringly to his father of the mourners’ fortitude: Not one tear, not one word of revenge against the poor ignorant Arabs. Such tragedies only strengthen the young Israelis in their determination to defend and settle their land. He emphasized the bravery and innocence of Rothberg, claiming that he had been killed defending the children’s house, and comparing him to the biblical Samson, who, because of his gentleness, failed to bring down the gates of the Philistines. Though Uris attended the funeral and read the translation of Dayan’s eulogy in the Jerusalem Post, he disregarded the references to Arab refugees. Similarly, in his comments on the Murrow show Egypt-Israel, he referred only to the Nahal Oz section.²⁷

In Exodus, Uris drew on a reservoir of cultural images from Nahal Oz for the climactic scene of Karen’s murder in a fictional border settlement he called Nahal Bidbar. Uris relied especially on material from a photo essay in the magazine The Coronet. Founded on barren desert in 1953, Naha Oz was, according to the magazine, threatened by over two hundred thousand Arab refugees who were lingering in filthy tent camps, unwanted by their host country, where they spent their time in resentful reverie. Their idleness produced hatred, and the energetic settlers of Nahal Oz are the closest objects of their hatred. Photographs of young Israeli farmers toiling on the land with smiles on their faces and rifles on their shoulders are accompanied by the caption, On the explosive Gaza strip, where Arabs and Jews are separated by inches of land and chasms of hatred, Israel’s potent defense weapon is the spirit of its youthful kibbutz pioneers who defy infiltrating marauders, bombings and even ambush, and refuse to be bullied off their land.²⁸

The narrative of Israeli innocence and self-defense precluded viewing Arab refugees as motivated by a desire to recover their homes. In Exodus, this narrative framed Uris’s entire history of Zionist settlement, from flashbacks about Ari’s family arriving from Russia in the 1890s, to the War of 1948, through Karen’s murder in 1956.

The New Jew on the American Frontier

Building a new nation entailed creating a new man. In his protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan, Uris fashioned the prototype of the tough Jew as an amalgam of American and Israeli masculine archetypes.²⁹ One such Israeli type appeared in Dayan’s eulogy: the warrior-farmer risking his life to defend his land, with one hand on the plow and the other on his gun. In choosing the name Ari, which means lion in Hebrew, Uris alludes to one of the earliest examples of this figure in Zionist mythology, the Roaring Lion Monument at Tel Hai, which Uris visited in 1956. In the novel, Ari’s father and uncle enter Palestine through Tel Hai in the northern Galilee. A hallowed site in Zionist historiography, Tel Hai was an isolated outpost of young Jewish settlers that fell to an Arab attack in 1920. Its celebrated military leader, Joseph Trumpledor, left a legacy of final words, crafted to instruct future generations: It is good to die for your country. The story of Tel Hai represented a symbolic break from the theme of Exile, a central myth of Israeli national origins that presented the Jews as having been exiled from their original homeland. The repudiation of Exile fueled Zionist ideology, which rejected the image of the weak Jew of the Diaspora as a long-suffering victim submissively entrusting his fate to God. The heroic fighters of Tel Hai represented the antithesis of the exilic Jew.³⁰

This Zionist credo has striking parallels with the myth of the American frontier as a crucible of rebirth, where pioneers merge with the land to strip themselves of the garments of Old World oppression. Whereas the myth of the New World frontier entails a rejection of the past, Zionism imagines rebirth as the return to an ancient land, to a time that preceded the Diaspora. The New Jew—a term intended to distinguish the Zionist pioneer from the European Jew—not only renewed the land as a biblical birthright, but revived the muscular body of the ancient Hebrew warrior through his martial skills. This lineage extends from the biblical conquest of Canaan—hence Ari’s surname, Ben Canaan, meaning son of Canaan. In Exodus, Old World victims of pogroms and extermination camps cast off their identity as persecuted subjects and transform themselves into New Jews by mastering the land and fighting the British and Arabs.

For Ari to become an American hero, he had to shed the stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. Kitty finds herself magnetically attracted to this big Palestinian, a gorgeous man with a hard handsome face, who does not act like any Jew I’ve ever met. As a strapping six-footer with black hair and ice-blue eyes, Ari could be mistaken for a movie leading man. In the movie, a glistening, bare-chested Ari emerges god-like from the Mediterranean in the night to carry out his secret mission. When wounded in battle, he stoically bears the pain that could have killed an ordinary human being. His emotional toughness matches his robust physique, so unlike a typical man of the Diaspora. A scorner of sentiment, he has bemused tolerance for the biblical idealism of his comrades. We have no Joshua to make the sun stand still or the walls to come tumbling down, he reminds them, and he works with superhuman stamina because he does not believe in miracles. Of the prayers of Orthodox Jews, he says dismissively, They don’t quite realize that the only Messiah that will deliver them is a bayonet on the end of a rifle.³¹

Ari may not have resembled the Jews Kitty met at home, but readers would have recognized a typical American hero from a Hollywood Western—with his extreme individualism and preference for action over words. Reviewers wrote of the Jewish Western, in which glorification of courage in Jews looked like Shane turning on his tormentors and winning. (In Shane [1953], a lone gunslinger protects struggling farmers from a ruthless cattle baron.) Uris knew the genre well from writing the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and one of his favorite reviews of the film was titled When Men Were Men—and Killers. In 1976, he would claim that You can write westerns in any part of the world, and in 1958, he transposed the western frontier onto Palestine and mapped its terrain through the symbolic geography of the border between civilization and savagery.³² On the screen, the setting of Exodus nostalgically revived the grandeur of sweeping panoramic landscapes, wide open for heroic pioneers—a view that was already receding from the Hollywood screen.

Poster for the film Exodus,1960, starring Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan.

Exodus reenacted the primal myth of the American frontier as a tale of regeneration through violence.³³ The hero in a Western ventures across the border of the civilized world to the wilderness in order to colonize dark, chaotic regions and learn the way of the Indians, thereby ridding himself—and the society he represents—of darkness. It is the barbarism of the Other—whether Indian or Arab—that forces the hero to become violent; he adopts their methods in order to defeat them, and to establish a border between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Ari forges his character in his encounter with Arabs, in the same way as an Indian fighter in the typical Western. Living among the Arabs when young, he learns to speak fluent Arabic and to scout the land from his adopted brother, Taha, the son of the friendly local mukhtar, who has voluntarily sold his land to Ari’s father to help civilize his own people. In later military exploits against the British, Ari easily disguises himself as an Arab. His familiarity with Arabs allows him to better enforce the hierarchy between himself and them. Fighting Arabs is an essential rite of passage for Ari as he comes of age in a hardscrabble new settlement.

After a group of Arab youth ambushes Ari with stones, his father blames himself for naïvely believing in the possibility of coexistence with his Arab neighbors. He teaches Ari how to use a bullwhip, the same one he used to subdue the first Arab merchant who tried to cheat him. When Ari confronts his youthful tormentors, he expertly throws the whip with a lightning flick around the neck of the leader; the lash snapped so sharply it tore his foe’s flesh apart. The boys of the village never attack him again.³⁴

Ari, though, never becomes enamored of violence for its own sake, and he follows his father’s advice to use his whip judiciously: You hold in your hand a weapon of justice. Never use it in anger or revenge. Only in defense. This early lesson in violence against Arabs forms the crucible for Ari’s individualism. As Kitty explains, when she feels rebuffed by his steely cool, he comes from a breed of supermen whose stock in trade is their self-reliance. Ari Ben Canaan hasn’t needed anyone since the day he cut his teeth on his father’s bull whip.³⁵

In this morality tale, Uris portrays Arabs less as noble savages than as uncivilized hordes who exist outside the realm of law and must be kept in line by frontiersmen wielding the weapon of justice. Indeed, it is impossible to read Exodus today without taking offense at its overtly racist stereotypes. Uris’s depictions came from a vast menu of Orientalism and colonialism. He portrays indigenous Arabs as squalid remnants of an ancient Islamic civilization and blames them for despoiling the Promised Land, turning it into festering stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth. Arab neglect made it necessary for Zionist settlers, like Ari’s father, to laboriously drain the swamps of the Huleh Valley and redeem a land that had lain neglected and unwanted for a thousand years in fruitless despair until Jews rebuilt it.³⁶

In contrast to Ari’s fierce individualism, Uris lumps Arabs together as mobs and gangs. Jews exercise violence with restraint; Arab violence is irrational, excessive, and vengeful. Unscrupulous Arab leaders ignobly whip up their followers into shrieking frenzies by promising them easy victories, loot, and rape. Throughout the novel Uris transforms political resistance on the part of Arabs into irrational sexual violence. Ari’s formative trauma was the rape and murder of his thirteen-year-old girlfriend during the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. His erstwhile Arabic brother, Taha, turns against the Jews in 1948 only because Ari forbids him to marry his sister. Such a union would threaten the sexual boundary between Arabs and Jews, a boundary that is as vigilantly policed as that between American frontiersmen and Indians. This recurring theme of sexual violence and vengeance makes it impossible for Ari—or the reader—to imagine Arab opposition to a Jewish state as politically motivated. Exhibiting the contradictions of most stereotypes, the Arabs of Exodus are both aggressive and spineless; they do not wield arms for a higher cause but rather revel in violence for its own sake, and Uris blames their refusal to defend their own homes in 1948 on their cowardice.³⁷

Furthermore, Uris projects onto his Arab figures the stereotypes of Jewish timidity that he was trying to undo. By exaggerating Arab cowardice, he purges from the brave New Jew the taint of those submissive Jews who chose not to fight their Nazi persecutors. In the character of Dov, Uris turns the concentration camp survivor into a hardened warrior. As a child in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Dov shot a German soldier point-blank and was then captured and sent to Auschwitz. In Zionist mythology, the exceptional Diaspora Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took their place in the pantheon of Jewish rebels, and Israelis celebrated the story of valiant resistance at a time when survivors of the camps were shunned for their powerlessness. Exodus dramatizes this contrast between the New Jew as fighter and the Diaspora Jew as victim when Karen finds her father in a mental institution. He had survived a concentration camp but is too debilitated to recognize her; he had doomed himself by naïvely believing that Jews could assimilate into German society. Karen’s future lies with Dov, the youngest incarnation of the fighting Jew, who joins a terrorist organization that Uris calls the Maccabees, after the ancient Jewish rebels who liberated Judea from Syrian rule. To dramatize this contrast in the film, Preminger compresses the order of historical events so that smoke is seen billowing from the King David Hotel explosion just as Karen unsteadily walks out the door of the mental hospital. (The actual bombing had occurred a year before the Exodus incident.)

By focusing on retribution rather than suffering, Exodus diverged from the liberal arguments for a Jewish state as a safe haven and as moral reparation for fascism, which would redeem Western civilization as a whole. The novel presents the violent struggle for a state as vengeance for Nazi atrocities and retribution for a long history of Jewish persecution, including Arab brutality in Palestine. In the words of Ari’s uncle, Nothing we do, right or wrong, can ever compare to what has been done to the Jewish people. Nothing the Maccabees do can even be considered an injustice in comparison to two thousand years of murder.³⁸

In its depiction of Jewish masculinity, the film version of Exodus takes a different course from one of the few earlier films about refugees in Israel, The Juggler (1953), directed by Stanley Kramer. In that film, Kirk Douglas plays a former entertainer from Munich, a concentration camp survivor who has been psychologically traumatized by the loss of his home and family. Paranoid and distrustful, he flees from every effort to make a home in the new state. Israel does finally rescue him, through the love of a blonde, buxom Israeli who carries a rifle and dances the hora with him. The viewer is left, however, with the overall impression of the juggler’s irrevocable psychic damage that a new nation cannot fully repair.

When Dov arrives in Palestine, a scarred and brooding soul, he also bears deep psychological scars, yet he is healed by his commitment to take up arms in a harsh masculine communion. In an emotionally searing scene of initiation, Dov descends into a dimly lit basement to undergo a ritual induction into the Maccabees. Surrounded by his elders, he breaks down when confessing that he was repeatedly raped by Nazis in Auschwitz: They used me like you use a woman! After this admission of shame, a candlelit ceremony purifies him. Holding a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, he swears to sacrifice his life for the cause. Dov’s renewed masculinity thrusts aside his feminized victimhood, and he emerges into the Palestine sunlight as a toughened New Jew.

Uris freely adapted Zionist myths of national origins for his American audience. His personal rejection of the Diaspora mentality, so central to Zionist beliefs, targeted contemporary American Jewish writers. He despised what he saw as the self-absorption of Jewish writers, who psychoanalyzed their personal neuroses and whined about their parents in print. I’m made ill by those beatnik writers who degrade the Jews, he said to an interviewer, and by beatnik, he meant Jewish. He hoped the publication of Exodus would be a literary turning point, when Jewish writers would stop apologizing for their Jewishness and stop with the neurotic ghetto characters. It

would be like a breath of spring air for the American people to meet Mr. Ari Ben Canaan, he wrote in a letter to his father—"the fighting Jew who won’t take shit from nobody … who fears nobody. He will be a departure from the Mailer … [Marjorie] Morningstar apologetics. He will be a revelation for America and I believe America will love Ari Ben Canaan just as they loved the Marines in Battle Cry."³⁹

Zionist mythology created the New Jew by repudiating his Diaspora predecessors. In his own brand of American Zionism, Uris created the fighting Jew and a nation of marines to expunge the images of contemporary Jews in the cultural repertoire of American Jewish writers. The subject of Israel allowed Uris to treat his writing as a virile art and to promote himself as novelist to the rank of his tough Israeli fighters.

The theme of toughness was not just a personal obsession of Leon Uris; it had broad cultural resonance at the time. In 1958, the year Exodus was published, the editors of Look titled a special edition The Decline of Masculinity. That November, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published The Crisis of American Masculinity in Esquire. Ten years earlier, he had sounded an early warning about flabby American political thought in The Vital Center. Postwar American men were soft, complained critics throughout the decade. Former war heroes were surrendering their individualism en masse to the pressure of conformity, the routine of office work, the seduction of affluence, and the apron strings of suburban domesticity. The crisis of masculinity bundled many social and political anxieties into an overall fear of softness.⁴⁰

As an antidote to this malaise, Schlesinger called for a new virility in public life. Tough-minded realism would serve as a bulwark against the utopian sentimentality of left-wing progressivism. The cult of toughness soared to rhetorical heights in a young senator’s clarion call to the New Frontier. John F. Kennedy, a model of masculinity, rallied modern Americans to emulate the pioneers of old who stoically gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West."⁴¹

For Uris, the Israeli hero perfectly embodied this new virility, and the land of Israel epitomized the New Frontier. Uris joined the liberal Cold Warriors who rejected the soft idealism of progressives in the name of realism. His Israel was not an ultra-glorious utopia that would model a New Deal for the world, as Eleanor Roosevelt had hoped. The kibbutz in Exodus is a military outpost, not the socialist experiment that thrilled I. F. Stone and Bartley Crum. Ari tends his private farm with no aspiration to start a Jordan Valley Authority, a project that had delighted liberals a decade before. In Exodus, the UN partition vote creates an abortion of a state, and it does not imbue Israel with the higher authority of internationalism claimed by Freda Kirchwey and Sumner Welles. The international community, in Uris’s view, had betrayed the Jews, who stood alone and with blood and guts won for themselves what had legally been given them by the conscience of the world.⁴²

Uris did share with progressives the view of Zionism as an anticolonial struggle. For him, though, that opposition to colonial exploitation was not an opportunity for an alliance between Jews and Arabs. Instead, he portrayed the revolt against empire as a heroic vehicle for Jewish nationalism.

Zionism as Anticolonialism

It’s the story of our own Revolutionary War against the British, transposed to Palestine. That’s how a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times explained the extraordinary success of Exodus, which had been read by millions of Americans and had enormous appeal for non-Jewish readers.⁴³ That appeal stemmed from the familiarity of this national narrative.

The slogan It’s 1776 in Palestine had been used to muster American support for Zionism since World War II. In the 1950s, Israel’s American advocates revived the 1776 analogy to encourage the United States to sell arms to the new nation. Uris kept in his scrapbook an editorial from the 1956 Congressional Record that likened the courage and stamina of the Israelis to that of the courageous Americans who declared their independence in 1776; it concluded that to help Israel today is to help ourselves.⁴⁴ In 1958, Israel’s tenth anniversary was celebrated at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the U.S. Declaration of Independence had been signed. Many luminaries who attended, including former president Truman, called attention to the location’s symbolism.

The image of Britain as the evil empire was relatively new in Hollywood. When the first American movie about Israel, The Sword in the Desert, came out in 1949, its unsympathetic portrayal of the British offended some viewers who honored the alliance of World War II. The New York Times reviewer criticized the portrayal of the British as pip-pip old chaps, killers, unmerciful policemen.⁴⁵ A decade later, the British Empire was losing its luster in a rapidly decolonizing world. The trailer for Preminger’s Exodus included a signature scene in which Kitty worriedly exclaims to Ari, as they look out over a magnificent landscape, You can’t fight the whole British Empire with six hundred people. It isn’t possible. He responds with a question: How many Minute Men did you have in Concord, the day they fired the shot heard around the world? She doesn’t know the answer, but he does. Viewing Israel’s founding as a revolt against empire, Americans could look in a mirror to imagine their own heroic past writ large.

The Israeli Minutemen of Exodus, as one reviewer called them, were given a revolutionary lineage in the novel that predated 1776.⁴⁶ Right in the same place we fought the Roman Empire we now fight the British Empire two thousand years later, proclaims one of these fighters.⁴⁷ The British Empire in Exodus appears as an amalgam of ancient Rome and biblical Egypt. Exodus maps Jewish liberation onto the biblical narrative of freedom from slavery in the scene where Ari leads the displaced persons out of British camps in Cyprus. At the same time, this liberation replays the shot heard round the world. In Uris’s history, the plot of Jewish revolution moves inexorably from the pharaohs to the Roman Empire, to culminate in the struggle against the British Mandate.

These far-flung connections would have come easily to an American audience schooled in the popular Roman and biblical epics of the late 1950s, such as The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and Spartacus. Dalton Trumbo started working on Exodus while finishing the screenplay for Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick’s Oscar-winning epic about a slave revolt in ancient Rome. Both films follow a similar plot about the struggle for freedom against a decadent empire. In the Cold War milieu, the Egyptian or Roman movie sets loom above the actors like twentieth-century totalitarian architecture. What’s more, the Roman and Egyptian overlords speak with British accents. The revolutionary heroes in each case—Moses, Judah Ben-Hur, Spartacus—all speak with American accents as they fight for independence

from tyranny. Sharing the epic dimensions of these films, Exodus presented a Jewish revolt against the British Empire that was identifiably American.

Viewed in an American mirror, a nation founded in revolt against empire could not be regarded either as a conquering power or as one rooted in colonialism. The word conquest appears in Uris’s novel only in reference to the Zionist idea of national land and the conquest of self-labor. Working the land precludes the subjugation of others: The Haganah would not try to conquer the Palestine Arabs. ‘Palestine will be conquered with our sweat.’ It was an army of restraint.⁴⁸ The idea of restraint implies that Jews use violence only defensively, to protect their work on the land, and allows them to disavow any violence previously committed against Arab denizens of that same land.

The narrative of revolt rhetorically displaces those inhabitants and replaces them with Jewish settlers, who are now seen as the indigenous population. In a ten-page statement that Uris wrote, titled Outstanding Action of the Jewish Underground, he applauded the Irgun’s 1944 declaration that the real enemy facing the Jews in this struggle of a Jewish state were not the local gangs of Palestine Arabs, but Great Britain. Not a battle between warring tribes, but a full scale revolt. According to this logic, Jewish settlers play the role of colonized subjects rising up against foreign rule. Here for the first time in centuries, wrote Uris, a race of so-called ‘natives’ had dared to face the British ruler with the same medicine which British colonial rule had applied to others. This narrative made Jewish resistance the prototype of modern anticolonial rebellion. At the same time, it erased the history of Zionist settlement under the aegis of the British Empire. In the same account, Uris described the 1948 attack on Jaffa, which decimated the population of the largest Arab city in Palestine, as a military operation against the British: The Irgun demolished houses to create rubble to block British tanks, and attack gangs in their base. By gangs he meant the 100,000-odd inhabitants reinforced by Arab troops.⁴⁹ Uris’s narrative elevated the Jewish struggle above ethnic tribalism to the universal politics of revolution, while it relegated the resistance of Palestinian Arabs to apolitical criminal activity.

While Uris adopted this version of Israeli history as a revolt against a venal empire allied with local bandits, Preminger and Trumbo wished to portray a more liberal view of Israel. They found Uris too unsympathetic to the British and the Arabs. As Preminger explained in an interview, Exodus is an American picture, after all, that tries to tell the story, giving both sides a chance to plead their side.⁵⁰ For ex-marine Uris, the scrappy fight for Jewish liberty made Exodus an American tale. For the cosmopolitan Preminger, it was the liberal tolerance of opposing viewpoints that gave the film its American character. When Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to write the final screenplay, Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. (Bartley Crum was one of their attorneys.) Trumbo and other blacklisted writers had continued to work under pseudonyms, but Preminger garnered attention when he openly named Trumbo in a New York Times interview as the screenwriter for the film.

Trumbo was aware that Preminger’s profession of fairness to both sides nevertheless served to reinforce a partisan perspective on historical events and cast Israel in a positive light. In a note to the director about the final screenplay, Trumbo described how this perspective informed his drafting of the climactic scene, in which twenty thousand extras in Jerusalem tensely await the results of the UN vote on the partition of Palestine:

By their willingness to compromise and to accept partition the Jews persuaded the world of their reasonableness as opposed to the unreasonableness of the Arab claims. This is regardless of the fact that actually the Jews, too, wanted the whole land for themselves. I choose to dramatize their perhaps reluctant acceptance of partition as a desire for it. It is better dramatically and better for Israel that it be that way, rather than to dramatize their desire for all of it (which would place them on the level of the Arabs in the audience’s mind).⁵¹

Concerned, however, about appearing unjust historically, even while acknowledging the dramatic and political need to elevate the Israelis above the Arabs, Trumbo pressed Preminger to include speeches about the need for justice for both Arabs and Jews.

The film combines Uris’s hard-core nationalism with Preminger’s and Dalton’s more liberal concerns. It showcases the internationalism of the UN vote to legitimate the quest for Jewish sovereignty. But the film’s most exciting action scenes center on the breakout from Britain’s Acre Prison, the Irgun’s greatest feat, as Uris described it. As in most historical fiction, tensions between family members represent broader social conflicts. Through his masterminding of this feat, Ari reconciles his right-wing uncle of the Irgun with his labor-Zionist father of the Haganah, whose opposing positions on terrorism had been keeping them apart. In their version of this prison escape, Uris and Preminger did not simply give credit to the Haganah that duly belonged to the Irgun, as detractors complained. Exodus resolved the internal Zionist rivalry in a vision of national harmony, even as it Americanized the narrative of Jewish revolt against colonialism as the mainstream story of Israel’s founding.

Both film and novel effaced the violent dispossession of Palestinians, with a glorified interpretation of Israel’s founding as an event unparalleled in human history. In addition to recounting the particular history of Jewish persecution and national restoration, Exodus presents the establishment of Israel as a universal good—as the embodiment of human aspiration and the fulfillment of the noblest impulses of mankind. The novel quotes from the 1948 Declaration of the State of Israel, which intertwines the particular and the universal: the Land of Israel … was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world. In the novel, Uris proclaims, Young Israel stood out as a lighthouse for all mankind. The story of a particular nation becomes an epic in the history of man.⁵²

Karen is the character in Exodus who best articulates the universal significance of Israel. She decides not to go to America with Kitty, rejecting a soft life of suburban comfort in favor of a tougher idealistic path. Karen explains that "this little land was chosen for us because it is the crossroads of the world, on the edge of man’s wilderness. This is where God wants His people to be … on the frontiers,

to stand and guard His laws which are the cornerstones of man’s moral existence. Kitty at first responds despairingly that the new nation is surrounded by savages trying to destroy you. But she then feels uplifted by Karen’s insistence that Israel is the bridge between darkness and light."⁵³ Even though Karen remains in Israel, Uris translates her reasoning into the American idiom of the frontier. In this mythology, the frontier marks not only the geographic border between nations, but also a Manichean opposition between civilization and savagery.

Jewish children in Exodus represent the progress of civilization, from the orphans aboard the ship to the young people who are successfully evacuated from Gan Dafna in a dangerous mission during the war. When Kitty compares this youthful colony to the neighboring Arab village, Abu Yesha, she laments, How pathetic the dirty little Arab children were beside the robust youngsters of Gan Dafna. How futile their lives seemed in contrast.… There seemed to be no laughter or songs or games or purpose among the Arab children. It was a static existence—a new generation born on an eternal caravan in an endless desert.⁵⁴ This passage does the rhetorical work of displacement, transporting the Arab children from their homes to a metaphorical desert. The portrayal of their existence as both static and nomadic removes them from the progressive arc of history and thus from a future rooted in the land.

If, according to the exceptionalist logic of Exodus, the Jews revolted against the British to establish not only earthly boundaries but also a moral frontier, then the Palestinian Arabs who claimed their own land could only embody the forces of darkness. In describing the UN partition vote in the novel, Uris writes that universal truth supported the cause of the Jewish State: It was the truth that the neutral UNSCOP [United Nations Special Committee on Palestine] had found in Palestine: the truth that Palestine was a tyranny-ridden police state; the truth, seen through the thin veil of Arab deception, of the Arab failure to advance culturally, economically, and socially from the Dark Ages; the truth apparent in the Jewish cities that had sprung from the sand and the Jewish fields that had been made to grow from desolation; the truth of industry and ingenuity; the truth—implicit in the DP camps—of the humanity of the Jewish case.⁵⁵ The concept of truth here works as a weapon. It expunges Arabs from the map of modern nations by driving them across the frontier between civilization and barbarism. They are identified as antiquated—in their authoritarian rule—and stunted—in their failure to advance—and thus not worthy of political measure. The weapon of truth transforms an exclusive story of a particular people into a narrative of humanity that equates Israel with the inexorable march of progress.

As the antithesis of enlightenment, the Arabs in Exodus bear the major responsibility for their own destruction, as though their backwardness inevitably caused them to give way before progress. In the novel, the village of Abu Yesha invites occupation by an invading Iraqi army. Taha, who rules the village after his father’s death, allows the Iraqi forces to operate freely, even though his villagers would rather live in a benevolent Jewish state. In the logic of the novel, Taha’s refusal to side with the Jews—with the universal forces of humanity and modernity—gives Ari no choice but to forcibly evacuate the village and expel its inhabitants, and then level it to the ground house by house. This destruction is represented not as a choice made by the novel’s hero, but as an act forced upon him by the refusal of his adopted brother to accept Zionism as a means for Arabs to liberate themselves from their own darkness.

In the movie, in contrast, Taha behaves like a good Indian, and he does make the enlightened choice to side with the Jews. Preminger added a stock Hollywood Nazi to lead the reluctant local Arab resistance, thinking, apparently, that this would make the Arabs appear less villainous than they do in the novel because they are being forced to follow an evil outsider rather than developing animus to Jews by themselves. Wittingly or not, Preminger associates the Arabs with Nazis and denies them a political will of their own. In a shocking scene that evokes an American lynching, Ari finds Taha’s corpse hanging from a noose, with a Jewish star branded on his chest and a swastika painted on the wall. This iconography makes Taha, who is killed for collaborating with the Jews, a Judaized victim of Nazism rather than a victim of Jewish violence in Palestine. Ari buries Taha alongside Karen in the same grave, in a gesture to a future when Jews and Arabs will be able to live side by side. After Ari speaks the film’s final word, shalom (peace), in his eulogy, the camera follows the armed mourners—including Kitty—as they board a convoy of trucks going off to fight Israel’s War of Independence.

In the longer time frame of the novel, Uris includes a fictionalized reference to the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, even while he shows irrational violence as almost always being committed by Arabs. Although he makes a reference to the unforgivable massacre of innocent people, Uris was primarily concerned that the story of Deir Yassin might tarnish Israel’s humane reputation, so he presents it as an aberration on the part of otherwise restrained Jewish fighters. He uses the grammatical indirection of the passive construction to imply that Jewish troops did not intentionally target their victims: In a strange and inexplicable sequence of events panic broke out among Maccabee troops and they opened up a wild and unnecessary firing. Once started it could not be stopped. More than two hundred Arab civilians were massacred. The narrator regrets that this event, the blackest blot on the Jewish record, had fixed a stigma on the young nation that it would take decades to erase. Uris tries to hasten this erasure by framing the massacre as an exception and arguing that it had nothing to do with the fear that drove Palestinian Arabs to flee. Other than this one exceptional episode, the Arabs who remained in Palestine were completely unmolested, and the Arab leaders bore full responsibility for forcing their people from their homes. To reassert the exceptional nature of Jewish suffering, he writes, This one example of Jewish excess—in the heat of war, one must remember—pales beside the record of scores of Arab-led massacres in over three decades.⁵⁶ Israel may have vanquished the British Empire, but its identity relies on this ongoing narrative of victimization.

In the novel, Uris ends his account of the 1948 war at the Suez Canal not with a confrontation between Israel and Egypt, but with the Israeli Air Force shooting down six British fighter planes: It only seemed fitting somehow that the last shots of the War of Liberation were against the British.⁵⁷ Fitting, because it fit an Americanized narrative of Israelis refighting the 1776 American Revolution, eliminating Arabs from the political landscape as historical actors either in their resistance against Zionist settlement or in their own revolt against the British Empire.

Lots of people around the world have decided they want to run their own lives, explains an American reporter in the opening of the novel. Colonies are going out of vogue this century.⁵⁸ Exodus placed Israel at the vanguard of this global trend. As a historical novel, it reveals as much about the time of its production as about the history it recounts. In the late 1950s, Asian and African countries were

rapidly declaring their independence from European colonial rule. In the context of the Cold War, Americans viewed these struggles for decolonization with admiration, but also with ambivalence and paranoia in cases where they feared that communists were backing independence movements. The story of Israel’s revolutionary origins offered a reassuring image of stability amid these bewildering changes.

Israel’s anticolonial origins grew all the more important after it had joined forces with its former colonial overlord, Great Britain. When Egyptian president Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Israel secretly colluded with Britain and France to launch a massive invasion of Egypt. The Sinai-Suez War represented the nadir of Israel’s early diplomatic relationship with the United States. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with UN support, pressured Great Britain and France to halt their occupation of the Canal Zone. Soon after, he forced Israel to withdraw from the Sinai and Gaza, under threat of sanctions.

America’s global image as an opponent of colonialism was one of the many strategic concerns at stake for the administration during this crisis. Defending Egypt’s sovereignty was not Eisenhower’s primary goal; in fact, he feared that Nasser’s nationalization of the canal would inspire similar moves in the oil fields of the region. A more important consideration was that the United States was engaged in a Cold War struggle for the allegiance of newly decolonized nations in Africa and Asia. These nations had rallied behind Nasser, and the United States was eager to resist the Soviet Union’s labeling of America as imperialist. Vice President Calls It Declaration of Independence from Colonialism, proclaimed a headline in the Washington Post. For the first time in history, stated Vice President Richard Nixon, we have shown independence of Anglo-French policies toward Asia and Africa which seemed to us to reflect the colonial tradition. That declaration of independence has had an electrifying effect throughout the world.⁵⁹

Nixon’s hyperbole expressed a wish to share in, if not appropriate, the limelight shining on Nasser, whose actions in standing up to colonialism did indeed have an electrifying effect on the new nations of Africa and Asia. Nixon evoked the Declaration of Independence at a time when it was being deployed by national movements across the globe and the political spectrum. In 1945, Ho Chi Minh modeled the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence on the American one, seeking American support to no avail. In 1951, Time named Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Man of the Year, and in his U.S. tour, he identified Iran’s independence with the 1776 struggle for freedom from the chains of British Imperialism.⁶⁰ In 1960, the Year of Africa, an article in Life compared Ghana’s formation of a new government to the first perilous steps taken by the American colonies.⁶¹ In 1965, the white minority government of South Rhodesia patterned its Unilateral Declaration of Independence on the American declaration of 1776.

For Americans during the Cold War, their own revolution became a rhetorical touchstone for evaluating national independence movements, and for distinguishing anticolonialist uprisings from nationalist revolutions that posed a communist threat. When nonaligned nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, Eisenhower tried to cast the conference in American terms as bearing witness to Emerson’s vision of the 1776 shot heard round the world.⁶² When Hungarian demonstrators stood up to Soviet tanks in 1956, he compared them to the Minutemen repelling the British.⁶³ The spectacle of British paratroopers landing in the Canal Zone, though, pulled global attention away from the Soviet incursion into Hungary. The Eisenhower administration hoped that once the invasion of Egypt had been halted, Afro-Asian support for Nasser would turn toward condemnation of the Soviet imperialism by the bayonet. The tension between supporting American-style independence and opposing radical revolution was expressed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as the problem of how to guide the new nations from colonialism to independence in an orderly way.… We must have evolution not revolution.⁶⁴

Israel appeared to fit this model to a tee. While Exodus was entertaining readers and viewers with its story of Israeli independence, the American press was heralding Israel’s foreign aid policy as a nonimperial model for encouraging development in Africa. Israel was not invited to Bandung, but it did actively cultivate relationships, through economic and military aid, with newly independent African nations such as Ghana. Newspapers reported on Africans studying in Israeli universities and kibbutzim, and Israeli technicians going out to assist the newly independent Africans, who find in Israel a welcome alternative to the great powers of East and West.⁶⁵ Articles portrayed Israel as a paradigm for decolonization; as one journalist put it, Israel was the strongest link between the white nations and the chaotic African situation.⁶⁶ These stories characterized Israel as a force for orderly modern development, firmly inside the Western world but opposed to European colonialism. This image of Israel as a developmental bridge between East and West offered a Cold War version of Theodore Herzl’s 1896 idea that a Jewish state in Palestine could serve the West as part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.⁶⁷ Although this bulwark may have turned into a bridge during the era of decolonization, Israel was still seen as policing the same border—fostering American theories of development while guarding against both communism and revolution.

Exodus did not directly address policy dilemmas, but on a popular level, it offered a symbolic resolution of the American ambivalence toward decolonizing nations. Israel’s War of Liberation, as Uris called it, was connected with emancipation from European colonial rule, while Israel’s enemies, especially Egypt, were associated with revolution as anarchy or communism. Arab revolutions are unthinkable in Exodus except as irrational violence stemming from an inferiority complex, a resentment of modernity, and hatred of Jews. In the Sinai-Suez War, Israel may have chosen the wrong side of history by colluding with European colonialism. But by 1958, Exodus was offering a vision of the nation as an anticolonial exemplar, one that sought what Dulles had referred to as independence in an orderly way. Exodus aligned Israel with America not by treaty or formal alliance but by telling a story that reflected America’s view of itself as a champion of national independence. The novel contributed to the mystique of Israel’s anticolonial founding and helped to obscure its colonial origins.

Exodus ends in 1956 with Israel on the verge of war with Egypt, in a final scene at a Passover Seder commemorating the exodus from Egypt. By means of this biblical trope, Uris presents modern Egypt not in terms of its twentieth-century struggle against colonialism, but as the modern incarnation of ancient tyranny: The Egyptians, the original oppressors, had become the symbol of all the oppressors of all the Jews throughout all the ages. The Seder takes place right after news arrives that Karen has been murdered "by a gang of fedayeen from Gaza."⁶⁸ In Uris’s fictionalized border town, based on Nahal Oz, he renders Palestinian fighters who crossed the border from

refugee camps as criminal agents of the modern pharaoh through a narrative that sanctifies Israel’s birth as anticolonialist, while erasing the Arab struggle for self-determination.

The Other Exodus

Exodus succeeded in bringing Americans to the Promised Land. As a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel, opined Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. The head of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism said that "we could have thrown away all promotional literature we printed in the last two years and just circulated Exodus. In 1959, El Al Airlines sponsored a twelve-day Exodus Tour of Israel," which paired scenes from the novel with sites from antiquity or Israeli history. Fiction supplanted history, as tourists would ask to visit places where events from the novel occurred. Tourist guides reported that Exodus rivaled the Bible as background reading for visiting the Holy Land: one visitor, for example, asked to see the Galilee, a place he "read about in Exodus." If Exodus replaced the Bible as the onsite guide to the contemporary Israeli landscape, it served a similar function for millions of Americans who stayed at home.⁶⁹

Exodus did have its detractors, though. In a 1961 essay, the young Philip Roth delivered a scathing attack on its historical amnesia, suggesting that the popularity of the book and film among Americans had to do with the focus on the tough Jewish fighter in an attempt to remove from the nation’s consciousness … nothing less than the memory of the holocaust itself, the murder of six million Jews in all its raw, senseless, fiendish horror. Roth compared Exodus to the inane prospect of a popular movie that would enable us to dispose of that other troublesome horror, the murder of the citizens of Hiroshima. Such a movie celebrating the beautiful modern city that has risen from the ashes of atomic annihilation would serve to exonerate Americans of their guilt.⁷⁰

Exodus teaches that you don’t have to worry about Jewish vulnerability and victimization after all, the Jews can take care of themselves. If Life magazine presents Adolf Eichmann on the cover one week, and a few weeks later a picture of Sal Mineo as a Jewish freedom fighter, writes Roth, then the scales appear at last to begin to balance, [and] there cannot but be a sigh of relief. Roth believed that Uris’s portrayal of the founding of Israel as violent retribution for Nazi extermination meant relinquishing the moral authority of the Jew: The Jew is no longer looking out from the wings on the violence of our age, nor is he its favorite victim; now he is a participant. To Roth, Exodus demonstrated not exceptionalism but a nationalistic norm, because "a man with a gun and a hand grenade, a man who kills for his God-given rights (in this case, as the song informs us, God-given land) cannot sit so easily in judgment of another man when he kills for what God has given him."⁷¹ The tough Jews of Exodus represented to Roth the ultimate form of assimilation into American society. No longer outsiders or victims burdened with moral insight, the Jews of Exodus have been Americanized through a call to arms that effaces their history of suffering, and their nation’s responsibility for the suffering of others.

In his critique of new Jewish stereotypes, Roth showed no interest in the old Arab stereotypes that pervade the novel and film. To Arab readers, though, Exodus represented what Aziz S. Sahwell called a distortion of truth. In a pamphlet published by the Arab Information Center in 1960, Sahwell detailed the prejudiced portrayal of Arabs and their way of life, and he judged the novel to be propaganda masquerading as history. One of the only critics to point out that the novel ends in 1956 with a justification of aggression against Egypt, Sahwell interprets Exodus as not only narrating retrospectively the history of Israel’s birth, but also predicting the future of Israel’s strategy of preemptive war.⁷²

Many American Jews have testified that Exodus inspired them, motivating some to feel pride in their Jewish identity, some to fight for social justice, and some even to imitate the tough Ari Ben Canaan and enlist in the Israeli army.⁷³ It is less common, however, to read of reactions to Exodus by Arab Americans. To convey one response, I draw on personal correspondence with Albert Hazbun, the father of a colleague, Professor Waleed Hazbun, who remembers as a child wondering about Exodus after finding it on his father’s bookshelf.

In 1959, as a young Palestinian from Bethlehem, Albert Hazbun moved from the American University of Beirut to San Francisco to work as an engineer-in-training at the Bechtel Corporation. A few days after his arrival he bought a copy of Exodus. Having heard about the book in Beirut, he wanted to read it himself to be able to respond to its claims. He recognized its similarity to other popular American genres with tough-guy heroes: I read the book quite carefully and managed to do it by isolating my thoughts from the politics and read it as an adventure story same as a Mickey Spillane or Perry Mason. But this familiarity did not dampen his indignation: The events in the book were so false and outrageous to me that I thought that intelligent people would see through that and not accept it at face value. There were several sentences in the book that were so outrageous to me that they stayed with me many years to come.

When the film came out a few months later, Hazbun followed the reviews avidly and was shocked when the Bechtel employee social group put up a large poster announcing, "Bechtel Evening at Exodus—an exclusive engagement for the company at the San Francisco theater that was screening the movie before its wide distribution. Hazbun contacted the Bechtel manager in charge to protest: I was surprised that Bechtel, the company with so much work in the Arab countries, which should have known better, was allowing such blatant Israeli propaganda for the employees instead of educating them to the true facts and events. He actually agreed with me, but said that it was too late for him to cancel the event. He then suggested that I was free to provide the employees with better facts." Hazbun printed copies of a review that criticized the novel for its distortion of history, and he posted it on all the bulletin boards in his building next to the announcement regarding Exodus.

Next morning I noticed that all my papers were missing. So I made it my task to show up early every morning to inspect all bulletin boards and replace any missing revue papers. I did this every day until the day the movie was shown. Hazbun and his wife attended the movie with the other Bechtel employees. It was hard not to feel with and support Ari Ben Canaan, but the viciously anti-Palestinian message was difficult to watch. I have never forgiven Paul Newman or Eva Marie Saint.⁷⁴

The review Hazbun posted on the bulletin boards came from the journal Issues, published by the American Council for Judaism (AJC), an anti-Zionist organization headed by Rabbi Elmer Berger. The ACJ had shrunk in numbers and influence after Israel’s establishment had stilled the debates about Zionism in the 1940s. But the organization decided to publish a slim volume called

"Exodus—Unhistorical Novel," containing two essays on Uris’s novel, reprinted from Issues. Addressing the portrayal of both Jews and Arabs, the essays objected to the exceptionalism championed by this popular narrative. "Exodus distorts concluded one review, because it separates Jews out of the stream of history, establishes them as virtually the only victims of mankind’s abysmal side, and then projects this role of perpetual scapegoat into the future. Except that Israel is now created to serve as a savior of the Jews. Irwin Hermann’s A Historical Appraisal opened with the claim that the inadequacy of the book (and of the Zionist interpretation of these events) lies in the refusal to recognize the integrity of the fundamental Arab grievance. He saw parallels between Zionist land and labor policies and those of other settler colonial projects. Using a word that may sound jarring because of today’s debates, he blamed the thoroughness of the Zionist colonial ‘apartheid’  for preventing a peaceful solution of all the problems. Condemning the novel’s glorification of Jewish terrorist activity, the review concluded that the novel is not a book of hope but of despair, not one of assertion but resignation; for its principal theme that a Jew cannot live an honorable life except in Israel is nihilism of the worst sort."⁷⁵

These were indubitably minority views at the time, for they criticized, in different ways, the exceptionalist narrative of Israel’s revolutionary origins. That foundational story achieved authority as history by mirroring the anticolonial image of the American nation in a decolonizing world. For the Exodus story to hold sway for so long as the dominant narrative of Israel’s founding, it would have to do battle with alternative narratives that placed Israel and the United States within a history of colonial settlement and imperial power. But when war erupted in the Middle East in 1967, the popularity of Exodus provided a ready-made template for journalists to use in their portrayals of Israel’s fighting Jews.

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