The serious circumstances that gave rise to the birth of the State of Israel and the subsequent clashes in the lands of ancient Palestine have generated some successful fictional interpretations, which contributed decisively to establishing perspectives and positions in Europe and the United States.
Leon Uris (1924-2003), a Jewish American novelist who fought with the Marines in the South Pacific during World War II, began a successful literary career shortly after, pouring his war experiences into the novel Battle Cry. Interested in what was happening in Israel (or driven by a Zionist PR, according to accounts), he investigated on the ground for a couple of years, conducting hundreds of interviews with Jews and Palestinians.
The result was his epic novel Exodus, which appeared in 1958 and was made into a film by Otto Preminger with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint in 1960. It became the biggest best-seller recorded in the US since Gone with the Wind, which appeared in 1936.
The 626-page volume novels the true story of the ship Exodus. In 1946, the young Zionist leader Ari Ben Canaan obtained a dilapidated ship to illegally take a group of 4,500 Holocaust survivors from Cyprus to Palestine from internment camps on the island. When the British authorities discover this, they block the ship; The refugees – with many children in their ranks – begin a hunger strike, and Ari threatens to blow it up with all of them inside. Finally they are evicted and returned to Germany, unleashing an international scandal.
Several of the Exodus travelers end up arriving in Palestine, such as the cordial Karen Hansen or the skillful and bitter Dov Landau, and attend the UN plan for the partition of the territory, Irgun terrorism, the independence of Israel, the fight against the Arab armies and the creation of the first kibbutzs. Meanwhile, Ben Canaan and nurse Kitty Fremont, a war widow, live a tormented love story.
Exodus, novel and film, was once considered key to awakening in the West sympathy for the then young State of Israel and, according to historian M.M. Silver, “helped establish Jewish identity on a global level.” While other analysts, especially from the Arab world, have called it a racist book full of prejudices about the Palestinians.
Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, journalists who had successfully embarked on documenting recent events in history in an entertaining and exhaustive way in books such as Paris Burns and O You Will Be Mourning for Me (about the bullfighter El Cordobés), published in 1971 Oh, Jerusalem, 570 pages addressing the same period and many of the events recreated by Uris.
In different statements, Lapierre expressed his desire for impartiality: “Larry and I conducted a four-year survey and interviewed 1,200 people, including Ben Gurion and Golda Meir; It was a challenge, since the emotions aroused by that city and that conflict are enormous.” “We found Jews and Arabs who were neighbors, appreciated each other and helped each other,” she declared.
Oh, Jerusalem, a book with which millions of readers have delved into the problems of the Middle East, also received criticism. Jean Lacouture, in Le Monde, criticized the fragmented narrative and its oral history tone. The presentation of the volume in Tel Aviv sparked accusations of bias.
More recently, following the release of the film of the same name, director Elie Chouraqui was criticized for following too faithfully the Lapierre-Collins tandem, ignoring the subsequent work of historians in Israeli archives and presenting, for example, the Jews of 1948 as much inferior in strength to the Arabs, a fact that is up for debate today.
Accepting these and other objections that must be taken into account in a topic of such complexity, they are great works that continue to be read well and provide interesting data to try to understand the Palestinian tragedy.
