RW: Yes, Ben Canaan, which means the son of Canaan. So Uris put together something which is, I think, pretty profound. I don't think the book is profound as a literary document, but one can return to it reliably as an idea of what that period was like. What happened subsequently is that the Arabs did not come to terms and what seemed to be a temporary war against the Jews became a permanent war against the Jews.
Permanent war is not something that liberals accept. The liberal imagination — now I'm talking about the soft-liberal imagination but perhaps the liberal imagination in general — thinks that all conflict is negotiable. It does not want to make allowances for conflicts that are non-negotiable, and since the Arabs cannot be dissuaded to be other than what they are, then one has to put the pressure on the Jews to yield. To yield because, from the liberal point of view, there has to be a solution, there has to be peace, there has to be a peace process. The pressure on Israel and on the Jews to put pressure on Israel has been growing from that time to this and that's the main pressure one feels. And it's why we see the division of which Jack speaks.
Part of the community, as a result of this, grows tougher. It knows it has to develop within itself the resources to withstand this because it becomes more and more serious from year to year. And by the way, I think the alignment between Israel and America stays the same throughout. So the problem of persuading Jews that there is a war out there in which you have to engage is the same problem that there is of convincing Americans there is a real war out there in which you have to engage. So these two things are one.
Here too, Jewish life, in this respect and in others, is going to depend very much on the strength of American liberalism. If American liberalism becomes muscular once again, and speaks in a voice of moral confidence, then you will have a much more confident American Jewry. Alas, if you find a defensiveness on the part of America, and a kind of Obama approach to have a weak America that he presumes is more attractive to others, to not impose ourselves, to not think that Western civilisation is any better than any other civilisation, then it will be very hard for Jews alone to withstand that kind of pressure...
If the survival of the Jewish state depends on the decadent, limp, weak and squishy suddenly getting a clue and growing a pair (ideally, at the same time), Israel may as well pack it in right now.
1 comment:
This is in the nature of a cavil, but, pace Ms. Wisse, I think Leon Uris was a great writer and _Exodus_ was a great novel. And not just _Exodus_. Uris could masterfully build his novels about any number of non-Jewish themes: One of the best Cold War novels dealing at least partially with Cuba was _Topaz_; _Trinity_, also a great read, deals masterfully with modern Irish history, and the religious struggles that are so much a part of it; and _Battle Cry_ is one of the best World War II novels written (much better in my opinion than _The Naked and the Dead_, by that darling of American intellectuals, Norman Mailer).
If some literati don't find _Exodus_, or Uris's other novels, profound, I warrant the reason is that he commits the two cardinal sins soi-disant Western intellectuals cannot pardon: He takes his own side, i.e., that of Western Civilization, against its enemies, and, perhaps even more unpardonably, his books were nearly all blockbuster best-sellers that were avidly read by the public at large. That, I submit, is one of the marks of the great writer; think Aeschylus, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Dickens, Melville, Zola . . . the masses actually watched their plays or read their works. If your reading public or audience is mostly made up of Greenwich Village Bohemians and northeastern university professors of literature, well, maybe your stuff ain't so hot!
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