Accuracy of Leon Uris' "The Haj"

Cafe Society
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Shortly after the author’s recent death, I re-read one of his epic novels, The Haj. It touches on Uris’ favourite topic (the fate of Jews before, during and after WW2, including the founding of Israel) but this particular book is written from the perspective of a Palestinian boy who, along with his family, flees his home during the war of Israeli independence in 1948 and spends the last half of the book in a resettlement camp, trying to get back.

Over the course of this book, Palestinians, and Arabs generally, are portrayed in a less-than-flattering light (violent, sexist, treacherous, decadent, corrupt, unreliable, undisciplined, lazy), while the various Jews (before and after 1948) are routinely cast as civilized peaceful types who fight only in defense.

Given Uris’ well-estalished bias, I have to ask if this is even close to an accurate portrayal of Palestinian Arabs, 1922-1956 (the timespan of the book). Uris wrote in a few scattered compliments for them now and then, but they feel forced and unsupported by the narrative, as though his heart wasn’t really in it.

So did I end up reading some kind of 550-page propoganda tract, or what?

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I don’t think it was strictly propaganda but rather a negative portrayal based on fact. Certainly you could travel Palestinian compounds today and find no shortage of Haj Ibrahims and many much much worse, completely stuck in a mindset that belongs to another time and resisting modernity and the NWO like it was a foam party in Sodom. My problem with the book (other than that it was the most depressing novel I read for several years, especially the ending) was not the portrayal of Arabs and Palestinians as the victims of antiquated ideologies and corrupt western-superpower-embracing hypocritical leaders so much as, as you mentioned, the portrayal of Israelis as very nearly sinless.

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I am Jewish and moderately pro-Israel. I tried to read that book a few years back and couldn’t get past the first few chapters. I found it to be horribly biased and racist.

Haj, who found this thread through a vanity search and whose user name has nothing at all to do with that book.

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Dare I ask what comprises a “foam party in Sodom” ?