66 pages • 2 hours read
Leon UrisExodus
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Critical Context: The Critical and Popular Reception of Exodus
The popularity of Exodus as a bestselling novel gave it an outsized impact in shaping perceptions of Israel, especially in the US. While the American public was already broadly sympathetic to Israel’s position and affirmed Israel as a strategic democratic ally in the region, Exodus brought a wave of renewed sentiment to undergird that sympathy, thanks to the novel’s admiration of Israeli endurance and its positive portrayal of the Israeli position in the events of the 1948 war.
While the novel was not widely regarded as controversial upon its release, it has come to be seen as such in recent decades. Exodus gives little attention to the Palestinian side of the conflict, focusing rather on the Jewish/British tensions at the time. Where it does address the Palestinians, it often perpetuates storylines that have come to be associated with false and damaging tropes. Some of these tropes include the idea that Palestine was largely an empty wasteland before the Jewish arrivals began, with only a minimal Palestinian-Arab presence; that the Palestinians were culturally backward and had no national self-consciousness until Israel’s rise; and that the Palestinians were merely hapless victims of their leaders’ poor judgment. Exodus portrays the 1948 war as a triumphal story of Jews overcoming adversity, while giving no space to the Palestinian remembrance of those events as the Nakba (“the catastrophe”).
The novel remains controversial today, as some defenders still regard its treatment of the Jewish side of the story as essentially accurate, while others view it as being little more than a pro-Israel propaganda piece. As such, Exodus still stands as an important, if contentious, literary touchpoint on the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Socio-Historical Context: The Establishment of the State of Israel
The main narrative of Exodus focuses on the years between World War II and the establishment of the state of Israel (1946-1948). One of the major global flashpoints at the time was the geographical region known as the Palestine Mandate, which had been overseen by the British since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Tensions had risen in Palestine over the course of several decades, as major movements of Jewish immigration began arriving in the late 1800s. These movements, called “Aliyahs,” represented the first major return of diaspora Jews in 2,000 years, believing the time had come to resettle the region they viewed as their ancestral homeland. While the initial impact of the Aliyahs was positive in some respects, especially with regard to Jewish land reclamation projects that increased the arable area of the region, the growing numbers of Jews—many of them entering as unauthorized immigrants—made the position of the Palestinian-Arab residents of the Mandate ever more tenuous.
Britain, which had initially been favorable toward the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and stated so publicly in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, addressed these tensions by strictly limiting Jewish immigration. This tightening came just as many European Jews were fleeing from the looming threat of Nazi occupation, and the Jews of Palestine organized undercover missions to aid refugees.
This work continued after World War II, when the number of Jewish refugees—now with the sympathetic backing of the international community due to the horrors they had faced in the Holocaust—swelled to immense proportions. Jewish groups like Aliyah Bet and the Haganah resisted British rule in Palestine and sought to bring in as many Jewish refugees as they possibly could. This further inflamed tensions with the local Palestinians, and by 1948 Britain was ready to let the international community decide. The UN studied the problem and voted for the partition of Palestine to allow for the establishment of a Jewish state. This was unacceptable to the Arab bloc of nations, which declared war on the new state of Israel.
During the 1948 war, the Israelis held their ground against the invading Arab nations, but their actions also precipitated the violent displacement of the Palestinian population, which was thereafter forced to live as refugees in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The tensions inflamed by the events of 1948 have not lessened in subsequent decades, and still underlie the intractability of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
