I recall sitting in a movie theater as a teenager in 1960 watching the film “Exodus,” that year’s blockbuster starring Paul Newman. Like most of the audience, I cheered on Newman in his role as a Zionist rebel guerilla fighting heroically for the creation of the new Israel. Who could be against Ol’ Blue Eyes?
What I didn’t know at the time was that I was seeing a well-produced piece of historical propaganda presenting a highly sanitized and rather misleading version of the founding of Israel that has influenced American opinion ever since and helped set the template for this country’s foreign policy. Such is the power of Hollywood in American politics and culture.
Mainstream critics mostly liked the movie, which appealed to sensibilities softened up by the immensely popular best-selling 1958 novel of the same name by Leon Uris, upon which the film was based. Those on the left and in academic and literary circles, however, tended to skewer it, and the Academy Awards selection committee, which then still had some standards, pointedly ignored it.
This was not anti-Semitic prejudice aimed at the film’s Jewish director-producer Otto Preminger or the book’s Jewish author; the movie industry and the literary community both contained a large Jewish presence, then as now. Discerning observers and commentators simply knew propaganda and bad art when they saw or read it. The general public: Not so much.
The most harmful thing “Exodus” did, as a number of critics, then and since, have noted, was to demonize Arabs in the American mind, rendering them subhuman, so that the Netanyahu government’s recent broad characterization of its enemies as “human animals” raised few hackles in official Washington and made the brutal bombing of Gaza acceptable.
Without going into the incredibly complicated and implausible plot of “Exodus,” one absurd scene that jumps out is that of savage, anti-Jewish Arab terrorists being led by a German Nazi. A perusal of the invaluable work of such eminent Jewish “revisionist” historians as Tom Segev and Benny Morris reveals no evidence of Nazi participation in the Palestinian resistance, but in the immediate post-World War II, post-Holocaust environment, the notion had a certain obvious appeal as a plot line; it further tarred Palestinians by fictional association.
The latter-day influence of “Exodus” was analyzed a few years ago in Ha’aretz (11/9/12), Israel’s leading newspaper, by longtime Israeli-American journalist Bradley Burston, who had become disillusioned with Israel’s contemporary apartheid policies. Burston remarked that part of the “Exodus” propaganda appeal in the US stemmed from the movie’s Americanized characters, such as Paul Newman’s Jewish militia leader, who resembled a two-fisted frontier hero taking on marauding Indians in the old West. Burston interpreted this as a deliberate attempt by Leon Uris to create an “American-flavored Zionism.”
There is a curious conjunction with reality here. On the eve of Israel’s creation in 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, a supporter, approvingly compared the eventual expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine to the equally necessary removal of indigenous people from the American landscape in the 19th century — as a precondition to “progress.” Indeed, in today’s context, it seems at times as though the Israelis are the settlers, the Palestinians are the Indians, and we (the US) are the cavalry.
At any rate, the hold of “Exodus” on the American imagination was well established by 1998, when CBS televised a two-hour celebration of Israel’s 50th anniversary hosted by actor Michael Douglas and featuring a wide range of stars and celebrities. Among the latter was President Bill Clinton, who waxed eloquent about Israel’s accomplishments. Twenty-five years on, post-Netanyahu, things look a little different.
While “Exodus,” with a little help from its friends, was effectively selling a flawed version of recent Middle Eastern history to Americans, another film from the 1960s was offering a dramatically different and much truer version of events there. David Lean’s epic, award-winning masterpiece “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), set in World War I, traced the historical developments that resulted in the creation of Israel 30 years later. Like “Exodus,” it, too, was based on a book, T.E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” published in 1926, a brilliant, idiosyncratic, somewhat mystical remembrance of his wartime experiences and exploits. Unlike the fictional “Exodus,” it was a factual narrative.
Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), an Oxford-educated archaeologist and adventurer, was one of the “desert-loving” Englishmen who roamed the Middle East prior to the Great War. His knowledge of the region and its people led to his appointment as an intermediary between the Arabs and the British in forging an alliance against the Turkish Ottoman Empire, then allied with Germany and Austro-Hungary.
Lawrence’s mission was to bring about a unified Arab revolt against the ruling Turks, the quid pro quo being a free, independent postwar Arab state encompassing Palestine (so the Arabs thought) under the leadership of future King Feisal of Syria. The offer of Arab autonomy was bogus, but both the idealistic Lawrence and Feisal, pawns in the game, believed it; their accurately portrayed cooperative relationship formed the basis for the film.
The subsequent British-French double-cross of the Arabs was the source of all that came afterwards; it still resonates a century later. Quite simply, the formation of Israel was a product of realpolitik in which Arabs and Jews (also promised Palestine) were played off against one another.
In the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, formalized at the Versailles and San Remo peace conferences following the war, Britain and France decided to ignore the Arabs and divide the Middle East between them as victorious colonial powers, with the British getting Palestine as a mandate. Lawrence and Feisal were devastated by the betrayal; Lawrence never recovered psychologically.
The Jewish Zionists, meanwhile, who had been promised an eventual homeland by the Balfour Declaration (in order to enlist American Jews in Britain’s war effort) were settled in Palestine, mainly for geopolitical strategic reasons — to provide a friendly, westernized presence in the region, a buffer to protect Britain’s Suez Canal.
Historian Barbara Tuchman (“Bible and Sword,” 1956) best summed up the end result of all these maneuverings, which led inexorably to today’s intractable Israeli-Palestinian situation: “A crisscross of secret treaties, pledges, promises, and ‘understandings,’ were made which have never since been satisfactorily untangled.”
So, by all means, see a movie about the Middle East, but make it “Lawrence of Arabia,” not “Exodus,” and learn some real history.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2023
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