In 1962, Boris Slovin, a Latvian electrician working at a railway station, was given an American book by a co-worker. Could he translate it, asked the friend. Slovin couldn’t, but his lawyer wife could. Or just about, since she had a little English.
The process was laborious as the book was 600 pages long, and at the end Slovin’s version needed shortening and editing. But it was to become, as Gal Beckerman put it in his history of Soviet Jewry, “a blockbuster in the samizdat circuit”.
Dissidents read it out to fortify themselves during hunger strikes; copies were smuggled into prisons and passed from inmate to inmate; versions were hidden in stoves and cupboards to evade detection by the secret police.
The book was Exodus by the American novelist Leon Uris, a 1958 romanticised tale of the foundation of the state of Israel, centring on the exploits of a buccaneering Jew, Ari Ben Canaan, born in Palestine but from a family that had fled Russia’s pogroms. Ben Canaan rescues Jews — refugees from the Holocaust and now under British detention — and smuggles them into Palestine.
And the book’s stories of hope and defiance and the deliverance of Jews from suffering inspired a new generation, dreaming of their own exodus from oppression, an oppression that had not ended with the Second World War. In the West it became a massive bestseller.
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In 1960 an epic film of Uris’s Exodus was released starring Paul Newman (who had a Jewish father and came to identify himself as a Jew) as the fictional Ben Canaan, and produced by Otto Preminger. Dalton Trumbo, who had been on the Hollywood blacklist as a communist, wrote the screenplay, with Exodus celebrated in progressive circles for having brought the era of blacklisting to an end.
Watching the film now prompts three observations. The first is that it is, at three and a half hours, overlong. The comedian Mort Sahl is said to have exclaimed “let my people go” when he was about half way through it. Newman argued with Preminger that the dialogue was unrealistic, and he was right.
The second is that it is hard to imagine Hollywood making such a film now. It is unquestionably a simplistic account, with the legitimate claims of Palestinian Arabs almost entirely, and wrongly, ignored. But Hollywood remains quite capable of simplistic accounts. What is hard to imagine now is the open championing of the cause of the dispossessed Jews seeking somewhere to live in the face of imperial indifference.
The courage of the founders of the Israeli state and the hope they offered to people without hope is no longer a fashionable cause. Exodus shows Jews resisting the policy of the British empire, while left rhetoric now sees Israel as the product of empire.
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In some ways this change in sensibility is a good thing because it suggests less myth-making, more balance, and greater sophistication. But to lose altogether the sense in which Israel was a progressive endeavour designed to house a homeless people is to lose a vital part of the story.
However, the most important observation prompted by watching Exodus is that you understand Israel better once you have seen it. The romantic tale lacks much nuance but myths that countries tell themselves often do. You can understand Britain better, for instance, if you watch the most hackneyed of Battle of Britain films.
Paul Newman’s character, Ben Canaan, is determined and defiant. The opening section sees him use theft, deception and the threat of violence to try to spirit a boatful of Jewish refugees out of Cyprus and into Palestine. Hundreds of Jews agree to starve themselves to death if the British do not let them pass from Cypriot waters and ultimately the hunger strike works.
Later Newman engages in a gun battle and the use of explosives to free his uncle, whom even he sees as a terrorist murderer, from a British jail. And there are many other moments of escape and military manoeuvre. All this builds to the moment when the United Nations votes to allow the creation of a Jewish state, alongside a Palestinian one, a decision accepted by the Jews and tragically (even if understandably) rejected by the Arabs.
As the radio announces that the partition plan has been agreed, a huge crowd sings the Hatikvah, soon to become the Israeli national anthem. It was for moments like this that, as Beckerman writes, “for the handful of Zionists in the Soviet Union ... the book was pure sustenance — many tears fell on the thin typewritten pages”.
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What Exodus tells is the story of a desperate people who felt, as Ari Ben Canaan did, that Jews could no longer rely on others. That too many had died, too many were in exile, too many had nowhere to go. Now Jews would secure their own land and ensure their own safety — whatever some British commander might instruct them.
Ben Canaan is an angular, sometimes angry figure, but also strong and stoic. He isn’t much interested in words, he wants deeds. He did not intend to play by the rules of those who had failed him and his fellow Jews. He does not seek their approval or anyone else’s. The UN might represent the hand of history, but he was going to force this hand.
This is Israel’s founding myth and the country cannot be comprehended without it. That is why Sadiq Khan’s call (just to give one example) for a ceasefire was not merely wrong, not merely absurd (he might try and tackle London’s knife crime before intervening in the Middle East), it was utterly pointless.
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As Keir Starmer seems better to appreciate, Israel will not and cannot respond to such a call because to do so would be against its very essence. It would be to value favourable international opinion over its own perception of its security interests. It will not leave Hamas in control of Gaza. Israel was created as a refuge for the Jews, when all other refuges have failed. And it will fight for its security as Ari Ben Canaan did.
But there is one final point about Exodus. It may be crass in the way it overlooks the Arab experience but it still advances a liberal Zionist vision worth reasserting. It celebrates the idea that Jew and Arab will one day live alongside each other in peace. This too is a hope on a thin piece of paper worth crying over.
In the final scene of Exodus, Paul Newman speaks over the open grave of a young Jewish refugee and an Arab friend, both murdered in the early days of conflict. “It is right that these two people should lie side by side in this grave, because they will share it in peace. But the dead always share the earth in peace. And that’s not enough. It’s time for the living to have a turn.”
May it come to pass.
