The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 1958 Leon Uris published his bestselling novel Exodus, which was later adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman. Uris hated any depiction of “weak Jews” and believed that many Israelis felt the same due to their “strong feelings about Jews who will not fight back.” And the people that they were to fight back against was clear. “This is Israel,” wrote Uris in a 1956 letter to his father, the “fighter who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares him.” Thus, the Jewish people could restore the honor lost to the Nazis by warring against Arabs in the breach. But better than substitute Nazis, the Palestinians gave Israel savage Nazis, third-world barbarians embodying the depraved native in the colonial mind. The Aztec. The Indian. The Zulu. The Arab. In Exodus, the image of marauding Arabs, cowardly and prone to rape, will be familiar to anyone who has seen the depiction of Black people in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. For just as the vulgar caricature of Black people served the cause of white Redemption, so too did the Arabs in Exodus serve the cause of Zionism.