Exodus,Nakba Denialism,and the Mobilization of Anti-Arab Racism

Racialization and Settler Colonialism

McKay et al. (2020) have recently called on U.S.-based sociologists to pay greater attention to how settler colonialism ‘expands race and racism beyond ideological perspectives and reveals the links between historical and contemporary racialized social relations and practices—the racial structure—of American society’ (McKay et al., 2020: 2). They draw attention to the ways in which ‘the racist discourse of settler colonialism erases the political, epistemic, cultural, and ecological sovereignty and diversity of Indigenous Nations’ (McKay et al., 2020: 4). Using the single racialized category of ‘Indian’ to describe the roughly 600 distinct Native American nations and tribes that lived in what became the United States is itself an epistemic erasure that lies at the heart of the American settler colonial project.

Given this history, it is unsurprising that 19th-century American writers who embarked on travels to the Holy Land drew on racist depictions of Native Americans to make legible the Palestinian Arabs they encountered. In his 1869 bestselling travelog, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote that the Palestinian Arabs he encountered ‘reminded me much of Indians’ because ‘they sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian’ (cited in Obenzinger, 1999: 264).

This attitude shaped Americans’ views not only of Palestinian Arabs, but also of the land on which they lived. As Twain comments elsewhere in The Innocents Abroad,

After nightfall we reached our tents, just outside the nasty Arab village of Jonesborough. Of course, the real name of the place is El something or other, but the boys still refuse to recognize the Arab names or try to pronounce them. (cited in Obenzinger, 1999: 265)

Twain’s jovial tone indicates tacit approval of the American travelers’ refusal to acknowledge the name used by local villagers for their own land. Such attitudes helped condition American readers to ignore Palestinian Arab connections to land, setting the stage for later generations of Americans to accept without question the subsequent Zionist recasting of the land in ways that sought to erase Palestinians’ attachment to it.

These erasures are part of a larger pattern of racialization deployed in the service of settler colonialism. Several scholars have pointed to the ways in which political Zionist thought has, since its emergence in the 19th century, been grounded in the racialization of both Jews and Palestinian Arabs (Abu El-Haj, 2012; Sayegh, 2012; Zureik, 2015). Ronit Lentin has recently argued that ‘race, rather than ethnicity or racism, is key to understanding Zionist settler-colonialism’ because ‘Zionist ideology has been constructing the Jewish people as a superior race from its inception to the present’. Lentin further argues that Zionist thought posited ‘that the Jews were not merely a nation with its own tradition and culture, but a biological racial entity’. In doing so, ‘Zionism adopted discourses of race approximating those expressed by antisemitic regimes’ (Lentin, 2020: 135). Therefore, taking up McKay, Vinyeta, and Norgaard’s call to see settler colonial and racist structures as co-constitutive is key to helping us understand how Exodus functioned to perpetuate the epistemic erasure of Palestinians’ national claims.

Before proceeding, I wish to explain my preference for the term ‘anti-Arab racism’, over ‘anti-Palestinian racism’. I do not think the term ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ is accurate in this context, in part because the term would imply that Exodus constructs Palestinians as racially distinct from other Arabs. However, both the novel and the film refer to Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arabs alike as simply ‘Arabs’, reserving the term ‘Palestinian’ for Jews born in Palestine prior to 1948. In addition, contemporary Palestinians have long rejected the claim that they are ethnically or racially distinct from other Arabs; rather, they consider themselves to be a distinct national formation within a large pan-Arab movement (Khalidi, 1997). Therefore, using the term ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ could be construed as an erasure of Palestinians’ own self-understanding as a national body that is imbricated within the broader Arab national movement. With this distinction in mind, we now turn to the tropes that underpin the Nakba denialism of Exodus.

Trope 1: The Arabs as Lacking Religious or Historic Ties to the Land

While Exodus’s main Zionist characters repeatedly invoke their feelings of Jewish historic and religious attachment to the land to justify the establishment of the Israeli state, Muslim religious and historical attachments to the holy land are ignored. According to Uris’s brief historical sketch of Muslim and Arab history in the region, in the seventh century the ‘dogma’ of Islam ‘erupted upon the wild semicivilized Bedouin tribes in the deserts’. Inspired by the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings, ‘they swept out of the sand and with fire and sword spread their gospel from the doorsteps of China to the gates of Paris’ (Uris, 1959: 227). This passage not only reinforces the (false) stereotype that Islamic practices spread violently, but also ignores the significance of Palestine—and especially Jerusalem—to Muslim religious belief. There is no acknowledgment in Exodus that Jerusalem was the first direction of Muslim prayer, and no reference to the Muslim religious belief that the Prophet Muhammad undertook a miraculous night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, ascended to the seventh heaven, and met with the previous Abrahamic prophets (Mourad, 2008: 87–88). Also missing is any mention of the Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock, two of Jerusalem’s most recognizable buildings, which were built in the seventh century by early Muslim rulers to symbolize Muslims’ religious connection to the city (Mourad, 2008: 86).

Likewise, Uris does not mention Christian religious connections to Palestine. There is no reference to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, nor to the dozens of monasteries that were built in the deserts surrounding the holy city during the first four centuries after Jesus’s life. Also missing is any acknowledgment that the people living in this area have long expressed both personal and collective connections to the land they call Palestine (Filastin in Arabic) (Masalha, 2018). Through these epistemological erasures, Exodus seeks to deny the historic, religious, and affective attachments of Palestinian Arabs – both Muslim and Christian – to Palestine and its holy sites.

The vibrant social history of the Palestinian Arabs is likewise obscured. During Ottoman rule (1516–1917), most of Palestine’s inhabitants lived in rural areas as either peasants (fellahin) or pastoralists (bedouin), while a small minority of city and town dwellers made their living through trade, scholarship, tourism, and the administration of holy sites. As Ottoman rule became more decentralized in 17th century, large land-owning families (effendis) took over such responsibilities as maintaining security and collecting taxes. When the Ottoman government tried to reassert its authority in the 18th century, the people of Palestine rebelled, with land-owning families, city dwellers, peasants, and pastoralists collectively undermining the centrally appointed rulers (Manna, 1994: 55–57).

Uris’s historical glosses obscure this vibrancy. Instead, according to Uris, the Turkish Ottoman conquest led to ‘five centuries of corruption and feudalism’. As a result, ‘the Arab world disintegrated into filth; unspeakable disease, illiteracy, and poverty were universal. There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. It was a constant struggle to survive’ (Uris, 1959: 228). By portraying 19th-century Palestine as a place of unadulterated misery, Uris presents an essentialized, unchanging Arab society that lacks any redeeming qualities. In doing so, he sets up the Zionist settlers as saviors of this backwater – if only the Arabs will accept them.

Trope 2: The Arabs as Incapable of Modernity

By 1880, the population of Palestine totaled approximately 457,000 people: Muslims comprised 87% of the population, Christians 9%, and Jews 4% (McCarthy, 1990: 10). Most Muslims and Christians lived in and around approximately 500 villages that dotted the land, while the cities were home to a mixture of all three faith groups. Their identity was largely tied to their religious affiliation and to the villages and towns in which they lived. While most of the population was unschooled at this time, during the last two decades of the 19th century several government, private, and missionary schools were established throughout Palestine and the region. In addition, a growing number of young Palestinian Arabs (mostly men) went to Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, and beyond to achieve higher learning, where they discussed the pressing political and intellectual matters of the day. Together these developments formed the core of the Nahda, the Arab cultural revival movement that called for the selective adoption of Western scientific advances while remaining proud of their Arab identity (Nassar, 2017). Especially influential was a network of 23 schools founded in Palestine by the Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society that taught students Arabic language and literature, along with history, geography, and math. Many of the graduates of these schools would go on to become key members of the Palestinian Arab intelligentsia in the decades to come (Agsous, 2021).

Economic shifts occurred as well. As the Ottoman Empire became integrated into the global capitalist system in the 19th century, the Palestinian economy grew increasingly dependent on international trade. In addition, legal changes led to the financialization of land that had been previously held communally, leading large landowning families (effendis) to become enriched by an expanded Ottoman bureaucracy and increased global trade. Unlike during the 18th century, when effendis worked with peasants and pastoralists against the Ottoman government’s reassertion of control, by the late-19th century some of the landowning families became less willing to forge bonds with the peasants and instead sold their land to absentee landlords who had little connection to either Palestine or its inhabitants (Manna, 1994: 58–61).

The impact that global capitalism had on Palestinian Arab society does not appear in Exodus. Instead, according to Uris, by the time the first Zionist settlers arrive in the late 1800s, ‘their Promised Land was not a land flowing with milk and honey but a land of festering stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth caused by a thousand years of Arab and Turkish neglect’ (Uris, 1959: 216). With this supposed ‘neglect’ now asserted, the logic of Exodus posits that Arab leaders ought to be grateful to the Zionist movement, which brought enlightenment and modernity to their benighted people.

This message is conveyed through the portrayal of the Palestinian Arab father-son duo of Kammal and Taha, along with their Zionist counterparts, Barak and Ari. Uris describes Kammal as an Arab effendi from the fictitious northern village of Abu Yesha who, during the first decade of the 20th century, goes to Cairo ‘to study advanced farming methods, sanitation, and medicine’. But when he returns to his village, he finds he is ‘unable to translate what he had learned to practical applications for his villagers; they were so illiterate and so backward that they simply could not comprehend’ (Uris, 1959: 226–227). In other words, according to Uris, the ignorant Arabs are incapable of embracing modernity on their own: they need help from Western saviors.

Uris then presents the Zionist movement as a benevolent force that seeks to help the Arabs emerge out of their backwardness. According to the novel, as Kammal witnesses the modern farming methods that the Zionists have brought to this isolated part of Palestine, he tells Barak, ‘I have watched the Jews come back and perform miracles on the land . . . The Jews are the only ones in a thousand years who have brought light to this part of the world’ (Uris, 1959: 258). By having Kammal utter these words, Uris advances the claim that the local Arabs will only be able to achieve modernity by welcoming Zionist settlers onto their land.

Out of gratitude to the Zionists, Kammal offers to sell a plot of village land near Lake Huleh to ‘the Zion Settlement Society’ (a fictitious organization based on the Jewish National Fund) on the condition that the Zionists ‘allow the Arabs of Abu Yesha to learn your farming and sanitation methods’ (Uris, 1959: 258). As a result, Uris tells us:

The establishment of [the Zionist settlement of] Yad El had a tremendous effect upon the Arabs of Abu Yesha . . . Barak was true to his agreement and set up special schools for the Arabs to teach them sanitation, the use of heavy machinery, and new farming methods. Their school was open to any Arab youngster of Abu Yesha who would attend. The Yad El doctor and nurse were always at the call of the Arabs. (Uris, 1959: 261)

By having a local landowner sell land to the Zionists, Uris presents the Zionists as part of a benevolent movement that was naturally welcomed by those Arabs who sought to modernize their otherwise backwards societies. Only European Jews, according to Uris, can introduce new farming methods; only they can produce doctors and nurses.

This plot device obscures the more common pattern of Zionist settler colonialism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the deleterious impact it had on the Palestinian peasants. Most of the land purchased by Zionist organizations during this early period was sold to them by non-Palestinian absentee landlords, not local landowners (Khalidi, 1997: 112–113). The contracts of these land purchase agreements often stipulated that the local peasants who had been living and working on the land – often for generations – had to be removed, by force if necessary. While these expulsions were initially ignored by the Ottoman authorities, in 1910–1911 the problem of forced peasant dispossession at the hands of Zionist settlers gained greater attention. In what became known as the ‘al-Fula affair’, a local administrator tried to prevent a Beirut-based absentee landlord from selling a large plot of land to the Jewish National Fund because it would lead to the expulsion of peasants living in and around the northern Palestinian village of al-Fula. The administrator appealed to the Ottoman authorities and wrote essays in regional newspapers to try to generate broader awareness of the threat that Zionist land purchases posed to Palestinian Arab peasants. Although the land purchase went through, news of local resistance spread across the region through a network of newly established newspapers (Khalidi, 1997: 107–111). These Arabic press outlets helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the emergence of a Palestinian national movement that was grounded in protecting Arab land from Zionist colonization.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, British colonial rule over Palestine was formalized in 1922. The British recognized only Jewish national claims over Palestine, not those of the Palestinian Arabs. As a result, the British allowed the Yishuv to establish autonomous institutions while forbidding Palestinian Arabs from establishing parallel ones. This put the Palestinian Arabs in what Khalidi (2006) has called an ‘iron cage’. If they recognized British rule over them, they would effectively relinquish claims to national sovereignty, but if they rejected British authority, they would be seen as undeserving of self-rule. Exacerbating this situation, the British picked Amin al-Husayni, at the time a minor Muslim cleric from a notable family, to be a pliant local leader who would fit into their divide-and-rule strategy, bestowing upon him the neologism ‘Grand Mufti’ (Roberts, 2016: 97–117).

Over the course of the 1920s, growing Zionist land purchases resulted in thousands of Palestinian peasants being forced off land they had lived on for generations. Many of the displaced peasants migrated to shantytowns on the outskirts of nearby cities, looking for work. But the General Federation of Jewish Laborers (Histadrut) harassed employers who hired non-Jewish workers (Glazer, 2001), resulting in ever-growing numbers of landless and jobless Palestinian Arabs. As social and economic pressures increased, Palestinian Arab leaders – who lacked any real power and were divided among themselves – could do little to help (Khalidi, 2006: 65–104).

With mounting social and economic frustrations, a younger generation of Palestinian Arabs with a more explicitly anticolonial, nationalist orientation turned to mass politics. While the uprising of 1929 became infamous for the deadly riots that ensued, Palestinians considered their conflict to be with British colonial rule, not with Jews per se (Barakat, 2019). In 1933, young members of the Istiqlal (Independence) party drew on Gandhian principles of non-cooperation to demand independence in a series of nonviolent demonstrations. But they were soon undermined by the British and by the Mufti, whose position was threatened by the rise of a genuinely populist, anticolonial Palestinian national movement (Matthews, 2006: 214–224). In 1936, with their displacement continuing unabated, Palestinian Arabs launched a general strike to demand independence. At first the strike was largely unarmed, but Britain’s wonton brutality against the Palestinian Arabs led to an uptake in violence, which was met with even more brutality (Kelly, 2017: 177–181). It culminated in a widespread nationalist rebellion, known as the Great Arab Revolt, which aimed to convince the British authorities to ban land sales to Zionists, curtail Jewish immigration, and enable Palestinians to establish their own national government.

The national aspirations of Palestinian Arabs do not appear anywhere in Exodus. Instead, Uris presents them as mindless and easily manipulated into committing acts of violence by unscrupulous Arab leaders. It is this third trope to which we now turn.

Trope 3: The Arabs as Easily Manipulable and Prone to Violence

According to Uris (1959), while the nascent Arab nationalist movement that emerged at the turn of the 20th century may have initially had laudable goals, it was soon ‘grabbed up by tribal leaders, sheiks, religious leaders, and effendi landowners, under whose influence the original ideas degenerated into hate-filled dogma’ (p. 224). Having denied Palestinian Arabs the possibility of having their own nationalist or reformist aspirations, and by erasing the colonial conditions under which Zionism took hold in Palestine, Uris then moves to depict the Arabs as incapable of thinking on their own and thereby falling prey to manipulative Arab leaders. Uris’s characterization of Arab nationalism as a ‘hate-filled dogma’ is juxtaposed with the peaceful coexistence exemplified by Kammal and Barak (as noted above), further denying the possibility that Palestinian Arabs can be negatively impacted by Zionist colonial settlement.

The epitome of the manipulative Arab leader, according to Exodus, is the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husayni, ‘the most vile, underhanded schemer in a part of the world known for vile, underhanded schemers’ (Uris, 1959: 253). According to Uris, because ‘the Palestinian fellaheen were ninety-nine per cent illiterate’ and became ‘hysterical at the slightest provocation’, al-Husayni was able to use his bully pulpit to whip up the masses into a frenzy that would increase his power (Uris, 1959: 253). The Mufti is portrayed as a purely one-dimensional villain whose gang of thugs forced the Palestinian Arabs to participate in the Arab Revolt against their will and to their own economic detriment. No mention of the Palestinians’ nationalist aspirations or the threats posed by Zionist settler colonialism is made. Nor is any mention made of Britain’s brutal suppression of the Revolt with help from members of the Zionist Haganah militia (Kelly, 2017: 120, 124). Uris, having pressed the claims that Palestinian Arabs lack religious or historic attachment to Palestine and lack a sense of national identity, then turns to the fateful events of 1948. It is here that Uris’s depictions of violent, easily manipulated Arabs come into full view.

After World War II, as the full horrors of the Holocaust became known, and as Zionist militias attacked British targets over the latter’s restrictions on Jewish immigration, the ‘question of Palestine’ was handed over to the newly formed United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Palestine to be split into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The ‘UN Partition Plan’ allocated about 56% of the land in Mandate Palestine to the proposed Jewish state, which would have resulted in approximately 498,000 Jewish and 494,000 Arab Palestinians residents (51% Jews and 49% Arab Palestinians). The proposed Arab state would have comprised 43% of Mandate Palestine and included a population of about 725,000 Palestinian Arabs and 11,000 Jews. At the time, Jewish inhabitants made up only a third of Mandate Palestine’s overall population and owned approximately 10% of the land allocated to the Jewish state (Yusuf, 2002). Given the lopsidedness of the plan, and following decades of expulsions at the hands of Zionists, Palestinian Arabs understood partition to be a formula for even greater dispossession. As a result, they – and the vast majority of Arabs in the region – opposed the UN plan (Kattan, 2021).

Fighting between Arabs and Jews in Palestine broke out the day after the partition plan passed the UN General Assembly. Over the next several months, Zionist paramilitary forces built up a fighting force of around 50,000 well-trained and well-armed troops (30,000 fighting troops and 20,000 auxiliary), while the Palestinian Arabs, still weakened from Britain’s crushing of the revolt, gathered about 7000 irregulars. A few Arab volunteers from neighboring countries (mainly Syria and Iraq) also joined the fight to save Palestine, yielding an additional 3000 poorly armed and poorly trained irregulars by spring 1948 (Pappé, 2006: 44). During the early months of 1948, as Palestinian Arabs tried to prevent implementation of the partition plan, Zionist paramilitary forces began terrorizing non-Jews living in the areas they sought as part of the Jewish state, especially in cities such as Haifa and Jaffa (Khalidi, 2008: 35–38; Morris, 2009: 140–155). As wealthier Palestinian Arabs began to flee, local leaders issued communiqués urging people to remain (Khalidi, 2005: 45–47; Khalidi, 2008: 39–41). However, following the April 9, 1948 massacre of villagers at Dayr Yasin, in which Zionist militas killed over 100 civilians and mutilated several of the dead bodies, Palestinian Arabs began to flee in even greater numbers (Khalidi, 1988; Morris, 2009: 125–129; Khalidi, 2006: 134). As tens of thousands of refugees made their way to the surrounding Arab countries, pressure mounted on those governments to act (Morris, 2009: 181).

The result was the outbreak of the interstate phase of the war on May 15, 1948, the day after Israel declared statehood. As the Israeli military sought to solidify its control over areas allocated to it by the UN, five Arab armies were deployed to stem the massive flow of Palestinian Arab refugees into their countries. While Arab forces claimed a few early victories, they were ultimately outnumbered and outgunned by the Israelis. During summer and fall 1948, Israeli forces conquered Palestinian villages beyond the area allocated to it by the UN and expelled more Palestinian Arabs to neighboring countries, though some Palestinian Arabs managed to remain in (or return to) their homes and land (Manna, 2022). Many Palestinian Arabs who resisted (and even many who did not) were killed. Historian Saleh Abdel Jawad (2007) documents 70 massacres committed by Zionist and Israeli forces between December 1947 and January 1949, though he says the number is likely much higher (pp. 60–61). By the end of the war, ‘more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villagers had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied of their inhabitants’ (Pappé, 2006: xiii).

The massive violence of what became known as the Nakba is mostly obscured in Exodus. The Dayr Yasin massacre, which played such a pivotal role in the flight of Palestinian Arabs in spring 1948, is referred to only obliquely toward the end of the novel, using a fictionalized name of the village and describing it as ‘a strange and inexplicable sequence of events’ that involved ‘a wild and unnecessary firing’ (Uris, 1959: 523). By fictionalizing Dayr Yasin’s name and taking this episode out of an otherwise chronological presentation of events, Uris decouples the massacre from the mass flight of Palestinian Arabs, further erasing Zionist culpability and obscuring a key reason why the Arab states entered into war with Israel 1 month later.

This manipulation of events allows Uris to present Arabs outside Palestine as fighting Israel because they are inherently prone to violence and hatred. This idea comes through in the portrayal of the other supposedly villainous Arab leader in Uris’s novel: Fawzi al-Qawuqji. Al-Qawuqji was commander of the Arab Liberation Army, whose volunteers had arrived from neighboring countries to support the Palestinian Arabs’ efforts to stave off expulsion. According to Uris (1959), al-Qawuqji was a man ‘obsessed with himself; his egomania knew no bounds’ (p. 275). After the partition plan was announced, according to Uris (1959), al-Qawuqji’s ‘agents scoured the stink holes of Damascus, Beirut, and Bagdad [sic] recruiting the dregs of humanity, thieves, murderers, highway robbers, dope runners, and white slavers’ (p. 467). Yet, as Laila Parsons (2016) explains in her biography of al-Qawuqji, he was clearly motivated by strong anticolonial, pan-Arab nationalist beliefs and a wish to prevent Palestine from being colonized. Such motivations are inconceivable in the novel: Uris can only imagine those who fight for Palestine as constituting ‘the dregs of humanity’.

All three tropes presented above draw upon a long history of racist depictions of Arabs found in western European and American cultural productions. What makes Uris’s deployment of them unique is that he pressed them into the service of specific political claims that sought to absolve the Zionist movement and the Israeli state of any responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba. We now turn to an examination of how these racist tropes were mobilized to form the core elements of Nakba denialism.

Nakba Denialism

Having denied Palestinian Arabs’ civilizational and religious ties to the land, their capacity for modern development, and their aspirations for national sovereignty, the Zionist narrative advanced by Uris in Exodus then slips easily into Nakba denialism; that is, denying Zionist responsibility for the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948 and instead blaming the Arabs themselves.

The core elements of Nakba denialism in Exodus come through most clearly in a three-page report on ‘The Arab Refugee Situation’ near the end of the novel in which Uris seeks to exonerate the Zionist movement and the state of Israel of any blame for the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis. The report claims, ‘Strangely most of the Palestine Arabs fled even before the invasion [on May 15, 1948]. Jaffa, Haifa, and the Galilee created most of the refugees while the fighting was comparatively light’ (Uris, 1959: 552). This claim is false: as noted above, Palestinian Arabs in those areas faced deadly attacks from Zionist militias and the Israeli military (Abdel Jawad, 2007; Khalidi, 2008; Manna, 2022). By ignoring the campaigns of terror launched by Zionist paramilitary forces in urban areas in the first three months of 1948, Uris obscures the reasons why Palestinians fled at that time.

After erasing Zionist expulsions and violence, Uris fills the gap with his own explanation that blames Arabs for the creation of the refugee crisis:

The first reason for this was that the Palestine Arabs were filled with fear. For decades racist leaders had implanted the idea of mass murder in their minds. These leaders played on the illiteracy, superstition, and fanatical religious devotion of the fellaheen. (Uris, 1959: 552)

Here Uris draws on anti-Arab racist tropes to blame unscrupulous Arab leaders who took advantage of the hapless and ignorant peasants.

Uris’s emphasis on blaming Arab leadership comes through more clearly in his second reason:

The Arab generals planned an annihilation of the Jewish people. They did not want a large Arab civilian population present to clutter their operational freedom . . . Those few Arab villages which fought against the State of Israel were attacked and the Arabs driven from them. No apologies have to be made for this. (Uris, 1959: 553)

The claim that Arabs left at the behest of their leaders has long been central to the narrative of Nakba denialism, even though this claim has been thoroughly disproven (Glazer, 1980; Khalidi, 2008). Its appeal lies in the fact that it presents Zionist violence as a justifiable reaction to Arabs’ supposed genocidal intentions, for which no apology is necessary. Again, by denying Palestinians’ national claims to the land and by drawing on racist tropes of Arabs as marauding killers, Uris seeks to erase the Zionist settler-colonial violence that was responsible for the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis.

These racist tropes of Palestinian Arabs – that they lack ties to the land, they lack modernity and national identity, and they are easily manipulated by hateful leaders – likewise shape the proposed solutions to the Palestinian refugee crisis presented in Exodus. Uris suggests that the Arabs of Palestine can simply be settled elsewhere in the Arab world:

There is much lush, fertile, and empty land in the seven million square miles of the Arab world. The Tigris-Euphrates Valley [in Iraq], one example, has some of the richest unused land in the world. It is inhabited by a handful of Bedouins. This section alone could take not only the half million [displaced Palestinians] but ten million others as well. (Uris, 1959: 553)

Anticipating criticism to this proposed solution, Uris dismisses out of hand the idea that Palestinians would want to return to their homeland:

The Arabs argue that the Palestine refugees themselves do not want to be resettled but want their farms in Palestine back. This is sheer nonsense . . . If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it, much less run from it without real cause. (Uris, 1959: 553–554)

Here we see the circular logic of the Nakba denialism: by denying the role of Zionist settler-colonial violence in the expulsions of the Palestinian Arabs, Uris can advance the claim that they simply left ‘without real cause’, which in turn reinforces the notion that they lack a sense of attachment to their land.

Because the Palestinian Arabs are presented as generic Arabs who can be resettled anywhere in the Arab world, Uris then returns to blaming Arab leadership for the ongoing plight of the Palestinians. Uris asserts that

the Arab people need leadership . . . not of hate-filled religious fanatics, not of military cliques, not of men whose entire thinking is in the Dark Ages . . . Only when the Arab people get leadership willing to grasp the hand extended in friendship will they begin to solve the problems which have kept them in moral and physical destitution. (Uris, 1959: 554)

Uris’s use of the term ‘the Arab people’ to refer to both Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arabs erases the distinct national and political subjectivity of the Palestinian people, collapsing them into a single racialized category of a people whose thinking is allegedly stuck ‘in the Dark Ages’. Moreover, by portraying Israel as extending a hand ‘in friendship’ to the Arabs, Uris presents the Jewish state as innocent of any wrongdoing, further denying its role in creating the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Nakba (Denialism) is Ongoing

Among today’s 14 million Palestinians living around the world, approximately 5.4 million are stateless Palestinians, descendants of those who were expelled or fled during the Nakba, and who still long to return to their homeland. Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens of Israel are increasingly calling for an end to Israeli settler-colonial domination; Palestinians living in the West Bank are calling for an end to the occupation and colonization of their land, and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are demanding an end to the crippline blockade. Because of the ways these various structures of oppression continue to dominate their lives, Palestinians often say, ‘The Nakba is ongoing’.

But if the Nakba is ongoing, so, too, is Nakba denialism. Zionism’s eliminatory logic continues to be advanced by partisans who claim that Palestinians cannot return to their homeland because they would pose an inherent threat to Jewish safety and well-being (Schwartz and Wilf, 2020). To be sure, some elements of Zionist discourse have changed. Instead of proposing to settle Palestinian refugees in Iraq, many right-wing Zionists now claim that ‘Jordan is Palestine’, implying that Palestinian national aspirations should be enacted there (Kuttab, 2021). Meanwhile, liberal Zionists cling to the idea of the two-state solution, hoping that Palestinians will be satisfied with a quasi-state in (parts of) the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Schwartz and Wilf, 2020). In both the cases, while there is some acknowledgment that Palestinians have national aspirations, neither right-wing nor liberal Zionists are willing to hold Israel fully accountable for its role in the expulsion of the Palestinians, nor are they willing to acknowledge that Palestinians have specific historical and religious ties to the land from which they were expelled. Instead, according to Zionist logic (again, in both its liberal and right-wing manifestations), the root of the ‘conflict’ between Israel and the Palestinians continues to be alleged Arab hatred.

This epistemological framework helps explain why so many Israelis were excited by the 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the Arab states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (followed shortly thereafter by normalization agreements with Morocco and Sudan). If all that is needed to end the ‘conflict’ is to have Arab leaders who are willing to make peace with Israel, then the normalization agreements seemed to confirm that Israel need not be held responsible for its violent expulsions of Palestinians in order to have peace. Here, too, the logic of normalization rests on racialized depictions of Arabs as lacking specific national identities: Palestinian national demands can be bypassed by signing normalization agreements with other Arab states.

Nakba denialism also lies at the heart of the official American approach to Israel and the Palestinians. The 1993 Oslo Accords were premised on the idea that peace could be made between Israel and the Palestinians by cultivating a pliant Palestinian leadership that would be willing to make peace with Israel while postponing the core issues of 1948: Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians and its refusal to allow them to return. During the Camp David II talks in 2000, Israel continued to deny its role in the creation of the Nakba (Fischbach, 2021), while U.S. negotiators backed Israel’s refusal to acknowledge Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland (Ross, 2004: 720–729).

Among the broader American public, attitudes toward the Palestinians are changing, albeit slowly. Over the last two decades, a younger generation of Palestinian American activists – along with allies from other minoritized communities – have been raising awareness about Palestinians’ lived realities. They are doing so through a combination of social media and on-the-ground organizing that takes an intersectional approach to their joint struggles against settler colonialism, imperialism, racism, and others forms of structural oppression (Kenney- Shawa, 2021). And they are doing so despite heightened state surveillance and attacks on their First Amendment rights (Palestine Legal, 2015).

Their efforts seem to be bearing fruit: 20 years after Said lamented Americans’ ignorance about the Palestinian perspective, a series of recent polls demonstrate the emergence of distinct generational divides. A 2022 Pew poll showed that while 47% of American voters aged 65+ had a favorable view of Palestinians, among voters ages 18–29 those expressing favorable views toward Palestinians rose to 61% (Alper, 2022). Similar generational shifts can also be seen among Jewish Americans and American evangelicals (Magid, 2021; Wainer and Korte, 2021). The hegemony of the Exodus narrative may be dissipating within some of the younger segments of the American public, but it still holds sway among older Americans. Those older Americans are perhaps more influenced by the Exodus narrative, though further study is still needed.