The way Israel’s founding was explained to me when I was young and impressionable: after WWII, people felt sorry for the Jews, so they kicked the Palestinians off their land in order to make room for the Jews.

I’m ashamed to say I believed that for way too long.

I am not a scholar of the Middle East, nor particularly familiar with the history of what is now Israel from 1900 to 1948. So I’ll assume that Uris’s research is sound until someone lets me know otherwise. Some interesting history from the novel:

* Productive farmland was cultivated from swamps and marshes through tough manual labor (a white-collar American like me would have had a rough go of it). These initial farms (kibbutzim, if memory serves me) were largely communal-type endeavors [voluntary socialism is quite okay in libertarian thinking]. And after a day of backbreaking work, some would have to stand guard for fear of attacks from Arabs and Bedouins. [All understatements; thousands of young Jews died drying swamps. Israel was swamps and desert before the Jews reclaimed it with their lives and private money. They were indeed slaughtered by marauding nomads.]
* While these pioneering Jews were cultivating land, which they puchased fair and square, their Arab “neighbors” were cultivating hatred and were ready to make those Jews the scapegoat for everything, as usual. Haj Amin el Husseini, who was basically an Arab warlord, initiated a pogrom against the Jews for the sole purpose of gaining power for himself. He and the others after him have not stood for the poor, downtrodden, etc. This fine fellow was also in bed with the Nazis – again, way before the establishment of Israel. [He met with Nazi leadership to investigate how to implement “The Final Solution” in Palestine. The Arabs also volunteered stormtroopers who partook in killing Jews.]

[I too loved that book; great read.]
* The Jews had to fight both the Arabs and the backhanded British, who all too often were interested only in playing one against the other.

Great book, great history. So yes, Aslan’s version of the peace-and-love existence between Arabs and Jews prior to 1948 seems like a version he would like to believe, not what he knows to have been the case.

[And I thought I was cynical!]