Here is Justin Raimondo confessing his love for the music of Exodus and the story that film (1960) told of exiles finding a home, the triumph of the outsider. Few American films have had such power, says the cinematic friend who tipped me to this. “The movie really may have been half as influential as The Birth of a Nation (but over a longer period, by now).”
Of course, now that story is dead to Raimondo, he writes, in “Israel: The End of the Dream From “Exodus” to the apartheid state. ” The new rightwing coalition is further evidence, the bullied have become the bullies.
When I was very young, I thrilled to the strains of “Exodus” – the music that accompanied the popular movie depicting the Israeli fight for independence. I played it over and over, every night, falling asleep to its crashing chords of defiance and deliverance. But it wasn’t just the music. As I grew older I was enamored of the Israeli narrative: a nation of exiles who forged for themselves a place that could be called home. For a somewhat alienated teen-ager, such as myself, who didn’t feel at home anywhere, the Israelis represented the outsider triumphant, a long-persecuted people who, in spite of everything, had carved out a place for themselves in the world.
This is the image that burned itself into my brain, and, like many Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, I felt a bond with the Israeli people that could almost be called spiritual. Today, however – almost fifty years later – I have quite a different view of the Jewish state. Not even the musical score written by Ferrante and Teicher can erase the reality of a nation that systematically oppresses its Palestinian helots, a ruthless Sparta armed to the teeth (courtesy of my tax dollars) that is now engaged in a propaganda campaign designed to drag the United States into yet another unnecessary and horrifically destructive war in the Middle East.
I’ve often said that non-Jews were thrilled by the narrative of the ’67 War that our media gave them. My wife was moved to tears by the drama of a people reborn post-extermination, when she first visited Israel through the Rabin crossing from Jordan 3 years ago.
Are there some good critical reviews of EXODUS that you like?
I am in the process of watching it. It didn’t seem strongly anti-Palestinian in the first 2/3, even showing sympathetic ones. But then came the scene where the Mufti’s Nazi advisor basically tells the sympathetic Palestinian that he wants to redo the Holocaust.
I think the Mufti wasn’t even in the Holy Land at that point, the other Arab militias and armies did not ally with him, and he didn’t have Nazi advisors in Palestine anyway, right?
Plus, I read that such statements about ethnic cleansing were generally made up.
My reaction to the ’67 war as well. The bulk of Americans were raised with David and Goliath seared into our brains. And who doesn’t like the story of a plucky underdog getting the better of the bully who started an unfair fight. Such was the ’67 narrative I recall. Even the most antiwar (Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?) amongst us were cheering Israel. And then it turns out even LBJ did his best to suppress the Liberty incident.
Then I read here a few days ago that Yoffie thought American Protestants didn’t support Jews and Israel in ’67! What alternate universe does he live in?
Perhaps he was thinking about what SHOULD have happened had the facts of the 1967 war been more circulated.
It turns out Sal Mineo’s character provided the most salient foreshadowing of what the Exodus’s message would become.
I was taken in by it too, I hate to admit. Even dragged my long-suffering Iraqi boyfriend to a drive-in to see the film. There was all this stuff about making the desert bloom, with the clear message that the ‘Arabs’ were all living in squalor and too shiftless even to farm. Finally S. could stand it no longer, and he yelled “Wallahi, you’d think the Jews had invented trees!” We were shushed from all sides as I cracked up.
Still, I was stupid enough to think a cartoon at the time of the 67 war (I think) was funny: one side had Pharoah and his Egyptians chasing the Jews across the Red Sea, while the other had Israeli jets chasing Egyptians back to Egypt. Takes a long time to get over decades of propaganda.
I remember one scene from the film (I watched it about 15 years ago) that struck me as a lie of the whole enterprise of establishing Israel. The hero (Paul Newman) talks to an Arab Sheik and tells him: ‘We will live as equals side by side in a Jewish state’. – I was wondering: as equals “in a Jewish state”? (No one used the term at the time.) That’s a contradiction! – I’ve been wondering about the Jewish-Israeli logic ever since.