Muddling Fact and
Fiction
Exile by
Richard North Patterson, Henry Holt, 2007,
576 pages, $26
by Mitchell Bard
Richard North Patterson
knew that he was going to have problems with
his novel Exile because he devotes six pages
at the end to talk about the controversy
he expected. He writes off the anticipated
criticism he would get as partisans “so
committed to their own narrative that they
are grossly offended by any deviation.” To
further try to insulate himself from any
accusation of bias, he cites as readers two
of the best known advocates on each side,
Alan Dershowitz and Jim Zogby. Alas, his
book suffers from serious problems that reference
to sources on all sides cannot ameliorate.
First, as a work of fiction, Patterson has
written an inventive, albeit implausible
plot, involving an American Jewish man and
a Palestinian Muslim woman who meet in law
school, have an affair and then are brought
together years later when he decides to represent
her when she is tried for her role in a terrorist
conspiracy. The writing isn’t great
and, as thrillers go, there’s little
suspense, a not too surprising twist at the
end and a completely unsatisfying conclusion.
For most readers, it still is a decent read
and unless they are knowledgeable about Middle
East affairs will probably not realize how
absurd much of the plot is.
For those of us who are familiar with Middle
East politics, the implausibilities and factual
inaccuracies are distracting and annoying.
The fact that he pairs an assimilated American
Jew with a radical Palestinian Muslim immediately
strikes a discordant note. Why is the Jewish
character so ignorant? And why would a devout
Muslim woman fall for him? The main reason
for the pairing seems to be to give Patterson
the opportunity to use the woman to deliver
the Palestinian narrative. Naturally, Israelis
are brutal, immoral and inhumane. The Jew
just soaks it all in and doesn’t have
the most basic knowledge of his heritage
to respond.
Patterson makes some effort to balance the
political partisanship of the book by briefly
giving the Jew a Jewish fiancé and
prospective father-in-law who is a Holocaust survivor. This allows Patterson to bring
in some of the Jewish perspective on the
conflict with the Arabs. When the protagonist
visits Israel to gather evidence for the
trial, the author also imparts some important
information about the political situation
as it is rather than as the Palestinian characters
make it out to be. Of course, when Patterson
sends the lawyer to the West
Bank, the reader
is given another propaganda lesson.
To give just a few examples of the bias
and distortions in the book, Patterson uses
the cliche of the Palestinian who carries
a key to her father’s home in Israel
that was stolen by the Jews and then has
the woman say that Palestinian history began
thousands of years before Israel was created,
never mind the fact that, at best, the Arabs
can trace their history in Palestine back
a thousand years. In another place, the woman
says it’s a myth that Arab women are
subservient. One need only read any report
on the status of women in the Middle East
to see the truth about their role in Muslim
societies.
The story of Sabra
and Shatila is repeated
numerous times and the Palestinian woman’s
husband’s radicalism is attributed
to seeing his family murdered in the camp
by the Phalangists. As is the case throughout
the retelling of the Palestinian version
of history, the massacre in the refugee camp
is presented in a vacuum and the Palestinians
are portrayed as blameless victims subject
to endless persecution. Because the Palestinian’s
family is dead, the Jewish lawyer sees them
as no different than his father-in-law’s
family being killed by the Nazis. In Patterson’s
mind, Christians murdering Palestinians in
revenge for Palestinians murdering them is
similar to the Nazis’ scientific campaign
of extermination.
Patterson has an Israeli
character say the Palestinians
fled after partition because they were expelled and
were prevented from coming back, ignoring
the fact that thousands left before the war,
many others left at the behest of their leaders
and most wanted to avoid being caught in
the crossfire of the war. Few were expelled
and, after the war, Israel offered to take
tens of thousands back in the context of
a peace agreement.
The author makes an effort to distinguish
between different political factions in Israel
and the Palestinian
Authority, but really
doesn’t understand them. For example,
he recognizes that Hamas and the Al
Aksa Martyrs Brigade have different agendas, but
doesn’t recognize that the rivalry
between them is over who will control the
PA and not over their ultimate goal, which
is to destroy Israel.
The peace offer Patterson imagines Israel
making is basically a capitulation to Palestinian
demands. Israel makes all the concessions
because it is the one that is guilty of all
manner of sins while the Palestinians are
not required to do anything. In fact, the
plan Patterson outlines is similar to what
Prime Minister Ehud
Barak offered Yasser
Arafat in 2000 and that he rejected.
To give an example of factual errors, in
Patterson’s dramatization of the atrocities
committed by Israeli forces he says that
Israeli F-16s bombed the refugee camp in Jenin and this traumatized the Palestinian
woman’s daughter. In truth, Israel
purposely chose not to bomb Jenin, which
he neglects to mention was a terrorist base,
and instead sent its soldiers on an infinitely
more dangerous house-to-house operation in
a small area of the camp. During the mission
23 soldiers were killed. Israel would not
have lost a single soldier if it had used
F-16s but it would have risked the kind of
damage that Patterson’s character invents.
One example of a factual
error that reflects some of his carelessness
with the facts is that he places Armageddon
in the West
Bank when it is believed to
actually be the town of Megiddo in
the Jezreel Valley of Israel. Another mistake
is that he says Israel promised in the 1993
Oslo agreement to freeze settlement building.
This is false. Discussion of settlements
was specifically put off for final status
negotiations and Israel did not agree to
place any restrictions on them.
Patterson also repeats the Palestinian mantra
about the security
fence carving up the West
Bank and in Jimmy
Carter-like fashion suggests
Israel is only interested in grabbing land,
ignoring the fact that Israel has withdrawn
from 94% of the territory it captured in
1967. He claims the Arab massacre of Jews
in Hebron in 1929 came after Jews massacred
Arabs in Jerusalem, but this is a complete
fabrication. A character also says that an
Israeli considered the womb of Palestinian
women a ticking bomb, but it is the Palestinians
themselves who have said that the wombs of
their women are weapons in their war against
the Jews.
In one particularly absurd scene, the protagonist
goes to a school in the West
Bank and is
told about Palestinian children maimed by
the Israelis. The kids in this school only
play with toys and have no guns or swords
because they are being taught that “violence
only breeds more violence.” The reality
is that Palestinian
schools teach just the
opposite, putting photos of suicide
bombers on the walls as examples of heroes and teaching
them Israel does not exist and that there
is no Jewish history in “Palestine.”
He also invents a Palestinians for Peace
group and suggests there’s a large
movement in the territories advocating non-violence.
This is certainly a literary invention that
ignores the overwhelming support for violence
routinely found in Palestinian opinion surveys.
While it is easy to produce dozens of photos
of thousands of Israelis marching in Peace
Now demonstrations in Tel
Aviv, Patterson
would be hard-pressed to produce a similar
photo of Palestinian peace activists.
Exile is a novel so perhaps the author should
be cut some slack so he can tell his story.
Unfortunately, much of the education of the
public comes from American popular culture,
including novels by best-selling authors
such as Patterson, and those who read this
book are likely to come away with a disturbing
image of Israel that is as fictional as the
plot and characters.
Sources: Mitchell Bard is the AICE Executive Director |