Both the kibbutz and the Arab village lie on an important military route to Jerusalem. Gideon Asch is responsible for Haganah forces in the Ayalon Valley of Galilee and presides over the kibbutz of Shemesh, a few miles opposite Ibrahim's village. Ibrahim is muktar or head man of the Arab village of Tabah in Palestine when the novel opens in 1922. The principals are Sunni Moslem Arabs, especially Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi and his family, and an Israeli pioneer military leader named Gideon Asch. This time, however, the focus of Uris' fiction is the armature of Islamic belief, Arab social structure and historic political instability that propels the world of Islam toward self-destruction and-from Uris' point of view- relentless and insane violence against Jews and the state of Israel. The Haj comes to us some 25 years after Uris' multimillion-copy best seller Exodus, and it takes us again to the same tragic territory of violence and human displacement, of contested lands and broken promises and Neanderthal barbarism practiced in the name of divine injunction. In this case, it's our curiosity to discover, and perhaps understand, the sources of the distrust and hate that have turned the Middle East into a maelstrom of bloodletting with the Arab-Israeli conflict at the center.

LEON URIS' novel The Haj plays to one of the strongest and oldest of human drives-curiosity, the need to know.

Exodus uris novel