Leon Uris's "The Haj" could have been a different and far better book. Returning to the scene of his huge 1958 best seller, "Exodus," Mr. Uris attempts here to explore a Palestine in tumultuous upheaval between 1944 and 1956, hoping to shed light on what still remains a bewildering political and religious impasse. The illumination he provides, however, is so thoroughly dimmed by a severely biased viewpoint that the book loses all power as a work of fiction and all credibil...

"So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life," says Ishmael, the young Palestinian boy who narrates about half of Leon Uris's new Zionist figburner ["The Haj"]. "It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan …" and so forth, for most of the remaining 500-odd pages of this extended study in treachery, bigotry, obsequiousness, ignorance and sheer malevolence among the Ara...

"We Arabs are the worst…." That is the theme of [The Haj, a] crude propaganda-novel … which traces the Palestinian-refugee problem up through 1956—blaming 100 percent of it on the British and the Arabs (Arab greed, decadence, laziness, backwardness, bestiality, etc.), putting the case into the mouths of a few relatively "good" Arabs. The title character is Ibrahim, who becomes the young chieftain of the Palestinian village Tabah in 1922. He feels affection fo...

Leon Uris's novels "Exodus" and "Trinity" moved me, captivated me, and kept me up late at night. I expected his latest, "The Haj," to have the same effect, and I was very disappointed that it didn't. The story failed to capture my interest until I was almost halfway through it, and I never got fully caught up in it. The writing is surprisingly poor; many of the characters never come to life, and Uris continually hits the reader over the head with his p...