"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 Arabs…. [All] of these vices come naturally to the Arabs in this book. They are Uris-Arabs, a species familiar to readers of Uris's early epic "Exodus." In intellect, the difference between a Uris-Arab and his camel is not great and in morality the camel wins by a furlong….

The book begins in the 1920s, when the Jews first brought their absurd notions of sanitation, education and the rule of law to the surrounding valley, then proceeds through a series of battles in which the Arabs usually fall down and run when the Jews fire over their heads, and into a miserable exile in the refugee camps. Uris shows a glimmer of sympathy for the Palestinians' political plight, which he blames entirely on the other Arab states, but none whatsoever for their pigheaded rejection of the greatest blessing that can be bestowed on a backward race, Jews.

In all of this, one can discern the faint outlines of the book Uris evidently thought he was writing, about one man's struggle to throw off the burden of a thousand years and learn to live in peace with the infidels…. But a Uris-Arab is even less convincing when beset by self-doubt than when engaged in his normal pursuits of scratching, cursing and bragging. Uris is so totally out of sympathy with his Arabs that he scarcely troubles to put himself into their minds. Ishmael, the Haj and the minor character of Dr. Mudhil, an archeologist, are the only three Arabs out of the million or so in the book with a germ of sense, and all their insight seems to have done for them is to lift them part way out of ignorance and into shame. "We are a people living in hate, despair and darkness," Mudhil says at one point. "The Jews are our bridge out of darkness." "Exodus" said the same thing, but from the Zionist point of view. To put these sentiments into the mouths of Arabs results in a book that does not strike a single convincing note in a vast symphony of sound.