The popularity of Exodus as a bestselling novel gave it an outsized impact in shaping perceptions of Israel, especially in the US. While the American public was already broadly sympathetic to Israel’s position and affirmed Israel as a strategic democratic ally in the region, Exodus brought a wave of renewed sentiment to undergird that sympathy, thanks to the novel’s admiration of Israeli endurance and its positive portrayal of the Israeli position in the events of the 1948 war.

While the novel was not widely regarded as controversial upon its release, it has come to be seen as such in recent decades. Exodus gives little attention to the Palestinian side of the conflict, focusing rather on the Jewish/British tensions at the time. Where it does address the Palestinians, it often perpetuates storylines that have come to be associated with false and damaging tropes. Some of these tropes include the idea that Palestine was largely an empty wasteland before the Jewish arrivals began, with only a minimal Palestinian-Arab presence; that the Palestinians were culturally backward and had no national self-consciousness until Israel’s rise; and that the Palestinians were merely hapless victims of their leaders’ poor judgment. Exodus portrays the 1948 war as a triumphal story of Jews overcoming adversity, while giving no space to the Palestinian remembrance of those events as the Nakba (“the catastrophe”).