"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...