Darn, Guest AnEP has gone and trifled with a good rant by being reasonable. Indeed we are talking about gray areas and I am not aware of many novelists who can clean out every corner of attitude and produce something we will all like. My buttons were blown off by use of the word hack which I believe Uris, as well as Michener, now Rutherford clearly rise above, in that they shed a greater quantity of light than heat.

I have a book on Wars in the Mideast, which prefaces with: The Arab Israeli question is not a matter of right vs. wrong, rather a case of right vs. right.

Support of the Israelis does not mean to me a denigration of all that is English, and I don't think Uris wrote in that light either. I think much can be made of the English in Palestine, but that belongs in its own thread. I'd be real interested in what people have to say there. We are simply paying tribute to someone who did the best he could to make sense of complicated issues in a genre of literature that he co-created.