One of my all time favorite books, and perfidious Albion

I have done a couple of memes about books (see here and here) and I did a post about how much I miss the era of the beloved Jew. Funnily enough, from all of those posts, I managed to exclude one of my all time favorite books, which I am now rereading -- Leon Uris' Exodus (which I've linked to in the sidebar). In an incredibly lucid, energetic manner, Uris introduces the reader to the death camp refugees trying to get to Palestine, the Warsaw Ghetto, the destruction of European Jewry, early (pre-WWII) Zionism, the founding of the State of Israel, and so much more. It's an exhausting, exhilarating, depressing, uplifting book, and really deserves not to be forgotten, even though it was first published almost 50 years ago. (If you've seen the horrible movie, don't let that distract you from how good the book is.) One of the fascinating things about the book is how Europe and other countries have changed in their attitude towards Israel. France, believe it or not, was apparently a stalwart friend to the nascent state. Now it's a stalwart friend to the PLO. India (in large part because of Ghandi) was incredibly hostile to Israel. Now, because of India's own problems with Islamists, it's become much warmer to Israel. And on and on. The only thing that hasn't changed is England's attitude. Even though the Jewish State was first envisioned by Balfour, as part of a burst of English Judophilia (see Barbara Tuchman's wonderful book Bible & Sword), the English were completely aligned with the Arabs and loath to aid the Jews for fear of alienating the Arabs. And this despite the fact that, during WWII, the Arab countries, without exception, embraced and gave aid to the Nazis. The reason, of course, was oil. Now, the BBC is an unofficial arm of the PLO, and Tony Blair today gave a speech about terrorism being terrorism everywhere, whether in Russia, or Bali, or England, or Palestine.... No mention of Israel. This either means he's not acknowledging that the Palestinians are visiting terror on Israel (but apparently Israelis are guilty of terrorist acts against Palestinians), or he is ignoring Israel's existence entirely, much in line with the Palestinian belief that it doesn't exist. Balfour is rolling in his grave. UPDATE: Thanks to Curt, at Flopping Aces, I can forgive Blair (although I may never forgive the BBC). Here's what Blair really said (in relevant part):

And one other thing I want to say while I'm on this subject, neither have they got any justification for killing people in Israel either. There is no justification for suicide bombing whether in Palestine, Iraq, London, Egypt, Turkey, in the United States of America. There is no justification for it, period. And we will start to beat this when we stand up and confront the ideology of this evil. No just the methods but the ideas.