Category: Media

Sections: Information | Controversy | Text

Information

• Review of 1983 book God Cried about the Israeli siege and bombing of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War
• First published:
  • August 1983 issue of Literary Review

• Magazine publications:
  • Literary Review (No. 62) - August 1983

Controversy

From Wikipedia:

A 1983 review of the book by Roald Dahl, published in the Literary Review, caused a “small outcry.” Under the title “Not a Chivalrous Affair,” Dahl compared the then-current war in Lebanon (which he described as “deliberate mass murder”) to Dahl’s own service in Palestine during WWII. Remarking on the “authentic tales of horror and bestiality throughout this book,” Dahl asked of the war, “[W]hy in heaven’s name did not somebody influential in America shout ‘Stop'[? …] Is the American President and the Senate and the Congress so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there that they dare not defy them?” Dahl concluded that “on the whole […] the great Jewish communities outside Israel cared very little about what was going on [in Lebanon],” and rhetorically asked: “Must Israel, like [Nazi] Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?” The review was widely perceived as antisemitic, a perception only deepened by Dahl’s subsequent public statements in defense of his position. Events surrounding the reception of this review were dramatized in Mark Rosenblatt’s 2024 play Giant.

Text

• Read online at Archive.org

Original Magazine Pages