The Tribalist, by Louis Marano, is ostensibly a work of fiction but at its core a kind of love song by a gentile journalist for the State of Israel, and especially its secular Zionist core. (Because of the relentless attacks by left-wing polemicists on Israel’s allegedly “messianic” fringe, it’s often forgotten that most of Israel’s founders and all its leaders have been secular Zionists.)
The author, the product of an Italian-American family in Buffalo, served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Navy Seabee. After a brief career in academia, he spent 22 years as a journalist in Washington, D.C., including a decade at the Washington Post and five years as reporter, columnist, and feature writer for United Press International. His acute and vivid depiction of the mean-spirited, untidy passions of American Mideast correspondents toward Israel is the book’s great contribution to our understanding of one phalanx of the ignorant armies arrayed against the Jewish state.
“Politics in a work of literature,” wrote the great French novelist Stendhal, “is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.”