I returned from Guantanamo Bay after visiting two young Saudi men I represent there and told tales about the camp to my father, who as a Jewish GI had spent a year in a German prisoner of war camp. After a full minute of silence my father whispered, “We’re treating their boys worse than the Nazis treated me.” I wondered how deeply evil lurks in the American soul. What would it would take for America to turn on her Jewish citizens, as had happened historically in Spain, in England, in France, in Germany. A novel, THE RELUCTANT TERRORIST, resulted.
An atomic bomb destroys Tel Aviv, severing Israel. Surviving Israeli Jews are herded into refugee camps managed by Palestinians as Arab armies take over the country. The United States, demoralized by years of futile military actions in the Middle East, lacks the will to intervene. Two ships carrying thousands of Jewish refugees limp into Boston harbor, only to be turned away by the United States. As the ships are to be returned to the new nation of Palestine, Boston Jews forcefully free the refugees, killing ten Coast Guardsmen. This sets the stage for increasingly severe hostilities between the government and American Jews, including bombings of shopping malls, a Million Jew March on Washington and the establishment of detention camps for hundreds of thousands of Jewish “enemy combatants.”
Besides painting a plausible portrait of how civil rights could evaporate in the face of terror, the novel is a page-turner as American Jews struggle to balance their loyalty to America with the realization that “never again” has become “not now, not here.” The chain of events is spiced with legal and historical analysis as the confrontation between America and her Jewish citizens escalates, driven, as with so many violent clashes, by forces seemingly beyond all parties’ control.
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