The book has been widely praised as successful propaganda for Israel. Whatever the genesis of the work, it initiated a new sympathy for the newly established State of Israel. Others hold Uris was approached by a public relations firm in the mid-1950s with the idea of a writing a propaganda novel on behalf of Israel. I wrote Exodus because I was just sick of apologizing-or feeling that it was necessary to apologize. Their work is obnoxious and makes me sick to my stomach. Every year you find one of their works on the best-seller list. These writers are professional apologists. There is a whole school of American Jewish writers who spend their time damning their fathers, hating their mothers, wringing their hands and wondering why they were born. It has also been reported that the book involved two years of research, extensive travel, and hundreds of interviews. The first suggests Uris, motivated by an intense interest in Israel, financed his own research for the novel by selling the film rights in advance to MGM and writing articles about the Sinai campaign.

Uris covered the Suez Crisis as a war correspondent in 1956 and there are two stories told about how he came to write the work. It focuses mainly on the escape from Cyprus and subsequent events in Palestine. Otto Preminger directed a 1960 film based on the novel, featuring Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan. It has been both widely praised and criticized as being anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian and as having 'ignored the basic injustice' at the root of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Published by Doubleday in 1958, it became an international publishing phenomenon, the biggest bestseller in the United States since Gone with the Wind (1936) and still at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list eight months after its release.

Exodus is a historical novel by American novelist Leon Uris about the founding of the State of Israel beginning with a compressed retelling of the voyages of the 1947 immigration ship Exodus and describing the histories of the various main characters and the ties of their personal lives to the birth of the new Jewish state.

Leon uris ireland