Exile is a political thriller in which author Richard North Patterson delves into the conflict between Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians as they battle for their right to claim Israel as their home. The novel is set in San Francisco and features David Wolfe, a successful Jewish lawyer and an aspiring congressman who is engaged to marry Carole, a Democrat and political activist for peace in Israel, as well as the daughter of a wealthy Holocaust survivor.
Wolfe's perfect, successful world is shattered the moment he receives a phone call from Hana, an ex-lover he met while at Harvard Law School. Hana is a Palestinian and has just been accused of conspiring with terrorists in the assassination of the Prime Minister of Israel while he was visiting San Fransisco. Hana begs Wolfe to defend her in court. Since he is a Jew defending a Palestinian woman, his decision to take the case incites his fiancée to walk out on him, incites his Jewish political financial supporters to walk out on him, and even incites both the F.B.I. and the Mossad, Israel's central intelligence agency, to investigate him. Wolfe's own investigation of Hana's involvement in the case leads him to Israel, an investigation that also leads him to look deeper into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
However, while a moderately entertaining novel, Patterson's book has been criticized for its fabrication of facts concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its one-sided view. Patterson strives to paint Palestinians as the peacemakers while painting the Jews as instigating unwarranted violence, which critics assert can only be accomplished by misrepresenting the facts.
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