Book Review: The Eyes of Abel

I've rarely reviewed works of fiction here, but The Eyes of Abel, by Daniel Jacobs, is worth reading.


Set in the very near future,  The Eyes of Abel  starts off with a terror attack on a plane over San Francisco, where the terrorist sneaks the bomb aboard while wearing a burka. While most Americans are upset at the political correctness that allowed the authorities to let her board without proper security checks, liberal Pulitzer-winning journalist Roger Charlin is more concerned that profiling Middle Eastern-looking people at airports would create many more terrorists. To prove his assumption, he pretends to be an Arab and tries to get past El Al security in a New York airport, which is where he meets agent Maya Cohen, a (naturally) beautiful and brilliant agent who sees through his disguise and more.

The plot is relatively typical of the genre. The Eyes of Abel follows the pair as they fall in love and then work to save the world from an impending war centered on Israel but really planned by an alignment of big energy players and the politicians who are in their pockets.

Yes, it is somewhat formulaic. Yes, you have to suspend disbelief a bit. (Charlin manages to go through three months of the narrative without seeming to file a single story.)

But that doesn't mean that the book doesn't work, and it is difficult to put down once you start. Luckily, it is pretty short - less than 200 pages - so you can finish it in an afternoon.

What is most appealing, however, is that while the book works well as a Dan Brown-lite type of thriller, it also discusses the thorniest points of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a refreshingly honest way. Charlin and his colleagues are reflexively anti-Israel and Maya does a great job as she explains Israel's perspective and slowly changes Roger's mind. Media bias as well as the automatic anti-Israel bias of the world community is exposed nicely and pretty accurately, without getting in the way of the story. Plus, as the author emphasized to me, the book exposes the relationship between petrodollars and the war machines that align against Israel - and how the decline of the influence of oil could possibly bring peace.

If you need a good beach read, you can't do much better than The Eyes of Abel. And if you want to ensure that people understand Israel's point of view, you will recommend it to your friends.