Our Man In Tel Aviv

Writing in Commentary, Michael Rosen considers the spy novels of Daniel Silva. An excerpt:

Stylistically, the books also offer a telling portrait of the intersection between Israel and the outside world. Allon’s cover identity as a restorer of European artistic masterpieces requires him to live in the United Kingdom and Italy, where he seems far more comfortable than in his native Israel. At the same time, Allon’s masters in Jerusalem often find themselves at loggerheads with London, Paris, Rome, and even Washington. Silva says the spies of the Office “play in a very rough neighborhood, and they are willing to do things that traditional services are unwilling to do, simply because…they live on the razor’s edge there. A nuclear bomb in Iran looks one way to the people of the Netherlands, and looks a very different way to the people of Israel.”