The Blue Monkey Review

The Introduction to Right to Exist is entitled, “Why I Voted for Sharon.” In it, Yaacov traces his reactions to the events of Israeli history during his lifetime. Yaacov is a modern orthodox Jew. He prays daily and observes Holy days. At the same time he participates fully in Israeli political life, as a thinker, debater, and voter. And, as an Israeli Jew, he served as a young man in the military and remains a reservist. Yaacov recalls his concerns about the actions of the Israeli military in past conflicts—in 1973, when fighter pilots shot down a Libyan airliner, and the slaughter of Lebanese muslims by Christian militia (nominally under Israeli control) in Lebanon in 1982. He also remembers his hope for the future as a result of the Camp David Accords in 1978.

For most of his life, and certainly when I first met Yaacov in 1990, he leaned a bit to the left and also toward the peace movement in Israel. I remember letters or e-mails from him saying that he had voted for Yitzhak Rabin and later for Ehud Barak. Since 2000, though, Yaacov, like many Israelis, began to lose hope in a peaceful resolution of conflicts with Palestinians. Since 2000, after the negotiations for Palestinian autonomy broke down—after Palestinians walked away from an offer of sovereignty over virtually all of the West Bank—the majority of Israelis have lost faith (at least for now) in the prospect of two democratic states side by side. In February 2001 Yaacov joined a large majority of the Israeli electorate in giving Ariel Sharon, the country’s most prominent hawk in relation to the Palestinian question, control of the government.

Obviously my one-paragraph summary cannot do justice to the nuanced narrative provided by Yaacov. He makes clear that this change in his outlook came at an emotional cost, and he recounts the salient events of the last few years that affected his understanding of the use of force by Israel. Many of these events were personal experiences, and some of the most poignant were already familiar to me from Yaacov’s correspondence. Certainly the most frightening for a parent were his accounts of moments when his oldest son was near danger. I felt chilled when Yaacov first sent this story to me almost two years ago, and that chill returned when I read it in his book. In December 2001 Yaacov’s 17-year old son, Meir, stood just outside the range of a suicide blast that killed eleven teenagers. Meir heard the blast and witnessed the awful results. He called his parents right away to reassure them of his safety as his companions took role to discover that one of their friends was among the murdered.

“We should send them all to Afghanistan,” Meir said the next day. Yaacov’s spare response, to my gentile eyes a rabbinical one, was: “You’ll uproot millions of them?” Meir considered further and suggested a harsh alternative, one directed at able-bodied men. Again, Yaacov urged moderation. “Well, what can we do? What kind of a people is this that proudly sends its men to blow up children?” Meir’s frustration and anger are palpable.

So were Yaacov’s a few months later when he wrote to a couple dozen of his friends, “Can any of you give me one compelling argument why Israel should not militarily dismantle the Palestinian Authority, throw out Yasser Arafat, collect all of the arms she can, and kill all the Palestinian arms bearers who won’t hand over their weapons?” I didn’t respond. The wave of suicide bombings had left me numb, or I should say they superimposed another layer of confusion and sense of impotence after the attacks on the World Trade Center. I doubted the efficacy of the solution. There are millions of Palestinians, after all, and millions more Arabs who will continue to play Palestinians off against Israelis. Even without the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat, radical groups will flourish among Palestinians who see the Israelis as occupiers and oppressors. If the irreason of radical Islamists can lead them to attack the United States—attacks that can’t possibly threaten American society or even fundamentally hurt its economy, attacks that can achieve nothing geopolitically let alone militarily—then it seems chimerical to believe strength along can bring Palestinian incursions into Israel under control. But, I’m also not living where the certainty of new attacks pervades every day of life. I was not about to become a moral or political scold for Israelis at a time when I couldn’t even formulate my own thoughts about the U.S. policy for fighting terror.

Yes, I know—from the Palestinian p.o.v., all of this looks radically different. Palestinians die from Israeli incursions into their territory, they struggle with poverty and insecurity due to Israeli occupation. But, the point of Yaacov’s book is to grapple with the issue that seemingly people on both sides take for granted but never discuss: Whose actions are justified? Is there a cycle of violence, one in which actions of one side lead to reactions from the other and so on? In other words, an immoral equivalence of violence? Or, do the actions of one side constitute provocation for the actions of the other? Yaacov frames these issues in the context of the theory of just war. It is probably safe to assume that Yaacov believes Israeli actions have moral pretexts. But he also assumes he will have to prove this, to me and his dozens of other friends and also to the many people I hope will read his book.