The Blue Monkey Review

In 132 C.E., the Jews of the Roman-controlled Kingdom of Judea rose in revolt under the leadership of the messianic Simon bar Kochba. Sixty years earlier Roman legions had defeated another Jewish revolt, destroying the Temple in Jerusalem after a brutal siege of the city. Roman repression of the bar Kochba revolt, however, went much further. “Faced with guerrilla fighters based in hundreds of villages and towns, the Romans razed everything. One by one, each town and village was surrounded and demolished. … Anywhere from five hundred thousand to one million Jews died; so many survivors were sold into slavery that the going rate for slaves fell all over the Roman Empire.” (p. 40) Roman policy emptied Judea of Jews and then stripped it of its name. From that time to the twentieth century, the region that had been home to Jews for more than a thousand years would be called Palestine.

The first three chapters of Right to Exist provide an overview of Jewish history and of Palestine, but the bookends of these chapters are the second-century ethnic cleansing that removed Jews from Judea, and the 1947-48 Israeli War of Independence, when Jews reclaimed part of Palestine. After the people of Palestine, almost all of whom were non-Jews, practiced the religions of empire. After 325 Christianity became the state religion of Rome and religious diversity declined markedly. When a tiny force of Arabian cavalry arrived to claim the region from the Byzantine remnants of Rome in the 7th century, the populace remained Christian with Muslim overlords. During the next several hundred years many of those Christians became Muslim, and a small number of Jews moved into the land of Abraham. Under Muslim rule, interrupted by the invasions of the Frankish crusaders after around 1100.

Jews, meantime, lived in the lands of pagans and Christians. They developed a vibrant cultural and religious life, but with no political or military institutions to match those of Christian successors to the Roman emperors, the Jews were exposed repeatedly to legal limits and both legal and illegal persecutions. Even the Enlightenment’s promise of secular equality remained a sham for many Jews. By the late 19th century, Zionism proposed a solution for Jewish vulnerability completely consistent with the currents of the age, but so grandiose as to seem chimerical. Jews would form their own state. And the site for this Jewish state would be the historic homeland of the Jews in Ottoman controlled Palestine.

Yaacov does a fine job of sketching the major developments of this era. With the end of Ottoman rule as a result of World War I, the British took control of Palestine for about 30 years. British relations with the Zionist settlers remained uneasy at best, but at least the Balfour Declaration gave some official recognition to the project of creating a Jewish homeland. This would be realized, of course, by the 1947 United Nations’ resolution that divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Zionism, in just over half a century, had given the state-less Jews a state.

Of course, Zionist triumph came at a cost. The Arab neighbors of the Jewish settlers often objected to the new arrivals, even if they were setting up their kibbutzim and towns on legally purchased land. Conflicts erupted, and Zionist settlers had to find ways of defending themselves. Yaacov describes the continuing deterioration of Jewish and Palestinian relations. He does not turn from atrocities committed by Jews, and names them as such. As he writes more than once, “Murder is murder.” He asserts that terrorism never formed a fundamental policy of the Zionist leadership. Splinter groups adopted this tactic, with limited impact, and the acts of terror were named, and condemned, as such by the embryonic leadership of what would become the Jewish state.

The culmination of this period came with the 1947 War of Independence. Attacked by both Palestinians and by organized military intervention from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan, the newly-formed Israeli Defense Force (IDF) managed to hang on, avoid defeat by forces that at first were numerically superior, and eventually fight the invaders to a standstill or push them out of Israeli territory. Yaacov treats these events with as much detachment as any historian could be expected to have when discussing his own nation’s fight for life against invasion. He admits that both Arab and Israeli forces left civilian casualties, and that some IDF units behaved better than others. “I see no reason to claim that the IDF’s record in 1948 was spotless, because it wasn’t; it was merely better than that of any other army of its day.” (p. 100)

Yet it was the War of Independence that created the issues that still plague the Near East. Many Arab villagers fled from advancing Israeli forces; others were dispossessed by those forces. Several hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs moved into territories controlled by the Arab states surrounding Israel. It is the demand for justice, for a “right of return” for these refugees that forms one of the hard problems for peace. Yaacov discusses this problem in some depth, pointing to the different fates of Palestinian refugees in different Arab countries (those who fled to Egypt, for instance, were confined to Egyptian-occupied territory then in Gaza and always considered refugees by Egypt, while those who went to Jordan became Jordanian citizens).

Yaacov approaches this issue from several directions. For one, he compares the Palestinian situation after 1948 to the expulsion of Jews after thousands of years of residence in Arab countries throughout the Middle East. About 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Middle Eastern countries by the early 1950s, yet within a few years these new arrivals were integrated into Israeli society. By contrast, Yaacov notes, Palestinians remained refugees no matter how well or poorly they fared in their host countries. Yaacov also notes that the period was one of displaced persons and refugees, with millions of ethnic Germans fleeing from Eastern Europe after World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors afraid to return home and choosing to live in Israel or the U.S., and countless refugees from incipient Communist governments. Israel’s War for Independence left many refugees, Yaacov seems to say, but the decisions of war are almost universally accepted as the new state of reality.

I think Yaacov does a good job of facing the challenge of describing and explaining the Zionist project and the tensions that flowed from it. He takes us part of the way to a realist defense of Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians. Zionism always implied that Jews would develop the competencies of a sovereign state, that they would need to use power. And the use of power often means moral compromise, at best. No American can possibly claim a spotless record for our military, even in our War for Independence. Other American wars, especially our ethnic cleansing of many of the Indian nations (or, perhaps, those wars might be better described as genocide), are so repulsive that historians do not try to defend them.

But. Yaacov’s project is a moral defense of Israel’s wars. Arguments about the necessities of defense make sense in that context. Arguments based on pragmatism, however, that claim that some morally questionable actions result from the use of power, seem to set the discussion on a slippery slope. Philosophical pragmatism, after all, claims that unity might, in fact, be illusory, and that would include a unitary morality. I tend toward pragmatism myself, but Yaacov very definitely does not. Monotheism, he writes, means universal standards. This would seem to undermine the comparison of the Palestinian and Jewish refugee problems as a moral argument. This is not Yaacov’s only argument about the Palestinian refugee issue, but it does seem to me to be one of the keystones of his discussion of that issue.

These issues won’t go away (they haven’t yet, anyway), and future chapters may make the picture clearer. We’ll see.