The Blue Monkey Review

For me, Right to Exist, reads like an extended letter from a friend. I’ve become so accustomed to Yaacov’s “voice” (the literary kind) from his casual and sometimes not so casual correspondence that reading his book makes me feel like I’m listening to him. In literal terms, I haven’t heard Yaacov speak for much more than ten years, though I’m sure I’d recognize him right away if he called on the phone. But in Right to Exist, Yaacov takes the straightforward, somewhat didactic tone that he often took when speaking to members of my study group in Israel. He was always confident of his thinking, and very logical. And as a historian, he has the mother load of examples to support his points.

In chapter 4, “Decision to Persist,” Yaacov’s self-assured tone comes through in his discussion of one of the moral issues the book considers, the difference between revenge and reprisal. “Telling one from the other is not nearly as hard as you might think,” he writes on page 120. Revenge is an attempt to inflict as much, or more, loss on the enemy as he inflicted on you. Reprisal, on the other hand, employs force to for “redress of grievance.” Well, that seems pretty close, but the difference is that revenge abides by no moral limits, and that often means the loss of innocent lives. For Americans the paradigm is the Hatfields and McCoys. But the more compelling examples come from the headlines—schoolchildren, mothers, innocent bystanders targeted in suicide attacks. Reprisal, the Israeli response, has often been pretty nasty, and has inspired plenty of moral outrage. But, in my untutored reading of the news, Israel has gone after military targets and the leaders of groups that have organized terror attacks. There have been collateral casualties, and I do think these weaken the moral claims of this policy. But, as Yaacov wrote to me in a recent comment, “When the alternatives all lie between ugly and very ugly…the ugly is not a moral compromise, it is simply moral.”

Yaacov also makes another point in this section: “Jews do not take revenge.” For those who see Israeli policy as part of a cycle of violence and revenge, that will seem like a strange statement. But I’ve had the benefit of writing to Yaacov over many years, so I know this point well. Israel exercises coercive power over Palestinians, and has for decades. But Israelis have not exacted revenge as policy, ever. Some atrocities have been committed, and Yaacov carefully informs his readers of those, one by one as they become necessary for his narrative. But these have either been the acts of individuals or, as in the case of an IDF raid against Kibiya in 1953, have become part of IDF training as examples of the kinds of actions that Israeli must never take.

Right to Exist makes a convincing case that Israel is ready to make peace whenever the Arabs of the region decide to make peace, including of course recognizing Israel’s existence and sovereignty. That may not have been the case between the 1956 war and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, though the evidence remains ambiguous. But when Anwar Sadat made a realistic offer of negotiated settlement and peace following the war in 1973, Israel’s right wing government made peace with Egypt. That agreement has held ever since.

One of the persistent roadblocks to peace has been the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Chapter 5 does a very good job of explaining the settlements. Settlements had served Zionists well from the beginning of their project. These had given Jews majority status in enough of British Mandate Palestine to make good the claim for statehood following World War II. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli settlements (generally Zionist/Socialist) had gone up in West Ban areas near Israeli population centers, and also on the Golan Heights. In the 1980s a new settlement movement came into being, Gush Emunim, an Orthodox group with a grand vision of Israel as all of the Holy Land. These settlements became possible with movement persistence and with the election of sympathetic governments in the 1980s and 1990s. These are the settlements deep in the West Bank that have attracted Palestinian ire and attacks.

Yaacov insists that a genuine peace agreement with Palestinians would lead to the withdrawal of Israeli settlements. I have to admit that, even as an outsider sympathetic to Israeli interests, I don’t find much to convince me of Israeli intentions concerning settlements. Some settlements have been dismantled, but the examples don’t carry the point, here. But if Yaacov is correct, then settlement policy might not hamstring a peace initiative. The conditions for a successful initiative, however, remain unclear to me.

A final reflection inspired by these chapters. As a child listening to reports of Israeli victory in the Six-Day War, I knew nothing of Palestinians. Naively, I believed that Israel faced hostile neighbors. Only later did I learn that Israel was home to many Arabs. My youthful perceptions, however, seem to have reflected political events. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) came into existence in 1964, but apparently it remained a secondary player until much later. It carried out attacks against Israeli targets, mainly civilian targets, persistently from 1965. Jordan’s government expelled the PLO in 1970, and the organization set up in Lebanon.

It is difficult to disengage my sense of the post-war developments in the Middle East from my understanding of the Cold War. The entire region, near Europe, adjacent to the USSR, rich in oil, and frequently unstable politically, became a stage for West/East conflicts. Of, better, the US and USSR could both pour resources into the region in an effort to bolster their interests or perhaps find cats paws to torment the other one. American foreign policy, always a comedy of errors when not a tragedy of some kind, probably did about as well as it could in the situation. I think that American policy toward Israel was probably more ethical than otherwise. President Truman’s Secretary of State, George Marhsall, advised against recognizing Israel because it would antagonize Arabs states in the region. But Truman went ahead with recognition. Soviet policy in the region was almost wholly pragmatic. It certainly benefited Arab states in the availability of weapons and advice on how to use them. It probably directly benefited the PLO. In a recent New Yorker article, a Russian offical recalled the Cold War. "We created our Palestinian cyborg, you created your Osama bin Laden cyborg."