The Blue Monkey Review

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.

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.

Posted by at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

From my long correspndence with Yaacov, I knew many of the stories he shared in his Introduction. I also did not find many of his major themes surprising. Yet I found myself emotionally connected to the topic of the book almost from the first page. Yaacov shares much of himself, here, and asks the reader to prepare for an intellectual as well as emotional struggle.

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.

Posted by at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I plan to blog my reflections on the book Right to Exist by Yaacov Lozowick. But, before I begin, I come clean on what I bring to this task.

Over the next few weeks I will be reading Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars by Yaacov Lozowick. This book was published last year in Israel and this year, by Doubleday, in the U.S. My plan is to provide not exactly a review of the book but a reflection on it as I read.

But before I begin, I have to say a few things about myself. Like any historian, like any good scholar, I strive to recognize my own prejudices and preconceptions, my own point of view (p.o.v.). This book, dealing with the Zionist movement and the struggle for survival of the state of Israel, draws on my own long connection, in imagination at least, with Israel and Judaism, and it also makes me confront my ideas and ideals about the world I live in.

On the simplest level, Yaacov is a friend. I met him almost fourteen years ago when Seton Hill sent me to Israel to study at Yad Vashem. He and I are about the same age, and we are both historians. In 1990 Yaacov still coordinated programs for educators, but he was well along toward finishing his Ph.D. at Hebrew University. As he finished up he had to make a decision about seeking an academic career or accepting a position as director of the archive at Yad Vashem. He chose the latter, apparently a good decision, though at the time it seemed much less clear. I know this because Yaacov and I remained in contact after my brief period of study in Israel. We corresponded by conventional mail, and later moved on to e-mail. Some of the stories in his first chapter—his son just around the corner from a suicide bombing, his growing frustration with the peace process—are familiar to me from the messages Yaacov sent to me, sometimes individually and sometimes as part of a general message he sent to people in his address book. When Yaacov visited the United States more than a decade ago, he stayed with me during the two days he was in Greensburg. I’ve come to respect him as an honest commentator on Israeli politics and life, but an observer who is also living the life he portrays.

But the subject of Israel goes much deeper for me. I grew up in a family with a distinctively Zionist outlook. We believed that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews, and that was pretty much that. No, I’m not Jewish. My family was (and, minus me, still is) evangelical, and also very phileo-Semitic (of course, we expected that all Jews would become evangelical Christians, but that is another story). My earliest clear memories of world events related to Israel was the Six-Day War, in 1967. The astonishing reversals inflicted on the numerically superior Arab League forces seemed to me and my family truly miraculous. Now, as a professor of history, I try to teach students that miracles are stories to explain events, but should never be taken literally. They simply mean that the writer believed that God was on the side favored by the writer. But as a seventh grader, I accepted wholeheartedly that God favored Israel, and the Six-Day War seemed ample proof of this belief.

In spite of the beating that my religious outlook took over the years, I remained pro-Zionist. In 1973, as a college student verging on agnosticism, I followed the Yom Kippur War. Even though God (in my view) was not longer on Israel’s side, Israeli military still prevailed. Later in the 1970s I cheered the Camp David Accords and came to hope that other diplomatic successes would open the way for an end to the aggression of Arab states and the beginning of a solution to the problems of Palestinians.

Of course, over the years I’ve become more realistic about problems in the Middle East, more aware of issues facing Palestinians, and more skeptical of the claims and actions of Israeli leaders. I can’t assume any more that Israel plays a role in a grand design of a benevolent creator. And even my faith in democratic institutions, national self-determination, and the triumph of liberal ideas can feel like ten miles of bad road. Still, none of Israel’s neighbors are functioning democracies. I cringe when I hear about more Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas. Yet, correctly or not, I keep thinking that I would support that kind of retaliation if I lived in Israel.

So, Yaacov’s book promises a moral struggle for me as he struggles with issues of morality in Israel’s wars.

Posted by at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The book I reviwed on the free love movement in the 19th century inspired a whole range of reflections. My first book dealt with the same movement, so this recent work made me feel like I was renewing old acquaintance. But, because the work had challenged some of my published ideas, it gave me a chance to change my mind about free love, or at least to think about free love in new ways.

October 4, 2003

Yesterday, I wrote a review of Joanne Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality(University of Illinois, 2003) for the Journal of American History. In due course I will revise and send the review to JAH and hope they publish it in a timely fashion (unlike their review of my second book which took about 4 years after my book was published to find its way into print). But as I read the book I began to revisit my own acquaintance with the people and movement of Passet’s study. My Ph.D. dissertation and first book was Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825-1860 (NYU, 1988). Passet’s work covers much of the same ground, though with a different emphasis and a distinctive thesis. Yet my reflections on Passet’s work, and perhaps the passage of so much time, gave me a flood of thoughts about 19th century free love that I knew would never make it into the 500 words of my review and that might, in some cases, violate the fiction of impartiality that historians must maintain.

First, now that my book is long out of print I can freely recommend that if you read only one book on free love, make it Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. This work provides an overview of the movement, an in-depth discussion of the diverse views of free lovers, and a sturdy empirical study appropriate to a historical monograph. Passet does not write that her study was provoked by any of my views (though she does mention Free Love in her introduction), but she did manage to find an obscure article of mine on the free love movement entitled “A Masculine View of Women’s Freedom.” Perhaps she read that article after she had conceived of or even written much of her book. But her work does make a highly (though not totally) effective case against the thesis of my short article. In my article I proposed that free love was a movement for the freedom and equality of women but one that in most respects was thoroughly masculine. The lone anonymous referee for that article, apparently someone who knew very little about free love, wrote snidely that of course free love was a con game played by men and that the only remarkable thing about it was how long it kept going. That judgment annoyed me greatly (as did another thought-free criticism of one of my references), but I felt that I could do little to defend the movement and its leaders since it seemed to me that free love could have had little appeal to most women. The sexual freedom envisioned by free love ideologues would have worked only in a communal society (of which there were several, all male-dominated)—in the world outside a cooperative community, the freedom from marriage bonds preached by free lovers would have left women without support but almost inevitably with children to support. The leadership of the movement was almost entirely male, and the two most prominent women associated with the movement were both conflict-inspiring and volatile figures who lasted less than a decade each as leaders within the movement.

Passet’s work patiently attempts to answer each of my claims. Although she considers the careers of Mary Gove Nichols and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the two notorious leaders of the movement mentioned above, she also gives in-depth studies of other women who worked within and led the movement for decades. More importantly, she builds a strong case for the appeal of free love to ordinary women through her study of the correspondence published in free love periodicals. For Passet, free love was not a communitarian movement but a virtual community of periodicals and the readers and contributors to the periodicals drew support and a sense of togetherness from their participation in that virtual community. [True, I made something of the same point in an early article on the “Free Love Counterculture,” but my early work as a research assistant for Robert Hine dealt with communal societies. My attraction to free love came out of my earliest published article on the Modern Times community on Long Island, work that I rolled over into my dissertation study. And, as Passet admits, at least for early free lovers, the ideals seemed to make sense only in communitarian settings. Two communities did attempt free love, though as predicted by John Humphrey Noyes, leader of the Oneida community, without a firm religious discipline the freedom preached by free love made for volatile community relations. Nevertheless, the anarchists (read individualists who expected cooperation but not common ownership) at Modern Times and Berlin Heights persisted far longer than most surveys of communal societies give them credit for (certainly far longer than Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s sociological approach [Commitment and Community (1972)] would have predicted—she far understates the lifespan of Modern Times).]

I have a few criticisms of Passet’s work. I mention in my review that her early chapters claim support from women for Mary Gove Nichols and free love ideas that her evidence does not justify. She builds a portrait of women readers of Mary Gove Nichols’ Mary Lyndon that seems based in literary theory and not historical evidence. Later chapters make up for this and I have no problem in admitting that she adequately answers the claims in my article of many years ago (a relief, I’m sure, to Joanne Passet). Other issues were not important enough to take up space in my review. For instance, the author also gives Victoria Woodhull the mantle of bridging the pre and post-Civil War free love movements. I don’t think much of Woodhull—she was an unstable character even within the lively crowd of radical reformers, and she always managed to exploit radical reform for her own ends. Passet’s revelation that Woodhull tried to blackmail leaders of the women’s rights movement did nothing to improve my confidence in Woodhull. But Woodhull clearly picked up free love from her association with Stephen Pearl Andrews, with whom she headed the International Workers Party section 12. Andrews, and others, launched free love in the 1850s. Woodhull had plenty of contact with other pre-Civil War free lovers, including Jospeh Treat, another unstable character who Woodhull seems to have pushed over the edge. Due to her emphasis upon women leaders (which, let me repeat, I find appropriate given the need to overturn the Spurlock thesis), she says little about key figures such as Andrews.

Then there is the issue of sex. Passet’s subject is the free love movement, yet she prefers the term sex radical. She is correct to claim that sex radical includes a range of reformers many of whom would not have identified themselves as free lovers. Yet, free love was the term that identified the movement. No one used the term sex radical. In fact, Passet tells us too little about the sexual hang-ups of these people. Many of the letters she cites spoke of the suffering of women forced to meet the sexual demands of their husbands, often resulting in unwanted pregnancies. Nothing should trivialize the suffering of these women. Yet consider all of the cultural assumptions that contributed to that suffering. Most of the free lovers or sex radicals had no real attraction to sex as a source of physical joy. Passet does identify some who did, and these were remarkably free-thinking individuals for their time. But many of the Midwestern farm women who wrote to free love periodicals had little, if any, notion of the joy of sex. But even if they did, they had no way to enjoy it because almost universally they rejected the use of artificial birth control. The one form of birth control that does seem to have been in wide use in the 19th century among the white, upwardly mobile, middling folk was withdrawal. That practice, like the use of condoms, would have depended on the cooperation of husbands. Apparently, the husbands complained of in the free love press didn’t believe in birth control (and what man would be likely to actually demand the use of withdrawal?), but they also seem to have accepted cultural norms about masturbation, otherwise they might have left their wives alone.

But I’ve uncovered the cultural issue, and this is my last argument with Joanne Passet. She writes that the virtual community of free love periodicals, readers, and contributors grew out of the common experience of martial discord and also from the economic hard times that recurred during the late 19th century. Women—sometimes married to reform-minded men but all too often married to insensitive abusers—isolated in small towns or on farms throughout the Midwest, found in free love a genuine expression of their concerns. This social perspective appeals to me, and I think it contains a valuable insight. Yet, free love spread from New England and New York across upstate New York, the Firelands in Ohio, and then throughout the Midwest. In other words, it flourished where the culture of greater New England flourished, and in many cases (perhaps most) it was carried by New Englanders and their descendants. Much of radical reform, whether free love or the fringe of temperance and abolition, was populated by Puritans, many of whom found a replacement for religion in reform. Who but cultural heirs of the Puritans could have combined the exploration of unmentionable social changes (sexual freedom) with a disciplined (sometimes repressive) attitude about those practices?

I admit, even fifteen years after finishing my study of them, the free lovers still fascinate me, but the fascination is highly ambivalent. These women and men who risked and endured ostracism and even jail for their commitment attract me because of their perspicacity and courage. Yet, their ambivalence about sex, their sectarian conflicts with other liberal movements, and their self-righteousness were often extreme and frankly repulsive. The issues they embraced often have such contemporary resonance that it makes you want to draw a straight line from free love to a present-day sensibility about marriage. As Passet shows repeatedly, free lovers knew that the personal was political, and explosive in its revolutionary potential: “if self-sufficient women could have fulfilling sexual relations with men they loved, they no longer would enter into unloving relationships.” (Passet, p. 163) To a 21st century reader, that sounds like the bedrock of women’s liberation. To a 19th century reader, that would have sounded by turns revolutionary, whimsical, or dangerous. And it would not only have been conservative men, but also most women, who would have considered these ideas dangerous. Self-sufficiency might be available to a tiny minority of wealthy or talented Anglo-American women, but generally “self-sufficiency” belonged to social outcasts with few resources and few options except to scrabble for survival—single mothers (sometimes prostitutes), African American women, and Irish serving maids. By the time self-sufficiency became somewhat more widely available to middle-class women, these college-educated women often chose to live without marriage or to live in Boston marriage. In other words, the cutting edge of women reformers by the Progressive era were urban women who could contemplate giving up heterosexual unions and who seemingly ignored the Midwestern rants about true marriage and sexual variety. These new Puritan women of the 1890s and later showed the same single-mindedness and discipline that characterized sex radicals, but they solved the marriage question by not marrying.

In the end, though, the new women of the progressive era became old maids by the 1920s. The reasons that U.S. culture abandoned or vilified the “New woman as Androgyne” are sketched in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s article by that title. I think she and others have over-emphasized some trends in the culture, and my current work seeks (with little published success to date) to unravel that issue. What is clear, however, is that the homosociality of the Progressive era appeared old fashioned and anti-sex by the Jazz Age. Marriage re-emerged as a pressing issue, and, even though sexual pleasure became an overwhelming concern, the criticisms of marriage in the 1920s appeared in language that free lovers would have understood and cheered. The free love movement, for all its marginality, sectarianism, and self-righteousness, uncovered a deeply felt ambivalence about modern marriage that remains with us in the 21st century and seems as likely to survive as marriage.

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