Andrea, get your gun
Michael Moorcock
SCAPEGOAT: THE JEWS, ISRAEL AND WOMEN'S LIBERATION by Andrea Dworkin Virago, £22.50, pp. 454 Imagine the despair felt by an idealistic Protestant in Cromwellian England, the newly founded democracy surrounded on all sides by enemies sworn to restore a monarch and impose the rule of Rome. Having fought for popular sovereignty and freedom of conscience, seeing the Stuarts as foreign tyrants, the parliamentarians were now behaving very badly in Ireland. If they could foresee the miserable conse- quences of their realpolitik would they, as Andrea Dworkin in Israel, wonder serious- ly about condoning such violent policies? In the final account who and what does the violence satisfy and who suffers most from it? Increasingly, says Dworkin, contempo- rary violence is ritualistic and specifically targets women and children.
It's a sad irony that the lists of Irish names fleeing the Famine are also those of soldiers who murdered women and chil- dren in the American West, in furtherance of an urgent Washington realpolitik aimed at securing borders against potential threats to the recently founded democracy. No doubt the right to keep and bear arras was included in the British Bill of Rights (1689) for the same general reasons that it was included in the American Con- stitution. That the UK is not a gun culture, at least not yet, could be because common, rather than constitutional, law better reflects Tom Paine's notions of common sense. The question Dworkin asks us in her troubled new study is, how does a gun cul- ture develop out of a law-abiding democra- cy and must those who do not traditionally carry arms always be its victims? . Like the bookish, gentle Jews of tradi- tion, who were slaughtered in their hun- dreds of thousands from Odessa to Lubin, most women do not dream of keeping and bearing arms. After 1945 Jews, including the Dworkins, looked to Joshua rather than Jacob for their models. But women who were fighters in the Zionist struggle were still raped and battered in private by their Political allies, together with their Palestini- an counterparts, who also suffered more Public humiliation. A trip to Israel in 1988 proved too much for Dworkin. As a Zion- ist, she had accepted the violence involved in founding a new democracy in the Middle East. But now she learned that the resul- tant machismo put Israeli women in a worse position than they had been in 1950. What had happened to the egalitarian Zionism she had supported?
Disraeli is, with George Eliot, one of Dworlcin's literary heroes. Her reading is extensive and profound. Politically, she sees Disraeli as a great popular visionary who stuck to his ideals, was proud of his origins and followed his conscience in all important matters. He also, of course, gave fresh idealism and impetus to his party and secured British interests in the Middle East. She thinks this had something, at least, to do with what you might call his proto-Zionism.
The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist but the eternal law enjoins the children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persists- in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards,
predicted Disraeli in Tancred. Disraeli's idealism was romantic, of course, but it was in tune with similar thinking on the Continent as the notion of a Jewish national homeland gradually formed. This idea found particularly deep resonances in the USA and by no means only amongst Jews.
To the confusion of the British, who see America as just a more successful UK, white, Protestant America is sentimentally bound to support Israel, Catholic Ireland and black South Africa. Americans have a particular story, a mythology if you like, which despite historical questions endures. They share it with Israel and the Irish Republic as they might have shared it with some of their parliamentarian ancestors. It is a powerful myth of freedom, of casting off foreign yokes, of founding an earthly paradise, a new nation state. If the ideal has never quite been achieved, the dream remains as vital as ever. This ideal is at the heart of much American debate and for- eign policy, as it seems to me it is at the heart of Scapegoat.
A struggling people, in spite of American sympathy with it, isn't automatically virtu- ous because it struggles. Genocide was the realpolitik of many Indian tribes who expe- rienced it. As the blood feud becomes the only law in our inner cities as well as abroad, we might remember that the Iroquois and Cherokee confederations, inspired by the great Hiawatha, had devel- oped a sophisticated legal system specifi- cally to replace the blood feud. Ultimately destroyed by warring settlers (and Andrew Jackson's greed), it was a system which gave considerable status to women. It had, some might say, no reason to fear its women. Unless obliterated or treated very respectfully, the defeated, as history regu- larly shows, are prepared to wait centuries for another crack at a conqueror. It makes the powerful oddly uneasy, especially if they remember throwing off their own yoke. Kosovo didn't come out of nowhere and American public support was gained by presenting the ethnic Albanians as vic- tims of a Serbian yoke, rather than the rep- resentatives of a former foreign master. It would be interesting to see how Americans would respond to a Protestant minority in a united Ireland.
In examining all this, Dworkin thinks something important has changed in con- temporary conflict. She argues that Koso- vo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and so on reveal a new trend in warfare. Modern machismo no longer defends women and children. As systematic policy, the weakest are now often the first victims of mass rape, mutila- tion, torture and slaughter. Dworkin makes the case that such behaviour has become part of a common culture. But what trou- bles her most, as a Zionist and a feminist, is evidence of Israel condoning and some- times initiating brutal policies specifically against Arab and Palestinian women.
Our romance with macho aggression sends a clear message to Dworkin and, I would guess, quite a lot of women who wouldn't dream of calling themselves femi- nists. She has many bright fans who are not radical feminists. Anthony Burgess once defended her — rising with half-cut dignity to the role of knightly ally on a TV pro- gramme. Hitchens, Self, Burchill, Greer and others have all praised her.
Ironically, because like Orwell she draws admiration from the Right as well as the Left, much of the liberal left has vented its fury against her. She was called a Nazi by the Nation and is frequently referred to almost casually as a fascist because she believes pornography is effective propagan- da in a war on women and doesn't believe Playboy pictures are 'speech'. You don't have to agree with her, but you can always expect a high level of argument and thor- ough research (almost a quarter of this book, for instance, is source references).
Of course Dworkin isn't presenting a particularly novel observation here. Most women must feel at the very least uneasy in any culture whose political, literary and financial vocabulary draws increasingly, as ours does, on the language of the stadium and the battlefield. Of course the weakest suffer most in an uncivil society. Clearly where women remain weak they will con- tinue to get the worst of it. The question remains, how can we stop so much lawlesst ness?
Almost sardonically Dworkin concludes that it's time the sisters started emulating Israel, packing heat and looking around for their own turf, but I feel the situation will change for the better, not because Andrea got her gun, but because eloquent thinkers like her rise above national and party poli- tics, to find wide and sometimes surprising support. Like the great rabbis, she places law and justice above sectarian interests. She respects her critics. I am absolutely certain, for instance, that with her natural courtesy, stubborn principles and clarity of insight, Andrea Dworkin would be a huge hit at the next WI conference and would, when the time came to sing it, know every word of 'Jerusalem'.
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