It is now well over a year since Bangladesh separated from Pakistan. General Yahya's decision to quell the independence movement failed. Millions of refugees had fled to India; a guerrilla movement had emerged in East Bengal, and the Indian army had come to its assistance. The Pakistan army was defeated, and now, over a year after the end of hostilities, 80,000 Pakistani troops remain prisoner.

The eruption of 1971 had left Indians with great hope that now, at last, major subcontinental problems would be resolved. The Bangladeshis had looked forward through their bitter misery to a reemergence of the Golden Bengal of legend. And Pakistanis, dismayed by defeat and secession, at least had hoped that a truncated countrv would be easier to govern.

Unpredictable and potentially inflammable, the Middle East is currently experiencing an unusual degree of tranquillity and stability. For the United States this is a moment for satisfaction, if not yet of optimism or rejoicing.

The U.S. has played a major role in producing a climate of greater realism in which some Arab states are prepared to recognize Israel, if certain conditions are met, and in which the desire to resort to armed force to obtain a solution has been significantly reduced. It was the chief force in achieving in August, 1970, a cease-fire, now over thirty months old, between Egypt and Israel. It has reached an understanding with the Soviet Union on the need to prevent acts of hostility in the area and to localize any conflicts that occur. It has maintained the balance of power in the area by its supply of arms and aid to Israel without forfeiting all relationships with Arab states.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 met much resistance. In the intervening twenty-five years the Israeli experience has been subjected to much criticism. Some of this resistance and much of the criticism have come from Jews who feared that the political organization of the state and the concomitant functions of controlling and managing power are antithetical to Jewish cultural and ethical orientations. If, to many Jews, a Jewish soldier or a Jewish policeman were symbols of liberation from the threat of massacres and pogroms and the humiliation of defenselessness against anti-Semitic assaults, to others these figures have represented a setback for the moral purity of the Jew, who exemplifies a higher ethical existence, a retreat from the vision of a transpolitical society. That vision did not include such demands of collective physical and material existence as the delineation of territorial boundaries, the organization and the employment of military power and the assumption of collective responsibility for economic viability.

On the medieval porch of the Haram-el-Ibrahimi, the great mosque of Hebron whose proud and massive walls are a monument from Herodian rimes, three Israeli soldiers stand guard. Leaning nonchalantly on their machine guns, they scrutinize the visitors, courteously asking them to put on the head covering that is strictly required in synagogues. As one climbs the long stone staircase toward the entrance of the mosque the sound of a Jewish liturgical chant, at first faint and indistinct, grows louder until it becomes deafening.

About a hundred faithful, many of them soldiers in uniform with their heads capped with yarmulkes, stand and shake to and fro before the candlelit Torah fervently celebrating their office. For the first time in fourteen centuries Jews are able to worship in the building that contains the "Tombs of the Patriarchs" Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a site sacred to both Muslim and Jew.

In these dark days when our very own Prime Minister is waging a personal rearguard battle on the fields of Washington, when President Nixon is full of reproach and his Secretary, of State feigns anger, when Commander Sadat still won't decide on the meaning of "year of decision," we should stop for a moment to acknowledge that we have more luck in having Golda than in anything else. Just two and a half years ago the leadership of her splintered party rescued her from oblivion as a compromise, and the whole country—including this writer—cried out against the misfortune wrought from above.

It is almost a year since we returned to the States from Israel. A number of things have changed since then and some of our memories have dimmed. And not only for us. The Tel Aviv airport massacre, which occurred while we were in Jerusalem, is probably dimmer in most people's memory than the horrifying killings at the Munich Olympics or the Libyan plane disaster in Sinai. Still, we believe we learned some things that endure, that will not readily fade from mind.

We lived in Jerusalem for four months and we travelled the country like nomads, trying to catch the peculiar essence of Israel. But it's silly; born Israelis can't even catch it.

Last summer in Israel Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli I Ambassador to Washington, suggested that Richard Nixon was the best friend Israel ever had in the White House. Upon his return to Washington before the November election the Ambassador explained that he had not endorsed Richard Nixon's candidacy, and he reaffirmed his country's neutrality in the Presidential election. Despite such assertions, many Americans, both Jews and non-Jews, interpreted Rabin's earlier statement as a Nixon endorsement by Israel. Six months later it is possible to assess the controversy with greater care.

After the paris peace conference formalized the end of american military intervention in indochina, the normal expectation would be for the united states to turn to the work of reconstruction, at home and abroad, and to the longer-range task of peace. It is in fact committed to helping repair the damage it has done in indochina; but, as we enter the second development decade in the united nations program, there is need for a much greater american contribution to the developing nations in the years ahead.

Radical feminism as a political movement is associated with a series of unjustified claims. It is, as I have been arguing, simply not true that "women are oppressed" or that "men and marriage are the primary obstacles to woman's human fulfillment." We now turn to three corollary claims: that

—monogamous marriage and the nuclear family are crucial instruments of exploitative capitalism

—romantic love is the ideology of sexism

—femininity and other manifestations of sexual differentiation are inimical to sexual equality.