11 MISSION ACCOMPLISHED? ISRAEL’S “FOUR MOTHERS” AND THE LEGACIES

11 mission accomplished?: israel’s “four mothers” and the legacies of successful antiwar movements rachel ben dor daniel lie

11
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?:
ISRAEL’S “FOUR MOTHERS” AND THE LEGACIES OF SUCCESSFUL ANTIWAR
MOVEMENTS
Rachel Ben Dor
Daniel Lieberfeld
Abstract
After their conclusion, antiwar movements that have contributed
substantially to government decisions to end wars still face the task
of protecting and promoting their legacies. The article poses
questions concerning the extent to which movements’ political legacies
should be considered among the criteria of movement success and
influence, along with practical questions of the extent to which and
the means by which activists can control the legacies and lessons of
the movements they created. The article draws on the experience of
Israel’s Four Mothers movement, which was instrumental in ending the
war in Lebanon in 2000.
After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more
hills to climb.
— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
Introduction
Four Mothers—Leaving Lebanon in Peace, according to journalistic and
academic sources, was a remarkably successful antiwar
movement—“probably the most influential protest movement in the
history of Israel,” according to one observer (Shavit, 2006; see also
Frucht, 2000; Hermann, 2006; and Sela, 2007). Between 1997 and 2000,
movement activists helped turn Israeli public opinion against a
counterinsurgency war that Israel had been fighting in Lebanon since
1982. The group, which was the only national grassroots movement
active against the war at the time, was founded by the parents of
soldiers assigned to combat in Lebanon, most of them residents of
collective kibbutz communities in the Galilee region in Israel’s
North, near the Lebanon border. The Four Mothers name adopted the
image of the Biblical matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel.
Movement leaders, including this article’s first co-author, used both
religious and secular nationalist imagery to appeal to Jewish Israeli
public opinion, which, in the course of the Four Mothers protest,
shifted from less than 35 percent in favor of unilaterally ending
Israel’s military presence in Lebanon to more than 70 percent in favor
(Arian 1997, 1999a, 1999b).
To be sure, this opinion shift was not solely attributable to the
movement’s demonstrations, lobbying, petitions, and media and public
education campaigns: Increasing Israeli casualties in Lebanon, some
dramatic military disasters, and the government and military’s
inability to articulate attainable goals and strategies for the war,
were also important factors. However, as the Four Mothers protest
expanded into a national movement, it managed to garner considerable
media and public attention to its message: that Israel’s 16-year-long
war in southern Lebanon had failed to protect the northern
communities—the war’s ostensible purpose at that stage—and had
pointlessly endangered two generations of Israeli soldiers as well.
According to one of the movement’s slogans, “Our husbands were
fighting this war when our boys were still babies. We don’t want our
grandsons to still be fighting it.” In 1999, in the context of
national elections and antiwar trends in public opinion, Labor party
leader Ehud Barak pledged to withdraw the army if he were elected
prime minister. As an ad hoc movement whose goals focused on ending
Israel’s military involvement in Lebanon, Four Mothers—Leaving Lebanon
in Peace voted to dissolve itself after Prime Minister Barak, in May
2000, ordered the soldiers’ return to Israel.
Despite widespread support for ending the war among the Israeli public
in the lead-up to the withdrawal and afterwards, and considerable
esteem for the movement’s accomplishments, even from right-wing
nationalists who opposed its goals, the legacy of the Four Mothers
movement, within several years, became sharply contested. When war
between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization broke out in July
2006—after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers near the border,
and following the abduction of another soldier by the Palestinian
Hamas organization—Israeli nationalists blamed the Four Mothers
movement for having caused the war. This attribution was based on the
proposition that, had the movement not caused the army’s withdrawal
from Lebanon in 2000, its ongoing presence there could have prevented
Hezbollah’s carrying out cross-border raids and acquiring the rockets
that it fired into Israel in 2006. Moreover, the movement was blamed
for undermining the morale of the army and setting a precedent whereby
Israeli society itself became less able to tolerate military
casualties in war, for weakening the military’s deterrent
capabilities, and for inviting attacks by emboldened adversaries. By
this logic, Israeli withdrawal in 2000 was an act of appeasement that
encouraged not only Hezbollah aggression, but also attacks on Israelis
by Palestinian militants within the West Bank and Gaza in the intifada
(uprising) that began in late 2000. It is worth noting that even the
media outlets considered to be more dovish took this line, especially
in the early days of the war when public opinion sought to strike back
in response to the soldiers’ kidnapping. The approach that the Four
Mothers movement had advocated, using non-violent actions to solve the
problem, was lost in this period, in the public discourse and in the
words of some former activists, which were picked up by the media in
support of the pro-war consensus.
However, a government-appointed commission in the wake of the 2006
Lebanon fiasco concluded that the war’s negative outcomes for Israel
were a result of its political leaders having made “a vague decision
without understanding and knowing its nature and implications. They
authorized the commencement of a military campaign without considering
how to exit it” (Winograd Report, 2007). By re-invading Lebanon in
2006, Israel inadvertently strengthened Hezbollah politically and
weakened Israel, its military superiority notwithstanding. Might this
outcome have been prevented if leaders of the Four Mothers movement,
which was no longer active, had made an effort to revive the
movement’s messages and remind the public of its contributions to
ending Israel’s earlier war in Lebanon?
This article raises theoretical and a practical questions concerning
the evaluation of antiwar movements’ impact or success: On a
theoretical level, it explores whether the chief criterion of success
should be recognition for an essential role in bringing a war to an
end, or if criteria should also include the ability of movement
representatives, in the aftermath of their activism, to advocate
effectively for the social and political lessons they draw from their
protest experience—a concept for which the article uses the term
“legacy promotion and protection.” On a practical level, the article
raises the question of how veteran activists, particularly of ad hoc
antiwar protests, might go about promoting or safeguarding the of
their movements’ legacies. In raising these questions, the article
draws on the experiences of Four Mothers—Leaving Lebanon in Peace.
Contesting the Legacies of Successful Antiwar Protests
At the outset, it is worth noting that the claims made by some
right-wing Israeli nationalists about the Four Mothers movement and
about the Lebanon war—specifically, that Israel’s withdrawal was a
mistake—repudiated lessons that movement leaders and supporters hoped
to instill. These lessons were that resort to military force in hopes
of solving complex political and security problems not only failed to
accomplish its objectives, but such “wars of choice” were
counterproductive and end up harming Israeli interests—as Israel’s 18
futile and costly years of military involvement in Lebanon showed.
What motivates contests over the legacies of successful antiwar
protests? For many social movements, as Meyer (2006) notes, the stakes
of claiming credit are high for movements’ reputations and ongoing
influence. However, for an ad hoc movement such as Four Mothers, whose
activists typically had no ongoing interest in leading or being
centrally involved in social movements after their goal of ending the
Lebanon war was achieved, there were no compelling political reasons
to be concerned with the movement’s legacies or further establishing
the movement’s reputation.
However, the Four Mothers challenged the idea that retaliation and
hitting back is a source of power and security. They thus contested a
widespread, deeply-held political and moral worldview among
nationalists, which incurred an emotionally fueled backlash against
the movement. Those who have promoted and supported costly and
unsuccessful wars, moreover, often find it politically and
psychologically expedient to shift the blame for the war’s failure
onto antiwar protesters, rather than to accept a measure of
responsibility. Many politicians and military leaders (who, due to the
tendency in Israel of high-ranking officers to go into politics, are
overlapping elites) had a personal and professional stake in not
acknowledging the extended occupation of Lebanon to have been a
self-inflicted national wound.
Some right-wing nationalists in Israel may also have been motivated to
discredit anti-Lebanon war activism by concern that Israel’s
withdrawal from southern Lebanon potentially set a precedent for its
withdrawal from other territories under Israeli military occupation,
particularly the West Bank—although the situations differ markedly,
since Israel had no settlements in or ideological ties with Lebanon,
differences that also facilitated the Lebanon withdrawal politically.
As well, acknowledging the failure of war policy in the past might
constrain the government’s ability to wage war in the future. Such
constraints on executive power are typically resisted by government
officials, particularly those identified with nationalistic and
hawkish positions.
Movement leaders did not claim security expertise equivalent to that
of army leaders and security specialists, even though some activists
did have experience in military and security affairs and the movement
successfully solicited endorsements of its positions from
distinguished military officers. Yet, by pushing to legitimize
participation in national-security policymaking by ordinary Israelis,
in whose name the war was being fought, they advocated wider inputs
into such policymaking by civilians. The activities of the Four
Mothers movement in this respect was an effort to subject Israel’s
army “at least partially to non-military logics” (Levy, 2008, 134). By
recruiting participation from retired intelligence officers, movement
leaders were able to present a rational, well-informed critique of the
Lebanon situation along with “rebuke of the military system,
questioning the moral basis of employing young soldiers in a hopeless
mission of fighting guerillas” (Sela, 2007, 69). In the Four Mothers
case, as well as with other antiwar movements (Marullo and Meyer,
2005), attempts to redefine state-society relations are likely to
prompt a negative or suspicious response from those in government and
society who are interested in maintaining relatively narrow
policymaking inputs.
There was also an important gender component to the backlash against
the Four Mothers movement, both during their years of activity and in
the years following Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon. The movement’s
identity was understood primarily in maternal terms by Israel’s media
(Lemish and Barzel, 2000) and the public, as well as by many activists
themselves—even though a substantial portion were either men or were
women who were not mothers. In any case, the women who were the public
face of the movement broke from their socially sanctioned roles as
bearers of the nation’s soldiers or mourners for children killed in
war, and instead used their moral authority to accuse state officials
of pointlessly endangering or wasting their children’s lives. They
evoked censorious and sometimes quite derogatory responses from those
who felt that female citizens, in particular, should stay out of
national-security debates.
Movement leaders were particularly concerned to deflect criticisms
that activists were motivated mainly by hysteria over their children’s
safety. Concern for their sons’ well-being did, to be sure, powerfully
motivate many protesters. However, in stories that appeared in
mid-2006, in which former activists expressed ambivalence about the
outcomes of their earlier protest and supported a military response to
the contemporary crisis with Lebanon, reporters played up the angle
women’s regret for previous antiwar activism. This story angle tended
to reinforce stereotypes of Four Mothers activists as unstable,
fearful flip-floppers who changed political positions based on their
emotions. Reporters played up the angle of remorse or repentance, even
when the opinions expressed by former activists in support of the 2006
war were more akin to ambivalence (e.g., Shavit 2006). The evident
interest in the repentance story may also reflect the media’s tendency
to depoliticize the work of former activists, which reassures the
public that earlier political activism was a transient phase of no
lasting significance (McAdam, 1999, 118).
Overall, arguments over the movement’s legacy can be seen as
continuations of earlier arguments between the war’s supporters and
opponents while the movement was active, including the claims that
that antiwar activism weakened the army’s morale and the nation and
that Israel’s withdrawal would embolden Hezbollah (e.g., Honig 1997),
along with the protesters’ counterclaim that what weakened the nation
the most were politicians’ ill-considered commitments to elective
wars.
These ongoing arguments also reflected a phenomenon common after lost
wars: Right-wing nationalists portrayals of war outcomes as the result
of betrayals on the home front. As documented in German nationalists
and militarists’ responses to the loss of World-War I, in France after
the lost Algerian war, and in post-Vietnam America, nationalists and
militarists have propagated “stab-in-the-back” narratives. These
assert that the war could have been won militarily, had the soldiers’
spirit not been undermined by unpatriotic, supposedly morally
degenerate, Leftists (Lembcke, 1998; Rotter, 2003). Such mythologizing
is often accompanied by cultural reassertions of sharply dichotomous
gender roles (Theweleit, 1987 and 1989; Gibson, 1994; Jeffords, 1994),
which may give added impetus to post-war criticisms of women-led peace
movements. The political right was also assisted in erasing peace
movements in Europe from its analyses of factors that ended the Cold
war, and from the apportioning of credit for these outcomes, by the
relative slowness of peace activists to claim credit for their part
(Meyer, 1999). Overall, even those antiwar activists who have
contributed to discrediting disastrous wars and to ending them have
had little lasting influence on the militarized natures of their
societies and their approaches to security and foreign policy (on the
experience of anti-Vietnam war protest, see Katz 1983).
In sum, post-war political and cultural backlashes against the
achievements of antiwar movements appear to be a predictable element
of such movements’ struggles and one important reason why such
struggles rarely achieve a lasting social and political impact.
Arguably, the political backlash should be taken into consideration by
antiwar movements concerned with their political influence and
legacies. In this regard, the concept of movement success extends
beyond achieving changes in policy, and should also comprise the
movement’s ability to define what it achieved in the public sphere.
This element of success is important so that the positive achievements
of the movement will last and be available to inspire future
movements.
The struggle to define lessons from Israel’s 18-year Lebanon war, and
the Four Mothers movement’s role in ending it, is an example of a
wider phenomenon whereby hard-line nationalists succeed to a
significant extent in reframing antiwar movements’ achievements as, at
best, misguided appeasement, if not intentional betrayal of the
nation’s interest. The Second Lebanon war in 2006 showed the Israeli
public to be capable, within a very short time, of forgetting the
lesson that resort to force in response to non-existential threats
often incurs unanticipated costs and undermines one’s own political
goals, and forgetting why in the late 1990s it overwhelmingly favored
ending the army’s presence in Lebanon.
The 2006 Lebanon war, in this regard, exemplified a process in which
nationalists, in a climate of fear, actively promoted the unlearning
of lessons promulgated by antiwar movements such as the Four Mothers,
and the relearning of faith in the resort to force that a fairly
recent, failed war should have discredited. This process also entails
relearning unquestioning faith in military and political authorities,
and transferring feelings of insecurity onto a political adversary
within, so that those who speak out against a new war are again viewed
with suspicion and hostility. The effect is to once again narrow the
inputs into security policymaking that successful antiwar movements
have, perhaps only temporarily, expanded.
Activists and Movement Legacies
Many antiwar activists might agree that the seemingly inevitable
post-war backlash against activists’ efforts makes it potentially
worth the effort of trying to define the legacies of their
movements—during the protest and after the movement’s dissolution.
However, activists may not take up the challenge due to their limited
resources, to elements of the movement’s self-presentation and values,
and to internal disagreements: After a single-issue antiwar movement
disbands, the tendency, understandably, may be for activists to return
to normal life without expending additional effort to define the
movement’s meaning and political lessons. Leaders of ad hoc antiwar
movements do not typically see themselves as professional activists.
In the Four Mothers case, none of the leadership had previously been
deeply involved in political protest. In fact, Four Mothers activists
emphasized the fact that they were not serial protesters for peace, or
professional peace activists, since such protesters are typically
viewed as unrealistic by mainstream Israelis.
Four Mothers protesters presented the movement’s goal as “simply”
ending the war and its casualties, and most, after this goal was
achieved, looked forward to returning their full attention to
families, professions, and neglected elements of their normal lives.
Beyond the wearing effects of years of daily activism, movement
leaders’ self-conception did not include becoming advocates for their
own political legacy. Moreover, doing so implied an ongoing commitment
that would, in effect, lead them into careers in politics, such as
happened with some leaders of Israel’s largest peace movement, Peace
Now.
By contrast, Four Mothers activists considered themselves a truly
grassroots movement of “next-door neighbors” and worked hard to
project this identity, which was apparently part of the movement’s
appeal. The movement derived legitimacy and credibility from its very
lack of professionalism and its leaders’ lack of aspiration to formal
political power. Nor did activists see themselves necessarily engaged
with matters of high politics in the Middle East peace process. Part
of their reluctance to expand the goals of their protest stemmed from
a sense of modesty about what they could achieve, and to a moral stand
in regard to the use of power and success. Testifying to one’s own
achievements appeared to them excessively self-promotional—appropriate
perhaps for politicians, but unseemly in grassroots activists. The
culture of the kibbutz movement, which influenced the movement’s
founders and many of its participants, prized doing over talking,
which made activists reluctant to comment excessively on their own
work.
Some Four Mothers activists were also conscious of their potential to
serve as role models of women’s organizational ethics and behavior,
even though feminists criticized them for stereotypically female
behavior when they renounced power and success and returned to the
private sphere. After doing what they thought was right, and having
achieved the goal of returning soldiers to Israel, their attitude was
something like, “We did our part by bringing the war to an end, and
it’s now the public’s turn to evaluate the results of our actions and
perhaps take them forward.”
Even at an intellectual level, it was not clear that the
responsibility of activists should include evaluation of their own
accomplishments. In any movement’s immediate aftermath, there is less
detachment toward and perspective on what it has achieved or failed to
than would befit an historiographically valid evaluation. Although
glad to have contributed to ending the war, and to have received
recognition for doing so (Sontag, 2000), leaders of the movement were
ambivalent about their achievements insofar as they did not know
whether the impact they had made on the country’s politics would last.
At times that impact seemed substantial; at others, a mere scratch on
the hard surface of politics, or a step forward that could well be
followed by more backsliding on a Sisyphusean slope. Activists’ own
uncertainties about the nature of their legacy, and their wariness of
the subjectivity of their own assessments, made them tend to avoid
self-evaluation.
In fact, at the time its founders dissolved the movement, they were
concerned that some former activists might continue to issue messages
or take actions in the movement’s name that would damage its
reputation and legacy. For example, on the day the army’s withdrawal
from Lebanon was accomplished, movement leaders decided to hold a
demonstration at the Ministry of Defense—where the group, over the
previous three years, had routinely held protests and vigils when
there were Israeli casualties in Lebanon—and to present flowers to the
prime minister. However, at the same time, a somewhat marginal group
of activists within the movement decided to go instead to the Lebanese
border where media had gathered to cover the withdrawal. There, with
groups of Lebanese and Hezbollah followers cheering and parading as if
in victory, the small group of Four Mothers activists made an effort
to talk with the celebrating Lebanese. The scene, which was carried by
the media the following day, put the movement in a foolish and
shameful light—as if its members were begging the national adversary
for forgiveness and pleading for a chance to talk with them.
The problem of internal divisions grew in an unforeseen way when this
minority of Four Mothers activists tried to establish a new movement,
using the fact that they had participated in the Four Mothers movement
and claiming to promote movement policies. However, those who wanted
to continue using the political influence that the movement achieved
during three years of intense advocacy and media exposure lacked
agreed-on goals; they would have had an organizational identity and a
name, but no direction or cause. Others, outside the movement, also
suggested that the Four Mothers group might take up a variety of
social issues. Continuing under such circumstances, the founding group
felt, would only discredit the movement’s actual achievements. They
also feared that messages issued in the movement’s name after its
dissolution might contravene what they believed the movement actually
stood for. The founding group, therefore, eventually resorted to legal
action to prevent anyone’s speaking thereafter on the movement’s
behalf. The at-times-bitter divisions within the movement, stemmed
partly from cultural and regional differences that Israeli social
movements not uncommonly experience (Safran, 2006). In the case of
Four Mothers, the tensions between the kibbutzniks from the country’s
periphery, who had founded the movement, and the urban activists, who
had joined later and who were not typically parents of combat
soldiers, diminished possibilities for agreement about and advocacy
concerning what the movement’s legacies were and how best to advocate
for them.
More important than factionalism, however, was the simple fact that
movement activists had no agreed-on direction or shared ideals that
might provide a basis for continued activism after the war ended: The
only common political platform the group had was that Israel should
“leave Lebanon in peace.” In the sense that the shared platform was
limited to ending the war, activists might well have had a difficult
time defining its own legacy, and might have proven unable to agree on
such a definition. Assuming that agreement had been possible, however,
and that the movement’s leadership had recognized the need to take
pro-active measures aimed at legacy promotion or protection, what
might it realistically have done?
Conclusions: Considering How to Safeguard Movement Legacies
In thinking about approaches antiwar movements might take to promoting
or safeguarding of what they see as their key political legacies, one
may distinguish between three types of thinking. One analytic
perspective concerns the efficacy of what a movement actually did; a
second perspective asks what movement leaders might realistically have
done under circumstances prevailing at the time they ended their
campaign; and a third speculates on what might have been done under
ideal circumstances. These differing contexts for assessment have
something of the quality of parallel realities.
In considering the first approach—what actually happened—it should be
noted that ending a war does not mean the end of interaction between
the adversary sides: A state of active hostilities is transformed into
some other state of relations. A movement formerly active against the
war may decide to advocate what this new state of affairs should be.
Following the end of the Lebanon war in 2000, the Barak administration
failed to establish an alternative security regime for Israel’s
northern border. Although the six years that followed were largely
without hostile incident, the absence of a security regime among
Israel and Lebanon, and other interested parties, was the permissive
cause of the eruption of war in 2006 following Hezbollah’s abduction
of Israeli soldiers.
After Barak’s election in 1999 and his promise to bring the soldiers
home from Lebanon, the Four Mothers leadership formally changed its
organizational policy to focus on the government’s need to establish
security measures for the northern border. Movement activists met with
the prime minister in Barak’s office and talked with him about the
importance of not getting drawn back into Lebanon with any new
Hezbollah attack. As non-experts in security and diplomatic matters,
movement leaders did not set forth detailed policy suggestions. They
did write letters, talk with officials, and issue statements, about
the need for the government to attend to border security following the
army’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon. However, little or nothing
was done, with some populated areas of the border lacking even a fence
between Israel and Lebanon (Orland, 2007).
To help document its activities, the group, in its last meeting, voted
to use its remaining funds to support an archive for preserving the
legacy of the movement. However, this was not the same as seeing the
group as keepers of a message, which would have entailed a different
level of activism—one less intense than the activism undertaken
against an ongoing war, but still a more focused and coordinated
effort than anything that took place after the movement disbanded.
In the second evaluative context, what might have been done under
prevailing circumstances, antiwar groups could use their influence at
the end of a war they opposed, to press for third-parties, such as
government appointed commissions, to draw lessons from the war
experience, as was done with the Winograd Report after the 2006
Lebanon war. It appears that Israeli policy in Lebanon in the 1990s
was driven more by ignorance and bureaucratic inertia among senior
public officials, than by anything resembling coherent policy goals.
Senior Israeli politicians “were poorly informed about the original
causes of maintaining [Israel’s] ‘security zone,’ let alone its
function and role under the current Lebanese and regional conditions”
(Sela, 2007, 69) and they repeatedly disclaimed responsibility for
policy, preferring to accept the professional opinion of the military.
However, military officials were also divided over and unable to
explain the purpose of the war. An independent commission could
usefully have made recommendations aimed at avoiding the sorts of
systemic policy errors that the Lebanon war entailed, and the movement
could have advocated for its appointment.
It is perhaps only in an ideal world that activists could have also
contested attacks on the movement’s history and legacy, most basically
by reminding audiences of the actual policy options facing the country
at the time of the protest, and of their relative costs and benefits,
and by debunking the myth that the protests kept the army from
winning. This type of post-war activism might entail education
campaigns designed to keep what the movement considers to be the war’s
real lessons in the public view. Such education might publicize a
citizens’ view of the history of the country’s involvement in the
failed war, and discuss how wars that are necessary to ensure the
country’s continued existence can be differentiated from “wars of
choice,” which often involve grinding, ultimately futile
counterinsurgency campaigns in foreign territory.
It would likely prove difficult to coordinate such messages, be they
ad hoc responses or more concerted campaigns, and there is no way to
keep ex-activists from taking public positions that even appear to
renounce movement ideals, as happened when some Four Mothers activists
discussed in the media why they supported the reinvasion of Lebanon in
2006. When the group was active, meetings about what messages to send
the public were continual, and leaders adjusted the movement’s
messages in response to the changing political context. But deciding
what the movement’s message should be, and fine-tuning such messages
to changing political contexts, is virtually impossible after the
movement is no longer active.
In retrospect, it appears beneficial that movement leaders, before a
movement disbands, agree to guidelines for some forms of consultation
among former activists regarding statements to the press, use of the
movement’s name, when and how to respond to criticism of the movement,
and what the most important legacies of the movement should be. (This
sort of decisionmaking process might benefit from involving a
third-party facilitator from outside the movement.)
Regarding society-wide changes in institutions and values, criteria
discussed by several analysts of social-movement success (Burstein,
Einwohner, and Hollander, 1995; Rochon and Mazmanian, 1993), these
cannot be produced directly by ad hoc antiwar movements, such as those
led by soldiers’ family members, although the incremental and indirect
effects of such movements are worth consideration. Their main
contributions to societal-level changes can come by virtue of
normalizing participation by groups that were previously silent on the
war, such as happened to an extent from protests by the Four Mothers
movement and its 1980s forerunner, Parents Against Silence. Ad hoc
groups can also widen civilian inputs into military policy, although
in the Israeli case, and also in the United States, the military’s
professionalization and the diminution, in practice, of the idea of a
“people’s army,” has been motivated at least in part by the desire to
limit what military leaders see as excessive civilian input (Levy,
2008).
Clearly, promoting or safeguarding movement legacies cannot be
accomplished in some simple fashion, and, as noted above, even
internal agreement on what the movement’s legacies are may be hard to
achieve. Nevertheless, the experience of the Four Mothers movement
showed that its leaders’ attempts to put the movement’s history away
like a sealed box in a drawer were impracticable and unrealistic
because that history was inevitably going to be brought into current
political and national-security debates. As Faulkner stated in Requiem
for a Nun, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
Particularly for movements with a grassroots identity, whose
organizers do not intend to continue as activists after the movement
ends, the questions remain, first, whether or not to leave the
definition of the movement’s legacy up to whoever is interested in
commenting on it—understanding that movement critics are likely to
fill any vacuum. Second, assuming the desire to take action regarding
legacy definition exists among activists, what steps can realistically
and collectively be taken? While this essay can offer no definitive
answers, it proposes that these questions are worth raising and worth
grappling with for activists as well as social-movement theorists.
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