Best known, perhaps, for her short-lived romance with Saul Bellow—who remained her friend and confidant for the remainder of his life—Bette Howland, who died in 2017 and is little remembered today, had a promising career as a writer of criticism and fiction. The recently published Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage collects a novella of the same name, some of her short stories, and a previously unpublished work. Calling Howland a “brilliant 20th-century Jewish American woman writer,” Rachel Shteir describes her career and oeuvre:

On paper, Howland seems deserving of . . . new attention. She wrote one memoir, two short-story collections, and criticism, mostly for Commentary magazine. Her books received good reviews and she was awarded both Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. After the MacArthur, she mostly stopped writing fiction. . .

I am reluctant to paint Howland as a victim of her onetime lover—or the “patriarchy.” After the early passion waned, Bellow seems to have been devoted to his friend. . . . It also seems wrong to blame Bellow for the fact that after the breakup, while his exile from Chicago included Bellagio, hers included a remote island in Maine and a farm in Pennsylvania. He was ravished by the world; she lived like a monk. . . .

[Likewise], I don’t see any glimmer of [ravishment] in Howland’s work, which, as her son writes, is mostly about “the indescribable metaphysical bleakness of life in Chicago.” The best of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage describes that city. My favorite story, “Blue in Chicago,” remains among the most accurate descriptions of Hyde Park’s siege mentality that I have read. “You always want to know how close these things come to you,” the narrator begins, describing the shooting of a graduate student. Howland’s cold evocation of that South Side neighborhood only serves to illuminate more brilliantly the sadness she feels when trapped with her sulky Jewish relatives at a wedding. She has nowhere to go.

Why, ask many Israelis, can’t we just end the war, let our children, siblings, and spouses finally come home, and get out the hostages? Azar Gat seeks to answer this question by looking at the possible costs of concluding hostilities precipitously, and breaking down some of the more specific arguments put forward by those who have despaired of continuing military operations in Gaza. He points to the case of the second intifada, in which the IDF not only ended the epidemic of suicide bombing, but effectively convinced—through application of military force—Fatah and other Palestinian factions to cease their terror war.

“What we haven’t achieved militarily in Gaza after a year-and-a-half probably can’t be achieved.” Two years passed from the outbreak of the second intifada until the launch of Operation Defensive Shield, [whose aim was] to reoccupy the West Bank, and another two years until the intifada was fully suppressed. And all of that, then as now, was conducted against the background of a mostly hostile international community and with significant American constraints (together with critical assistance) on Israeli action. The Israeli chief of staff recently estimated that the intensified Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip would take about two months. Let’s hope that is the case.

The results of the [current] operation in [Gaza] and the breaking of Hamas’s grip on the supply routes may indeed pave the way for the entry of a non-Hamas Palestinian administration into the Strip—an arrangement that would necessarily need to be backed by Israeli bayonets, as in the West Bank. Any other end to the war will lead to Hamas’s recovery and its return to control of Gaza.

It is unclear how much Hamas was or would be willing to compromise on these figures in negotiations. But since the hostages are its primary bargaining chip, it has no incentive to compromise. On the contrary—it is interested in dragging out negotiations indefinitely, insisting on the full evacuation of the Gaza Strip and an internationally guaranteed cease-fire, to ensure its survival as Gaza’s de-facto ruler—a position that would also guarantee access to the flood of international aid destined for the Gaza Strip.

Once the hostages become the exclusive focus of discussion, Hamas dictates the rules. And since not only 251 or twenty hostages, but any number is considered worth “any price,” there is a real concern that Hamas will retain a certain number of captives as a long-term reserve.