Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  The Israel Air Force flew a cover over the three brigades that were now reversing the course Moses had taken to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.

  Their goal was the Suez Canal and on into Egypt.

  In the northern Sinai, Brigadier General Israel Tal, the builder of Israel’s armored corps, rushed his troops along the Mediterranean.

  In the center of the peninsula, Brigadier General Avraham Yoffe, the stout conservationist called back to duty from his job as director of national parks, sped his tanks across the sand dunes toward the Mitla Pass, the strategic gateway through the desert to the Canal.

  In the south Arik Sharon’s troops were fighting toward Nakhl, from which they were also wedging their way through the pass to the Canal.

  On the sea, a small Israeli naval assault force with helicopter cover sailed from Eilat to capture the Straits of Tiran. To their disgust, they found the Straits empty: the Egyptians had fled.

  Two A.M. Friday morning, June 9, Yoffe’s forces reached the Canal.

  Less than five days after the Egyptian threat to fight a holy war had exploded in the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian army was in flight across the desert. The great Soviet fleet of tanks lay burned or captured.

  In New York, Mohammed Awad el-Kony, Egypt’s suave ambassador to the United Nations, handed a message to U Thant. It was apparent that el-Kony found the message too agonizing to read himself. U Thant read it to the Security Council. The Egyptian government agreed to a UN cease-fire. The war in Sinai, in Jerusalem, and on the West Bank was over. It was not yet over in the Galilee.

  Of all the Arabs who encircled Israel, the Syrians were the most vicious.

  From the day the war broke out, they directed an almost ceaseless barrage of artillery fire at the northern kibbutzim and the new little development towns. People were killed, houses demolished, livestock destroyed, orchards and fields of cotton and grain decimated. Women and little children lived in the shelters underground. The northern villages knew the war as no other part of Israel knew it; for six full days they took its brunt.

  At seven A.M. on Friday morning, General David Elazar, known affectionately as Dado—a Youth Aliyah graduate who had escaped from Hitler as a child—gave the command.

  From all the kibbutzim and settlements that had endured Syrian fire for nineteen terror-filled years, the army now moved with trucks and half-tracks and jeeps, with infantry and tanks, and with the Israel Air Force.

  They moved up the cliffs, some of which had never been scaled by men.

  In Kibbutz Dan, Major Mottel, watching through binoculars, saw the first Israeli tanks burst into flames, blown apart by Syrian mines and antitank fire. He saw men leap out of turrets to pull the wounded out of the burning tractors and tanks. Under searing fire, they raced to climb into other vehicles. The tanks lumbered up the Golan Heights like prehistoric monsters.

  The men in the kibbutzim below the cliffs saw the slaughter. Each time a tank exploded, they knew three men were trapped in it.

  Leading a unit up a hill was Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Klein, an infantry battalion commander who had come from Hungary. The Syrians destroyed his half-track; Colonel Klein escaped from his burning vehicle and with his soldiers climbed the rest of the hill on foot—running, crouching, taking cover wherever they could find it. He saw two groups of his soldiers moving up the hill separately, and, fearing they might mistake one another for the enemy, he stood up to coordinate the two groups. The Syrians killed him.

  Behind him, his deputy, Major Zohar, took over. A Syrian bullet pierced his neck; the medics carried him down the hill past the troops racing forward. Thirty-year-old Major Alexander Krinsky, who had come with Youth Aliyah from Poland, was rushed in; he led the men up to the top of the hill, and there he was killed.

  Without officers, even without orders, the soldiers continued to advance.

  The hills were blocked by fences of barbed wire protecting the Syrian trenches and the fantastic underground network of Soviet-built concrete bunkers from which the Syrians could blast every vehicle scaling the Heights.

  All Friday afternoon the Israelis fought along the Golan Heights, racing down roads, encircling camps and villages. The Heights and the valley were blazing with smoke and fire.

  At dawn on Saturday, with heavy air support, the Golani Brigade, made up of crack infantry, burst into the village of Baniyas, the fortified area where the Syrians had sought to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River.

  Another force raced over tough mountain terrain, knocked out antitank emplacements, and pushed on toward Kuneitra, the largest city on the Golan plateau. The Syrian army was collapsing, retreating as fast as it could to Damascus, forty-five miles away.

  One day after the first breakthrough into Syrian territory, the battle for the Golan Heights was over.

  The casualties were heavy: one hundred fifteen Israelis killed and thirty wounded; one thousand Syrians dead—no one knew how many wounded—and six hundred taken prisoner. Eighty thousand Syrian soldiers and civilians had fled.

  The Syrians lost the Golan Heights, the cliffs from which they had harassed and killed for nineteen years.

  On Saturday afternoon silence fell on the kibbutzim. The children climbed out of the shelters and were blinded by the sunlight. To Major Mottel in Kibbutz Dan the silence was that of a roaring ocean that had suddenly grown still.

  Islands of light glittered in all the hills and valleys of the north. The people were told, “Turn on your lights—even your searchlights. No more blackouts. The Heights of Golan are ours.”

  That Saturday afternoon, Raquela and Moshe entered the Old City of Jerusalem on foot.

  They walked through the narrow streets. Señora Vavá had lived here, and before her, for more than three hundred years, the family had walked on these stones, had lived and borne children and died here.

  They reached the Western Wall. Raquela pressed her head against the Wall. Moshe and their four children had come through the war alive.

  A few days later, Raquela opened the French doors and walked through the garden to the patio of Mama’s cottage. Voices floated to her, a strange voice she could not recognize. She hurried through the little foyer to the living room.

  A tall woman in a black Bedouin gown stood talking animatedly, towering over Mama. Could it be? The mysterious smell of musk and incense filled the room.

  “Aisha!”

  The Arab woman flushed with pleasure. “Can this beautiful woman be my little Raquela?”

  The two tall women embraced. Then Raquela stood back, for a moment a little girl again, watching Mama and Aisha, drawn to each other by some strange bond, their hair a web of gray laced with black, their faces creased with nearly seventy years of living.

  “I will get us coffee,” Mama said in the tones she had spoken each morning on the patio before Jerusalem had been torn in half.

  Raquela and Aisha sat together on the sofa, holding hands, euphoric.

  The truncated city had become whole again. The ugly barbed-wire fences and the corrugated tin walls were torn down. Jerusalem was one city.

  There had been dire predictions of bloodshed. Jews would be massacred if they entered the Old City; Arabs would be massacred if they walked down Zion Square. But the warnings were groundless.

  The moment the barriers came down, Raquela had joined the thousands of Jews swarming through the Old City, revisiting her favorite little shops, welcomed again by friendly Arab merchants eager to sell their wares.

  On Zion Square, Arab men in long gowns and keffiyehs and women in beautifully embroidered Bedouin dresses entered the clothing stores to study the western fashions and pushed shopping carts through the wondrous aisles of the supermarket.

  Aisha and Raquela caught up with each other’s lives. In 1948 Aisha and her family had gone to live with relatives in East Jerusalem. She was a grandmother many times over.

  Mama entered carrying a tray with demitasse cups of Turkish coffee.

  “And how is the boy?” Aisha
asked. “Jacob, who used to fill my basket with pine twigs from your garden?”

  Mama’s hand trembled; the cups shook.

  Raquela spoke mutedly. “Jacob is dead. He was very ill.”

  “Ah,” Aisha sighed. “I loved him like my own son.”

  Mama, in control again, handed her the little cup of coffee.

  “Do you remember,” Aisha asked, “I always brought you eggs so fresh—the minute the chickens laid them.”

  “I remember,” Mama said. “You never fooled me.”

  Raquela watched the two women in silence. Would this euphoria last?

  She stood up. “Aisha, I must leave for work. Please come again soon.”

  “I will come, Raquela. I will bring you eggs and figs. It will be as if nothing had happened—between then and now.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  JULY 1967

  Raquela spent the next days talking, feeling, looking, listening, exploring, walking—walking endlessly—through the Old City.

  Then, one morning, driving her car to work, she felt an overwhelming urge to return to Scopus.

  She was glad no one was with her. She wanted to be alone, her emotions deflected by no one. She drove through the city toward East Jerusalem. The hideous fences and barbed wire were still there, but torn down and shoved aside.

  It was 1943 again and she was a nineteen-year-old girl on Bus 9 riding through a snowstorm. She steered her car through the broad streets hugging the crenellated walls of the Old City. Now the road began to wind. Her hands gripped the wheel in a spasm of fear. She was in Sheikh Jarrah: Dr. Yassky…the convoy…the seventy-seven doctors and nurses massacred.

  Through the windshield she saw Arab men sitting on little stools in front of their coffeehouses, smoking hubble-bubble pipes. The mufti’s villa and the Nashashibi houses stood, surrounded by trees, untouched by the war.

  Above the Arab houses she saw the white flags of surrender fluttering in the mountain breeze. Her hands relaxed on the wheel.

  Now she was traveling up the Mount of Olives with its crown—Mount Scopus. She drove slowly, apprehensive, beginning to fear what nineteen years and three wars had done to its “monumental serenity.”

  She left the car on the road. Hesitantly she approached the hospital. The white marblelike tiles were discolored and broken, like ancient ruins. The garden was a jungle of weeds and rubble. She picked her way through the dirt and stones and entered the main hall. It looked haunted. Cobwebs spun a gray filigree around the rusted pipes; the marble floor was carpeted in dust and fallen plaster.

  The rest of the world was blocked out. Memories spilled over. Her graduation. The student nurses sitting on the marble steps in blue and white uniforms, like cornflowers. The speakers table…Raquela Levy—Shulamit Cantor’s voice echoed through the empty hall—will you please come forward.…You have been selected outstanding student in your class…”

  She left the hospital and made her way through the overgrown foliage to the nursing school. The glass entrance door was shattered. Through the yawning hall, she entered the once-luxurious living room. Empty. Desolate. The droppings of birds mingled with the rubble.

  She closed her eyes. She saw Carmi. His British uniform. His movie-star smile. Carmi was singing: Raquela…Raquela…Raquela…it’s the most beautiful name in the world.

  At the United Nations the Arabs and the Soviets sought, as in 1956, to achieve in diplomacy what they had failed to achieve by blockade and war.

  Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin himself flew to New York to address a special session of the General Assembly in June 1967. He accused Israel of “treacherous” aggression. President Lyndon B. Johnson, supporting Israel, called for face-to-face negotiations, freedom of the waterways, and a just settlement of the problems of refugees.

  The Arabs refused. The special session ended in shambles. Meeting in a summit in Khartoum in September 1967, the Arabs adopted three “nos”: no recognition; no negotiations; no peace.

  The next month, October 1967, the Security Council, undaunted by the three nos, adopted what would later become famous as “Resolution 242.” It called for “a just and lasting peace…withdrawal from occupied territories [though by no means withdrawal from all the occupied territories]…the renunciation of all forms of belligerency, blockade or organized warfare…freedom of navigation through international waterways…the right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries…a just settlement of the refugee problem.”

  The refugee problem! Arthur Goldberg, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, who drafted much of Resolution 242, explained that settling “the refugee problem” meant settling it for all refugees, Jewish refugees as well as Arab refugees.

  The victory of the Six-Day War opened the borders that had been closed since 1948, and a million Arabs, some in refugee camps, others living in towns and villages or on the land as farmers, came under Israeli military government.

  In July 1967, Yasir Arafat, head of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), set up headquarters in the casbah in Nablus on the Israeli reoccupied West Bank. The PLO had been created in 1964 as an umbrella for Arab terrorist groups. Its covenant was simple: DESTROY ISRAEL.

  In the months following the Six-Day War, Arafat, constantly moving his headquarters, organized saboteurs and terrorists to whip up the Arabs on the West Bank and in Gaza, to terrorize not only the Jews but also the Israeli Arabs who had remained loyal to Israel throughout the war.

  The August morning was mountain cool. Moshe and Raquela drove south of Jerusalem through Bethlehem on their way to visit an Arab refugee camp outside Hebron. Hundreds of Arabs in white keffiyehs and white cotton pantaloons were doing road work with primitive picks.

  “Machines could do in a few hours what will take these Arab workers weeks or months,” Moshe said. “But government policy is to give Arabs the same work relief we give new immigrant Jews, with the same pay.”

  Outside Hebron, they drove through barren hills to the refugee camp. Would it look like Athlit or Cyprus? Raquela wondered. All these years she had seen devastating pictures of Arab refugee camps. Tents and muddy roads. Listless, weary men. Overburdened women. Half-naked children.

  A United Nations sign, inscribed in English and in Arabic, told them they had reached the Fawwar Refugee Camp run by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency).

  They entered the camp on foot. Raquela walked through the grounds unbelieving. No tents. No metal huts. No barbed wire. Nearly a thousand one-family houses in pastel pinks and grays ran in narrow streets up and down the small hills.

  “This is like no camp I’ve ever been in!” she exclaimed. “It’s like a modern town.”

  Dozens of children followed them to the clinic. They introduced themselves to the camp nurse and a visiting UNRWA doctor and spent the next hour discussing the problems of the pregnant women and newborn babies.

  They left the clinic and followed a line of people entering a warehouse. Inside, they watched curiously as each adult showed a ration card to a young Arab in white shirtsleeves standing behind a counter.

  He checked the card, counted the names listed, and then handed out large cans of cooking oil, bags of lentils, and fifty-pound white muslin sacks of flour.

  Raquela moved closer, reading the English legend on the flour bags:

  BREAD FLOUR

  ENRICHED, UNBLEACHED

  “FORTIFIED WITH CALCIUM”

  DONATED BY THE PEOPLE

  OF THE

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  NOT TO BE SOLD OR EXCHANGED

  Driving home on the unfamiliar road, Moshe seemed lost in thought. Finally he said, “To be a refugee living in a camp is tragic. But to be used as a political pawn for nineteen years by Arab nations—God only knows what happens inside the psyches of children who grow up in an atmosphere of hate.”

  Raquela was trying to sort out her emotions.

  “When I think of how we took care of our refugees—especially the Jews who came from Arab
lands…” She looked off into the horizon. “Keeping any people in a camp—even one like this, which looks like a suburb—does terrible things to them.”

  “The Arab countries could have absorbed them easily,” Moshe said, “the way thirty-five to forty million refugees from World War Two were absorbed. Instead, the Arab states kept them in camps to fester, and contributed little or nothing to take care of them. Do you know who footed most of the bill—the American taxpayers!”

  “I hate camps—all camps,” Raquela said bitterly. Memories of Athlit and Cyprus made her shudder. “I wish we could liquidate them, outlaw them all.”

  “Hm,” Moshe grunted. “That would be Utopia.”

  “They’re evil!” Raquela exploded.

  “Sure they’re evil. Even the best camps are evil. People deteriorate in them. Become demoralized. It’s a scandal. Take those ration cards we saw. Every person listed gets a monthly supply of food and clothes. Sometimes there are ten names on one card. The names never get crossed off. People die and their deaths go unreported. Young men leave the camps for Kuwait and other oil countries. They earn a fortune, but their names stay on the cards.” He chuckled. “The other day Prime Minister Eshkol joked at a meeting I went to, ‘When I’m reincarnated, I want to be an Arab refugee. You get everything for nothing and you never die.’”

  A few days later, another scandal was revealed; the refugees had been selling their rations to buy guns and ammunition. American food—not to be sold or exchanged—had been exchanged for guns to kill Israelis.

  Then the biggest scandal of all surfaced: the United Nations camps had become the proving grounds for terrorists.

  In October 1969, the week Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died and Golda Meir was sworn in as interim Prime Minister, terrorists blew up a supermarket, tossed grenades into a bank, and bombed the cafeteria of the Hebrew University, where many of the students were Arabs as well as Jews.

  Terror was on the streets, in the busy marketplaces. And still Yasir Arafat’s fedayeen failed to disrupt daily life in Israel. His fighting arm, El Fatah, turned to a new form of terror: skyjacking.