An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  Not even on the film set of Zorba the Greek did Yael feel so alive, so exhilarated, so transformed, as if she belonged to a nation of righteous heroes.

  She loved the thrill of danger and the “wonderful sense of comradeship.” During the fighting, she wished it “would never end. I never again wanted to return to my old life and face the glamor of a writer’s world.”29

  And it was an easy mood to fall into when you consider that a mere twenty-two years had passed since the Nazis had killed most of European Jewry: now she was in a helicopter hovering over the mythic Judea and Samaria, the land of David and Solomon and the Maccabees, and her father was the new Joshua blowing his horn and causing the walls—the barbed wire—to tumble that had separated Jews from their ancient past.

  Ruth shared the euphoria of victory, though for different reasons. Her hometown of Jerusalem was unified again, and everyone was celebrating, Arabs and Jews. On her first trip back to the city, the same day Moshe opened up Mandelbaum Gate, she noticed the way Arabs greeted Jews with the tomatoes they wanted to sell, or the way they hurried off to Jaffa Street in West Jerusalem to find a job or buy a radio at half the Jordanian price. Peddlers offered to sell her “Friendship” pencils made in Communist China. It was like a miracle. The ethnic hatred that had torn the city apart in 1947 and ’48 was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t notice a single act of violence, barely even a harsh word.

  She obviously wasn’t looking hard enough.

  Unshackled and overjoyed at living again in a land dimly similar to what she knew in her youth, Ruth was soon tooling around the Palestinian lands freely in her Saab coupe. In Bethlehem she wandered around the streets alone looking for friends from before 1948.

  Another of her first trips was to Gaza to reestablish contact with the six brothers she met in 1956. While there, she visited a school in a refugee camp to deliver toys donated by Abie Nathan, the owner of the California Café. Nathan had always felt guilty about the role he played in driving peasants from the Hawa family village in 1948. The teacher, originally from Jaffa and missing a leg due to the fighting in 1948, had festooned a banner from the cracked wall of the classroom: “We Shall Return!”

  27

  Open Bridges

  Shortly after the war ended, a Fiat with yellow Israeli plates drove up to the Tawil house, and an elegantly dressed man got out, approached the front door, and disappeared inside. The man was a relative of Raymonda’s from her mother’s village of Kfar Yassif in the Galilee. No one in Nablus knew him, and his was the first Israeli civilian car to venture into that part of the West Bank. Raymonda’s behavior had for years fed the rumor mill, mainly that she was a CIA spy. Now people suspected the stranger of being a Mossad agent and Raymonda of being a collaborator. That night someone slipped a note under the front door. It was her first of many death threats.

  Suspicion was for many Palestinians an automatic response to defeat, in particular when Dayan, the man at the helm of the victorious military machine, proclaimed to the international press, days after the war, that there was “no more Palestine,” that that chapter in world history was “finished,” that “Judea and Samaria” were “part of our land, to be settled, not abandoned,” and that Jews were “returning to the cradle of our people, to the inheritance of the Patriarchs, the land of the Judges and the fortress of the Kingdom of the House of David.”

  And yet the fact that one of Raymonda’s cousins could so easily drive across the old fortified border was a sign that Moshe’s was no ordinary military regime. With the same speed and determination the veteran commando had used in conducting warfare, he gave orders to clear away the barbed wire and land mines separating Palestinians like Raymonda and Daoud from their former homes in Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle, and other cities and towns and villages. Everyone, it seemed, was “returning.”

  In public, his policy for the occupied territories and the million Arabs living there, including hundreds of thousands of refugees from 1948, was referred to as the “Open Bridge.” Dayan told General Zvi Elpeleg, the man he sent to govern the West Bank, that the Israeli army had no business running the schools, courts, and garbage collection services for Arabs, and he should stay out of people’s hair as much as possible. Elpeleg, the antithesis of the pompous colonial administrator, agreed. The military governor of Nablus, General Givoli, another fine officer of great ability, received the same instructions: Let Palestinians plant their crops, raise their kids, work in Israeli supermarkets—they can even hop an Egged bus for an afternoon at the beach. The “Open Bridge,” Dayan knew, was a temporary measure and would only delay the inevitable clash. Because the disarray among local Arabs couldn’t last forever, because people don’t forget the pain of conquest and loss, because Israelis would have to push through with their “work against the wishes of the Arabs . . . we are doomed to live in a constant state of war with the Arabs, and there is no escape from sacrifice and bloodshed.”30

  With Moshe’s often-paralyzing headaches, his one eye that made reading difficult, his spotty written English, and his impatience with sitting at a desk, he relied on Yael for much of his writing. “We will leave [the Palestinians] alone,” she declared to the Daily Telegraph, “as long as they don’t co-operate with saboteurs.” The article dangles the prize of “self-determination” in front of well-behaved Arabs.

  What Dayan confided to his inner circle of commanders, men such as his pal Arik, was the way amicable relations with local Arabs was a tactic in the struggle over land and resources. He envisioned streams of Jewish settlers populating East Jerusalem and the hills above Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Nablus.31 With this long-term strategy, Moshe took decisive steps in inventorying the land, conducting censuses, sending in water and agricultural experts, and laying the bureaucratic foundation for what within a decade would become the settlement movement. Already in 1968 the IDF set up the first militarized moshav along the Jordan Valley.

  28

  The Return

  Weeks after the war concluded, the social event of the year took place in the archeological garden of the Dayan family home. Assi and his bride-to-be had made their wedding plans before the war. Soon after the war, Yael showed up and announced that she, too, wanted to get in on the action and proposed a double wedding. Ruth liked the idea; she just wanted to know something about the bridegroom, General Dov Sion, a man she had never heard of. Moshe knew him because Dov, nearly twice Yael’s age, was Sharon’s chief of staff. Yael met him a month earlier when he was part of the Israeli drive toward the Suez. Their decision was as quick as the war: “No time for preliminaries,” she later told a reporter with a military cadence to her voice, “no time for the slow evolvement of emotions. Life at the front line is concentrated, and you see the good and bad in people at once.”

  The wedding party threw the spotlight on the goldfish bowl that from the outside seemed to be the most glittering, the most beautiful, most powerful family in the country, all to the accompaniment of a Greek band. Sharon was Dov’s best man.

  Two thousand guests streamed through the family garden that day, including Ezer and Reumah, Danny Kay, and Ben-Gurion, who “beamed with delight”; even the mayor of Nablus got an invitation. In a photo, Yael leans against a looted bronze door with an ancient Koranic verse etched into the surface. She is wearing a dress made from woven gold fabric from Albert, the master weaver. From the expression on her face, life couldn’t have been better.

  Ruth, too, seemed to bask in the glory of her husband’s fame. She appeared on the David Frost Show, alongside Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders and the movie star Shelley Winters. But none of that interested her, not the television interviews, not the huddle of photographers following her every move, not the exaggerated assessments of Moshe’s military brilliance.

  Crossing the old border back into the Palestinian lands felt like a furlough from prison. She was back in the unified land of her youth.

  Having been an avid reader of Avnery’s magazine as a teenager, and a serious
student of Yael Dayan’s fiction and nonfiction, no one in the West Bank knew more about Moshe Dayan than Raymonda. Days after the war she was in Jerusalem to watch the man in action.

  Rumors circulating around Nablus were that the Israelis, led by a messianic rabbi, wanted to take over the mosque and erect the second temple.32 Muslims and Christians crowded into the old city to see what the conquerors would do. Dayan allayed people’s fears by handing over control of the Temple Mount, the site just above Herod’s wall, to the Muslim authorities. Though he invited the disappointed rabbi to his kids’ wedding, he wasn’t going to permit him to incite a religious war between Jews and the Islamic world.

  If Dayan showed rare wisdom there, what he did instead was probably the greatest single atrocity committed in Jerusalem since the Crusades. The one-eyed man whose deeds and misdeeds Raymonda had heard about since she was a teenager ordered the expulsion of everyone from the Maghrebi Muslim quarter. The quarter, built shortly after Salah ha-Din drove the Crusaders from Jerusalem, backed up to the Al Aqsa Mosque. Why would Dayan expel several hundred people from their homes?

  The rumbling sounds from a fleet of bulldozers crashing through ancient buildings were the first sign of something horrible. Raymonda heard screams of an old woman buried alive under the rubble of her five-hundred-year-old home; held back by a line of soldiers, there was nothing she could do. Eventually, the screams stopped. Raymonda’s impotence to save the woman added to the already considerable list of traumas haunting her sleep at night.

  The following day, her first foray back through Mandelbaum Gate, was like a hallucinatory dream. Passing unobstructed, she crossed into the new city of Jerusalem and headed to Jaffa Street. The city was throbbing with the life of a nation celebrating its triumph by drinking, dancing, singing the “ha-Tikva.” Bare-chested men were kissing women in braless tank tops. What a paradox, she thought, to be under the heels of a free society, a society with a bawdy irreverence in which a worker can tell off a prime minister without disappearing into a dungeon like in the various Arab states. With the colossal destruction she had seen in Jerusalem, she wanted to despise the Israelis—but the lesson she learned from nuns as a young girl was still operative: that the frolicking, freedom-loving Israeli masses were not responsible for the decisions of Moshe Dayan.

  She wandered the streets until arriving at a bookstore where she picked up a volume banned in the Hashemite Kingdom, The Wretched of the Earth, by the revolutionary enemy of French colonialism, Frantz Fanon. She can’t count how many times over the years she read aloud from the preface, written by Sartre, which captured her psychological analysis of most men in power: “This imperious being, crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a man.” There was another line that she’d repeat to herself hundreds of times over the coming years, especially during shouting bouts with Daoud and in Shin-Bet interrogation sessions in prison: “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

  She returned to Nablus with another book, Yael’s Dust.

  The next week, Raymonda made her way to Acre and to the house where Habib was born and where he lived before it was taken from him in 1948. It was hot by the time she arrived in her Buick with white Jordanian plates. The fronds of the palm trees on the street in front of the parking lot were limp and drooping, idle fishing boats crowded the oily water of the port, and she wandered into the Crusader streets besieged by memories, now and then looking at the names on the iron gates in front of the houses, trying to imagine what it must be like to live in someone else’s home, never knowing when a refugee like her might show up with a rusting old key.

  On the far end of a square, planted with petunias, was a monument to Jewish war heroes. The language on the plaque was of “liberation,” as though, like Rapunzel locked in a tower, Acre had been cruelly held by interloping Arabs, and with millennia of patience waited until the brave Hebrew-speaking liberators arrived to rescue her.

  Raymonda plodded onward in the humid heat, along walls Napoleon failed to breach, and she continued, damp with sweat, to Habib’s old house with a thick oak door. She stood and knocked, prepared to meet the Jewish inhabitants: Maybe they’ll allow me to climb to the second floor where my bedroom used to be, she thought. She’d smile; she’d be sweet as pie and make no accusations, no reproaches. Who can blame the new occupants for wanting a palace free of charge? They might be just like Dvora’s mother, willing to hand the booty back to the dispossessed and live in peace, Arabs and Jews.

  She rubbed her palm along the smooth carved balustrade. Looking up at the house, she imagined Christmas, before the divorce, still young and vital, leaning out the window and smiling down on her. Raymonda knocked again and heard nothing. She began pounding, and still no one opened the door. A wave of images flooded her mind: The servants used to tap lightly on her bedroom door before dinner, and she would put down her children’s book: one was Jean de la Fontinelle’s Alphabet, with an elephant on the front cover holding the letter “A” in its trunk. Back to the present, she sat on the steps rubbing her scraped fist and crying. Through the tears she could see the slender pipe in Habib’s hand, the way he balanced it on his palm, proudly inspecting it because he loved its rich mahogany color, and the way the dark brown turned black closer to the cracked volcanic rim.

  She cried about her decision to leave her parents behind, and the way both had died behind the once impenetrable border.

  Spilling out from a bus behind her were tourists dressed in the simple, unadorned, rough and tumble style of working-class Israelis. All the men wore identical looking white shirts with the buttons open to show the golden Stars of David looped around their necks. Someone jiggled with the lock on the other side of the villa door; the bolt made a mechanical noise, and the door swung open. It was only then that she realized that her childhood home had been turned into a museum of the bygone gilded “Jewish life” in Acre. It wasn’t enough to steal the villa; the Israelis also stole her memories, her identity, her past. She followed the tourists like a phantom, silent and with her internal time bomb ticking away. On the whole, everything remained as it was, frozen in time: the spacious rooms furnished in the French style of the 1930s, chandeliers and mirrors with gilded golden frames of carved wooden flowers, the mirror itself spotted with age.

  The room was dark with blinds closed against the sun, and the dim light from the lamps gave the rooms with the high ceiling a chiaroscuro effect. The strips of light coming through the blinds cast luminous laser-beam lines on all the tourists who passed close to the large windows facing the sea.

  The tour guide explained that the mansion had once upon a time belonged to an eminent Jewish family, and he pointed out the piano, the library with gilded volumes of French literature in red morocco, the oil paintings on the wall, the long tapestries from ceiling to floor, the marble floor, the intricate plaster work, the billiard room, the delicate stone masonry. Ezeh Yoffi, they said like a chorus: “Wow!”

  Raymonda was reminded of her visit to her aunt’s former house, in the German Colony. THIS IS ALL A LIE, she wanted to scream at the top of her voice. If there were any justice, the piano on which an uncle played Franz Liszt, the furniture, the books would revert back to their rightful owners. Daoud could meet his banker friends in the study, each of the five children would have their own rooms, and her salon, the grandest in the land, would welcome Jews and Arabs alike.

  Raymonda felt too dizzy for the words she wanted to shout to come out. She just nodded attentively for a while longer, before leaving the house, never to return. She headed to a seaside restaurant on the ancient fishing port, in use since the Phoenicians and now too toxic for anything besides jellyfish. Under the shade of a scruffy Cyprus pine, and with the brine from the sea mixing with the smell of French fries coming out from the kitchen, she cracked open Dust and began reading.

  Halfway through the book, Raymonda found herself smoking a pack of ci
garettes and fuming because of the way Yael uses stick figures to describe Palestine as an empty land—“empty” in the same way as the family villa in Acre was “Jewish.” The novel felt like an affront. As a nineteen-year-old, Raymonda had devoured New Face in the Mirror in emotional identification, spiced with a teenage desire for Yael’s independence, talent, and fame. Dust she read as a conquered subject under the heel of her father.

  29

  The Emperor

  Yael settled into a quiet life with an older military man; soon enough, she was pregnant and spent the coming months writing a book about her father’s victory, a victory made inevitable, she fervently believed, because defeat would have meant extermination by Arabs who refused to accept the Jewish people’s historical right to Eretz Yisrael. In the series of newspaper articles she wrote in the world press, she continued in her role as her father’s unofficial press agent.

  The mantle of international stardom started shifting over to Assi, who was now on a film set in Europe working on John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death, about two young lovers adrift in medieval Europe during the Hundred Years War. The film set out to deliver the peacenik message of “make love, not war.”

  Huston invited Ruth to his castle in Ireland, and from there, she headed to Paris, because the American director Jules Dassin, son of a Russian-Jewish barber and victim of the anti-communist purges in Hollywood, had chosen Assi to be his lead actor, alongside Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s wife, for the film Promise at Dawn.33

  Yael was also in Paris because her husband the ex-general was appointed Israel’s military attaché in Paris. An eccentric viscount, considering it a matter of prestige to be seen with Ruth, and especially the general’s glamorous daughter, gave Ruth a lion cub to pass on to Moshe. What else do you give a man with an empire under his heels? The cub’s name was Gamine, French for “naughty child.” It would later be renamed Ruthie.