An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  Raymonda felt faint because Arafat’s new line meant the end of the dream of a single democratic state. Ruth swallowed hard as well, but more out of excitement. Was this the beginning of genuine peace? She bolted up from the sofa and stood as erect as a soldier at attention. “Mr. Tarazi, I will deliver this message to my brother-in-law, Ezer Weizman.”

  There was an awkward pause. Raymonda fixed her gaze on Ruth. “Ruth, there is something you need to know. Weizman’s men are trampling on our rights.” Ruth sat back down before stiffening her back and coming to his defense. “I don’t believe a word you are saying. Ezer is a NICE MAN!”

  “Yeah,” rejoined Raymonda, “and Moshe is just a farmer! Weizman’s acting like a MONSTER.” Tarazi and Raymonda presented evidence: Not as deft as Dayan in his personnel choices, Weizman hired a certain General David Hagoel to be his commander. Like Conrad’s Captain Kurtz, Hagoel ran the territories as a personal fiefdom, doing as he pleased. The trigger for bringing up Weizman’s misdeeds that afternoon in Manhattan was the order Hagoel gave to soldiers to fire tear gas into the classrooms of schools, forcing children to jump out a window. But the evidence failed to sway Ruth, especially the accusation about the tear gas; in fact she was shocked that Raymonda would believe such gruel propaganda. “Our boys don’t do such things.”57

  “If you want proof, just go and see for yourself what’s going on. Go to Ramallah. Here, take the address of the mayor.” Ruth promised Raymonda and Tarazi to check out the story.

  She made a special trip back to Israel. As soon as she returned, she got in her Saab and drove to Ramallah to meet Karim Khalaf, the green-eyed mayor.

  The mayor told her story after story of demolitions and other abuses. Children testified about the tear gas incident.

  Appalled, she headed straight for the hospital—Weizman was recovering from an operation—and gave him a piece of her mind. “They call you a monster. Do you know what? You deserve it! Shame on you!” She had to refrain from swinging her handbag at him. “After what happened to Saul . . . how could you!”

  Weizman loved Ruth. The fact that she stood in front of him shivering with emotion, and mentioned the sniper attack on his son, was all it took to get him groaning out of bed. Snapping out orders for a change of clothes and a helicopter, he flew at once to Ramallah. He spoke to Mayor Khalaf, with Raymonda present, and heard the same appalling tales.

  Weizman stared at his men with a blank expression that quickly boiled into rage: his bad temper was legendary. With a sweep of his hand, and turning to his officers and chief of staff, he asked if the stories were true. He spoke with crisp military cadence and cracked his knuckles loudly. The officers said nothing, which Weizman assumed was an admission of guilt. He barked out commands to his underlings to loosen their stranglehold on the Palestinians.

  An article the following day in the Jerusalem Post quoted Khalaf praising Weizman as a wise man. During Ruth’s next visit to Ramallah, Mayor Khalaf thanked her for standing on the side of the oppressed. Two years later the green-eyed mayor lost his right leg when West Bank settlers booby-trapped his Cadillac.

  Raymonda began touting Ruth’s “good witch’s” power in bringing out Weizman’s humanity. His chief of staff, by contrast, was shocked at his boss’s “transformation of opinion,” and his alarming talk of “concessions and compromises” on Eretz Yisrael. Weizman shifted from being an ardent proponent of settlements to a principled opponent. He began looking for ways to establish a secret conduit, through Ruth and Raymonda, to Arafat.

  44

  The Good Witch

  Ruth returned to the jungles, mountains, favelas, and hotel bars of Latin America, with frequent trips to Washington, DC, where the bank had its headquarters and where Moshe, absorbed in the peace negotiations with Egypt, was in and out of the White House.

  Sitting down with Tarazi encouraged Ruth to strike out on her own. During her next trip to Washington, she read an op-ed in the Washington Post by the Georgetown professor Hisham Sharabi. The silver-haired member of an aristocratic family was an academic superstar—Bill Clinton was his student. Unhappy with what he wrote, she rang him up.

  She told him her name—stone silence on the other end—and invited him for lunch. “It’s on me.” Ruth made sure he knew she was divorced from Moshe. He sounded uncomfortable because she put him on the spot; he had to agree.

  Ten minutes later his assistant called and, with a deep baritone voice, wanted to know why the ex-wife of Foreign Minister Dayan would want to speak with Professor Sharabi. What about?

  “Just because,” she began. “Because I want to discuss the nonsense he wrote in the Washington Post.”

  “Nonsense? Yes, I see.”

  The man with the deep voice joined Professor Sharabi, and the three met in a hotel lobby. At first, Sharabi barely looked at Ruth. He picked at his salad with a fork and, when he finished, he stared down at his fingernails. She guessed what was swirling around in his brain: What the hell am I doing here with Mrs. Dayan? In those days, Palestinians got killed as “collaborators” for less. She decided to break the ice a little:

  “Listen, in your article you ticked off our crimes, one by one. Be my guest and rake us over the coals, though if you ask me I could do a much better job of it. You got your facts wrong, that’s all.” He was still staring down at his hands. “Do you know Raymonda Tawil?”

  The professor looked up and began slowly nodding his head.

  “Well, so do I, and you know what else? She’s one of my best friends. You can say we’re soul mates. We put her under house arrest, you know. I visited her in Ramallah. You may know her husband Daoud.”

  Sharabi kept nodding. “A fine man.”

  “I said to Daoud, ‘Daoud, now Raymonda must feel like she won the lottery. She finally has what she’s always wanted. It took her years of trying, and finally she’s a martyr, a media star. Mazel tov.’”

  The professor’s nodding transformed into a grin, and he was soon laughing into his fist. Ruth, too, started laughing so hard her stomach hurt. She asked him if he thought Israelis and Palestinians could make peace. “Our two peoples, I mean. Isn’t it time?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, Mrs. Dayan, you are entirely right. Maybe you and Raymonda are proof of what’s possible.”

  A few weeks later she got another phone call from one of the Israeli organizers of the upcoming New Outlook conference in Washington.58 On Raymonda’s behalf, he asked if Ruth could persuade Ezer Weizman into permitting the mayors of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron to attend the conference. The government had stubbornly refused, until then.

  “Of course,” she said. She got ahold of Ezer and began to raise hell. It didn’t do any good. “Ruthie, I can’t,” he kept apologizing every other sentence. His hands were tied. The mayors couldn’t leave Israel. People in the Shin Bet told him it would be a “security danger.”

  The conference took place at the International Inn. Sharabi stood in for the mayors, and Raymonda gave a rousing speech on peace. Ruth was there with Abie, Uri, Amos, some Peace Now activists, Edward Said, I. F. Stone, and other prominent American Jews. Jimmy Carter invited Said and Raymonda to the White House for dinner.

  Seeing Sharabi and Raymonda on the stage made Ruth more resolute than ever to use her and Raymonda’s powers to “bang some sense” into politicians’ heads. There was still one top politician Ruth avoided. One afternoon while still in Washington, she was sitting with Abie when he spotted Moshe surrounded by a clutch of security men. Abie nudged her, suggesting she give the fellow a hug because he was finally promoting life instead of destroying it. She had never stopped loving him. She also knew that speaking with him would tear open the wounds that had been healing in the jungles and mountains, far from Israel. She stayed riveted to her seat, and Moshe and his entourage disappeared through double doors.

  Mistrustful, reluctant Begin, submitting to heavy American arm-twisting, and with Dayan and Weizman pressuring from inside, eventually agreed to hand back the Sinai. The peace deal, f
or which Begin and Sadat shared the Nobel Prize, was supposed to lead to a general Israeli-Arab peace treaty. This never happened. Polish-born Begin deemed “Judaea and Samaria” to be the eternal property of the Jewish people. Lands where long ago our kings knelt to GOD.” He wasn’t about to deliver this sacred patrimony over to “beasts walking on two legs,” the Palestinians, and their “bloodthirsty” leader Arafat.

  Moshe, his schizophrenic respect for Arabs and atavistic attachment to their lands in full force, flatly refused to consider wily Arafat to be anything other than a terrorist. The most he was willing to offer Palestinians in the Occupied Territories was a sham autonomy, with no control over the Jordan Valley and the hill country. The IDF would continue guarding the borders, ruling the airspace, controlling water, and settling the empty space. Moshe’s vision of wagonloads of settlers, like in the American West, rumbling across the Green Line can be seen in his protégé Arik Sharon’s detailed scheme. In 1979, he wanted 1.5 million Jews settled in the West Bank.

  Dayan’s response to the victory of moderates inside the PLO, men such as Raymonda’s son-in-law Ibrahim Souss, Sartawi, and Sharabi, in winning Arafat over to the two-state solution, was ratcheting up settlement activity.

  The killing continued. In Paris, Mossad agents eliminated two of Ibrahim Souss’s PLO colleagues, both moderates, and like Dr. Souss, supporters of a two-state solution.

  45

  Militants for Peace

  The combination of Abu Nidal, the Israeli security services, and the rogue Jewish terrorists who blew up Major Khalaf in his Cadillac, should have made Raymonda more cautious, but she still behaved as if she were somehow immune from physical attack. The Virgin Mary protected her, she told Ruth. She surely needed divine help when there were as many as thirty activists and journalists, Arabs and Jews, crammed into her house.

  No longer trying to constrain Raymonda within the bounds of propriety and common sense, Daoud offered to rent an office space for her. With his refined indignation and tenderness, he complained that since her house arrest their salon had turned into a political club or a campsite. “I love you, my dear, and I’ll love you even more if you open your own office and let us live in peace and quiet.”

  She didn’t need much convincing, and Raymonda quickly found the perfect spot a hundred meters from Damascus Gate, on Salah al-Din Street, named after the great Muslim warrior who liberated the city from the Crusaders.

  The timing was right, too. With Begin brandishing his Nobel Prize, and Dayan feted as warrior-turned-peacemaker, she needed to expose the way the Israeli government was redoubling its colonizing ventures in the West Bank. But to launch such an ambitious project she had to return to Beirut and consult with Arafat.

  She left for Amman, and from there flew to Beirut. From the airport, a company of Force 17 men zigzagged her through the maze of gritty streets in West Beirut until they pulled up in front of the nerve center of the Palestinian resistance. Minutes later she had her second encounter with the legend.

  She spoke, and he nodded along. The gist of her proposal was this: Over the years, the Israelis had built up an integrated information strategy with a highly professional press office, regular reports sent to foreign governments, and an army of tour guides and “experts” leading journalists and VIPs around the conquered territories. All the Palestinians had to offer in response were scattered reports, for the most part poorly written, laced with hyperbole, or so slapdash and cavalier with facts, sprinkled with outright fabrication, that foreign journalists, overworked and less interested in fact-checking than drinking cold Maccabee beer at the American Colony Hotel bar, preferred to rely on the Israeli government press offices.

  A Palestinian press office, if done right, Raymonda said, not only could reach Israelis and people in the West; it could influence the politicians. We could counteract one of the Israeli government’s most valuable assets.

  Arafat squeezed a tennis ball as she spoke. She repeated to him what she had been saying for years. The Palestinians’ secret weapon was that the Israelis are a free people. “Do you know what that means? They’d rather get a suntan on the beach than fight us. Some Israelis can be our allies.” She gave this man who knew next to nothing about real-life Israelis a crash course. Yes, Israel has its fanatics. Yes, it has Begin and Sharon. But it also has communists and disciples of Bakunin, its Uris and Amoses, it has its Abies who agonized endlessly over the morality of their state, its crazy painters and poets and prophets. She mentioned Ruth and Assi.

  “Ruth Dayan?” Behind Arafat’s shades, his glowing eyeballs were expanding.

  “Yes, Ruth Dayan.”

  Sipping his black tea, he stared into space for a moment. “You are right. We need militants for peace, like Mrs. Dayan.”

  Raymonda’s press office was in full operation. For the first time, people in Israel and abroad got credible reporting from the West Bank. A nation arose from virtual non-existence by having a presence within pages of Le Monde, the New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and the Times of London.

  46

  Ms.

  Across from Raymonda’s desk, a large square window looked out onto the honking traffic of Salah al-Din Street. To clear her mind and plot her moves, nearly every day she ambled three blocks up to the American Colony Hotel, a well-known meeting place for spies from various intelligence services. Conversations were less likely to be bugged in the crypt-like bar downstairs than in her office.

  She ordered drinks and handed out copies of the latest bulletin or translations in English, French, and Hebrew from the press office’s newspaper Al Awda (The Return). Raymonda was willing to talk to Israelis, meet with them, protest together, and even risk her life, for the sake of peace. But her dream of a return to Acre was still alive.

  With Arafat’s blessing, the press office brought fresh vigor to a Palestinian East Jerusalem, showing strains from the comprehensive Israeli system of pass laws, permits, zoning, and multiple and sundry acts of bureaucratic malfeasance and chicanery. Gone were the salons and nightclubs and the genteel old families of the pre-1967 city. The city was full of garbage, pot-holed streets, bands of feral cats, and sagging electrical wires. Because the idea was to compete with the Israeli government press office on the other side of town by attracting foreign journalists, Raymonda made sure the office had the best coffee and aperitifs in town. Daoud dipped deeper into his savings to buy Italian furniture, French wallpaper, and plush clover-green carpet.

  The office functioned as a sort of human rights switchboard, with more than a dash of full-throated feminism. For hours every day, Raymonda and her coworkers worked the phone with villages and towns and cities, talking to mayors, activists, anyone with information to share. This allowed the office to come up with a complete documentary of events: lists of the arrested and beaten, the homes ransacked and property confiscated. With the “Kalashnikov” hooked up to a phone line, Palestinian voices were heard over the airwaves.

  As for feminism, her mantra was “When our women have the chance to get out from under masculine domination, you’ll see what they’ll do for Palestine.”

  Her fame grew. Vanessa Redgrave wanted her opinion about Arafat, to which Raymonda replied that behind his Smith & Wesson .38, Arafat was a man of peace. In a documentary she financed, The Palestinian, Redgrave is seen dancing with a Kalashnikov. Saturday Night Live did a skit with Jane Curtin as Redgrave and John Belushi, in tails, a bowtie, and dark shades, in the role of Arafat.

  Part of Raymonda’s careless sense of invulnerability, curiously, related to her feminism, which simultaneously aroused the ire of many Arab men.

  When Letty Pogrebin of Ms. Magazine, a committed Zionist, came to Israel with a group of fifty other American feminists in March 1978, she wanted to meet Raymonda because of her reputation as a rebel against “Arab patriarchy,” and a believer in Jewish-Arab coexistence, making Raymonda a “feminist heroine.” Pogrebin, repressing the “hatred” she frequently harbored against Arabs for “hating Israel�
�—her grandfather was killed in the 1939 Arab uprising in Tiberius—invited Raymonda to address her group at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

  A devoted reader of Ms. Magazine, Raymonda jumped at the chance. Of all people, American women needed to hear the Palestinian side of the story. Raymonda had on her most glamorous spring outfit, her Cosmopolitan Magazine look, as Pogrebin introduced her to the women sitting in the gilded reception hall. Israeli feminists in the audience nodded their heads in solidarity as Raymonda spoke about the evils of the occupation and the need for a peaceful state of Palestine existing side by side with Israel.

  Then the fireworks began. It was a repeat of her America trip, with the same lurid accusations, the same frothing mouths.

  “Israel is a democracy. How can you expect us to hand our land over to terrorists?” one woman wanted to know. An Israeli feminist tried to defend Raymonda but couldn’t because a black Baptist woman launched into a tirade. “I hate you Arabs.” She had her chest thrust forward. “You SHITS were the ones that sold us as slaves. No Jew has ever kept a black under the lash.” Raymonda, dumbfounded to find herself suddenly cast in the role of the slave trader, paused to gather her thoughts.

  Are you out of your mind, she wanted to say. By the time she regained her composure, others were piping up with their own recriminations and heckles. The best Raymonda could come out with was that Palestinian “freedom fighters” would never give up the struggle for independence.

  “Baby killers,” screeched multiple voices at once. “What do YOU know about FREEDOM?”

  She had expected a roomful of Vanessa Redgraves and instead got hardline Likudniks. Their lack of empathy pushed her to the edge of tears. She wanted to run out of the room, and would have if she hadn’t had a vision of her mother behind a sewing machine telling her to live without hatred, and to be strong. Never buckle.