An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  “What if,” began Raymonda, in what according to Pogrebin’s account was delivered with the “vocabulary of feminism” and “cadences” of a revivalist—“what if there remains somewhere in the Jewish state, somehow, some remnant of the great Jewish tradition of humanism? Some bits of the power your noble culture has in the diaspora where you are a minority, and you have no army. You call us Palestinian savages! The Israeli prime minister, you should know, bombed this hotel in 1946. Yesterday’s terrorist is today’s prime minister.”

  More boos.

  “And . . . and . . . and today’s freedom fighter will be tomorrow’s president of Palestine. His name is Yasser . . .”

  BOOOOO!

  Raymonda raised her voice. “His name is Yasser Arafat. And you talk about terror! The Israeli government has dehumanized us. We had a culture in Palestine for centuries. We knew English, French, music, and art. We were a light in the desert. Now we have lost everything, a people without a country. We are the Jews of the Arab world. Israelis are the Prussians . . .” Other Palestinians had said as much, just never in front of a mainly Jewish audience at the King David Hotel.

  The line about the Prussians nearly caused a pogrom, and Pogrebin held back a mad stampede of angry women, hotel cutlery in hand. STOP! She bellowed this so loudly that the women quieted at last. She asked Raymonda why the Israelis put her under house arrest.

  “I’ll tell you why. It was because the military authorities look at me as a malevolent propagandist for peace. Because I am telling everyone that the only way to prevent rivers of blood is for Jews and Arabs to sit down and talk, as equals. My mission is one of love, and Dayan and Begin want to muzzle me for it.”

  “Does that mean you condemn terrorism?”

  “Do you say the same thing about Soweto?” She quoted Sartre’s line about terrorism: a “terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others.” Which was the last thing Raymonda said before storming out of the hotel. 59

  Three days later, Pogrebin and the fifty feminists boarded a bus and headed for Tel Aviv. On the highway, along the coast, they encountered the smoking remains of an Egged bus. Fedayeen, sent by Arafat’s sidekick Abu Jihad from Lebanon, had landed by sea and hijacked the bus using Kalashnikovs and rocket propelled grenades. One of the terrorists was a nineteen-year-old woman from the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut. The aim of the “operation” was to capture hostages to be swapped for Fatah militants in Israeli prison. The operation turned into a bloodbath with over two dozen Israelis killed.

  Pogrebin had to dispel suspicions among many of the women on the bus that they were the real targets of the attack, and that Raymonda had somehow communicated their itinerary to the Fedayeen.60 The smoke and blood and death Pogrebin saw that day, in fact, convinced her that Raymonda was right in what she said at the King David.

  47

  The Tomb of God

  “If the prisoner is beaten, it is an arrogant expression of fear.”

  —Ghassan Kanafani

  Two weeks after the Coastal Road Massacre, Raymonda heard the screeching sound of military jeeps, a dozen of them, in front of her home. Soldiers, guns drawn, forced Daoud and the five children to one side as they handcuffed and blindfolded her. They drove her to the Moskobiya police headquarters where Joe Nasser had, according to Father Michel, been held. Palestinians call the place the “Tomb of God” or the “Torture Factory.” Where monks once tried to reach the divine, interrogators now worked at breaking minds and bodies.

  She was fingerprinted, and a female guard, a Moroccan Jew named Rose, led her through a heavy steel door and shut it behind her with a loud metallic clang. There, behind a simple wooden desk sat a small man who introduced himself as Yossi. He had dark eyes, and his lips were grimly pressed together. A long scar extending down the length of his right cheek gave him a sinister look in striking contrast to his necktie and the neat row of pens and pencils in the pocket of his button-down Oxford shirt. His voice was calm and refined, each syllable intoned carefully like a pharmacist reading from a prescription. “Mrs. Tawil, we’re going to have the opportunity to get to know one another well over the coming days. . . . If you don’t cooperate with us, you can stay here for years.”

  Yossi wanted to know about her activities in Rome and Washington, and about her discussions with Arafat in Beirut. “We know you met him.” This last word came out with distaste. Raymonda wasn’t dressed for interrogation, the Italian silk scarf didn’t fit the setting, nor did the Chanel maroon blazer or the matching coat with a fur collar, or the velvety black high heel Italian boots. “Who are your contacts in Italy? You have to tell me what you discussed with Arafat. Who else did you meet in Beirut? We need names.”

  In the same calm, steady, emotionless voice, he accused her of raising money to buy weapons for the PLO. “We’ve been watching you for years. We know EVERYTHING about you. You think we’re stupid? We know all about your little trick with the phone line.” There were a few more similar comments, followed by a cigarette or shot glass of steaming Arabic coffee, and he began again with the same line of queries and accusations.

  She denied everything except the phone line transmissions to the San Francisco radio station: she wasn’t a member of the PLO, had no secrets to reveal about Arafat, and had never raised a nickel to buy so much as a bullet.

  The only thing she said about Arafat was what she liked most about him: “It’s how he speaks. To me, at least. Some people find his monologs tiresome; I can listen for hours.” She also mentioned something that got through to her interrogator’s unflappable exterior: that Arafat was willing to cut a deal with Israel. With a sharpened No. 5 yellow pencil pulled from his shirt pocket, Yossi scribbled into a notepad.

  The five-hour interrogation session was just starting.

  “I know you like to smoke,” he said with a cool smile while opening a fresh pack and, smoothing out the cellophane, placed it next to a tin of biscuits. “And I’d love to give you some coffee. Against regulations, so sorry.” He asked about the news agency, and with what struck her as feigned impatience he tapped his pencil on the desk and, upping the ante, accused her of aiding a “terrorist organization.” For the next five hours, she denied every version of the absurd accusation. “You are alone, madam,” he said like a bad actor reading his lines. “No one cares about you. No one will rescue you from this place. You will rot here. Smell the air. You can smell the rot already.”

  Rose escorted her to a concrete cell, Number 12, with a sink green with mildew, an iron bed, a square wooden table, a rickety metal folding chair, and a single florescent light bulb that never went out. Because of the damp cold, she slept in her coat and boots. The stench from chain-smoking inmates and the acrid scent of vomit seeped into the mattress, into the very peeling paint on the walls.

  Each day Yossi, polite and impeccably dressed, circled like a raptor until he came up with a hole in her story. After each interrogation, Rose led her back to her isolation cell, and she sat on the bed and listened to the intruding insects buzzing in and out of the bars, and the sound of water drops dripping from the sink. Sometimes she heard groaning sounds outside her door of prisoners being dragged down the hall.

  Raymonda started losing weight, her hair fell out in clumps, she took on the smell of the mattress and sink. Yossi warned her that her comparison of Begin to Hitler was enough to keep her buried alive for a year.

  “For Christ’s sake, I was just quoting Ben-Gurion! Why don’t you dig up Ben-Gurion and grill him?”61 The only time she knocked Yossi from his unflappable equilibrium was when she said about Begin, “Deir Yassin was a kind of prelude for him.”62 The interrogator leaped up from his chair, grabbed her by the dress, pushed her against the wall, and barked into her face that she was a “danger to the State of Israel.” He then let go of her, ran his fingers through his hair, told her he was sorry, and sat back down and apologized again. “My God,” he moaned.

  After finishing one of the sessions, a guard marched her upstairs and handed her
over to a different officer who seemed to be a Russian, or who reminded her of a burly figure brought to life by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, a Soviet-style jail-keeper.

  The man was of gargantuan stature, a feature further brought out by his emotionless agate eyes and his shoulders, as thick as a steer’s, and long arms that looked strong enough to bend the iron bars of her cell. Like Yossi, he had a long scar on his left cheek visible beneath his light blond stubble. The size of the gap-toothed hulk, or rather, the vision of what he could do to her, almost made her faint: he was opening and shutting his hand in a strangler’s grip. But he spoke with an extraordinarily soft voice. When she reached him he said, half-turning, “boker tov”—good morning—and took her gently by the arm and led her to a room, as if they were heading to a dance floor.

  For forty-five days, Raymonda was in solitary confinement. She awoke one morning early to the sound of jangling keys and the squeaking of the opening cell door. Rose led in a Palestinian woman charged with stabbing her father to death because he had been serially raping her and her sisters for most of their lives. For long hours between interrogation sessions, Raymonda learned about her life in an isolated village, wholly under the control of her beastly father and a mother who knew but couldn’t prevent what her husband was doing. How the only way to stop him was with a long butcher knife. It felt like liberation, she said, to drive it into the detestable body she was so familiar with, over and over.

  The international campaign for Raymonda’s release was in full swing. She learned about the efforts of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir through an article smuggled to her, wrapped in a stale piece of pita.

  The Shin Bet refused to allow Ruth to visit. Even Minister of Defense Weizman, encouraged by Ruth, got the same response: his visit would endanger “state security.”

  Yossi was soon joined by other interrogators—at one point seven men faced her. Their final attempt to get her to talk was to use shame. Thinking that the worst indignity for a Palestinian woman was to have any association with a “whore,” they threatened to put her in a cell with a prostitute. “How dare you,” she snapped. “A woman is a woman. Why do you humiliate us?” Judging by her initial response, they must have thought the shame trick worked, but instead of baring her teeth at them for “daring” to lock a “respectable” mother of five up with a prostitute, she blasted her seven interrogators with a flurry of citations from Simone de Beauvoir. She threw in a few words from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “What sort of woman are you?” her interrogators asked with an amazed respect.

  In the middle of the night, guards brought in three Jewish prostitutes, from Algeria, Yemen, and Morocco, into the cell next to hers. Raymonda listened to the way they cursed the guards--in Arabic. And then all three began singing a song of Umm Kulthum, “Enta Omri,” “You are my life.”

  “Who are you?” they asked Raymonda. “Are you the terrorist?”

  “No, I am a Palestinian, and I love my country just like you do.”

  “You’re not here because you planted bombs?”

  “No bombs,” Raymonda laughed. “Why are you here?”

  “Because the government of Israel promised us milk and honey and we got shit instead. We are on the streets because our families need food. You think we love this country? All of us curse the day we came to this place.”

  For the final interrogation, Yossi handed Raymonda over to a tall, strikingly handsome man with hay-colored hair. He was the director of the prison, a man named Shimoni.

  Shimoni had a very different style from the Shin Bet men. He ran through the same stock questions—meeting Arafat, her secret rendezvous in Rome, her telephone hack. At one point, after she repeated her usual replies, he began to say something; then, with a cunning smile, he seemed to change his mind and made a sharp cutting gesture with the side of his hand. At first he struck only air. He drew close to her, pointing his finger right in her face. “So, Mrs. Tawil,” he said almost snorting, “I don’t think you realize the trouble you are in.”

  “The State of Israel is in trouble if you keep . . .” Before she could finish he slapped her on the face with such violence that she fell out of her chair. She scrambled clam-like on all fours, but he grabbed her again and, with one knee on the ground, he balled his fist and hit her in the face, slashing open her cheek. She could barely breathe out of her nose and mouth because of the blood.63

  In the split second before losing consciousness, Raymonda returned to the Acre of her childhood: fluttering through her mind were images of the Crusader walls jutting out into the sea; the white spray from crashing waves and sparkle in the surf; the playful acrobatics of swallows; the buckled old woman selling flowers from large yellow baskets; the midday Angeles ringing from the church tower. She also saw a man in a huddle of clothing sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of her family’s villa in Haifa in 1948. He was face down against the quarried granite, his legs crossed at an unnatural angle, one arm, the one with the gun, nearly touching the door, as if he was trying to knock when the soldiers shot him. The man was stiff with rigor mortis.

  And then the world went black.

  She woke up in the infirmary. Once news reached the Red Cross of her condition—doctors feared she could die of a brain hemorrhage—international pressure mounted for her release. Journalists came to the hospital, and the newspaper pictures of bandaged-up Raymonda were a PR disaster.

  Encouraged by his sister-in-law, in the middle of May Weizman gave a news conference announcing her immediate release. Ezer had a second announcement: he was firing General Hagoel from his post in the West Bank.

  Rose gave Raymonda the official news of her release. “You will be freed tomorrow.” Here her voice trailed off, and there was a pause, during which Raymonda could hear her breath; it was almost like she was holding back tears. “You are such a great woman, a woman with the same kindness of women of my country.” She meant Morocco. Rose had big, walnut brown eyes, black hair down to her side, and a perfect set of white teeth. “I will miss you. You have to remember, Raymonda, that we are your sisters. In Arab lands, we lived together for centuries. It wasn’t like now.”

  Raymonda could have dismissed this as a case of Alice’s Walrus and Carpenter, who wept salt tears over the oysters they gobbled up, but she sensed Rose’s sincerity. Her tenderness. They were sisters, women from the same Middle Eastern family.

  48

  A Furious Aura

  “The eyes are not here

  There are no eyes here

  In this valley of dying stars

  In this hollow valley

  This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms”

  —T. S. Eliot, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead: A penny for the Old Guy” from “The Hollow Men”

  The first time Raymonda read the book Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life, she was still in the hospital. In the epilogue, Moshe is wandering around a canyon in the Negev known in Hebrew as Nahal Beersheeba. Seeing what looks like a cave, he attaches a rope to the bumper of his jeep and clambers down, and begins sniffing around like a dog looking for a buried bone. What he finds is an Iron Age scene: potsherds, bones, flint blades, and an ax head. “This was their land,” he writes about the ancient troglodytes, “their birthplace, and they must have loved it.”

  When they were attacked, they fought for their birthplace. And now here was I, at the end of a rope, having crawled through an opening in a cliff-side across their threshold and inside their home. It was an extraordinary sensation. I crouched by the ancient hearth. It was as though the fire had only just died down, and I did not need to close my eyes to conjure up the woman of the house bending over to spark its embers into flame as she prepared the meal for her family. My family.

  Raymonda was barely able to hold up the book, and even though it made her wince in pain, she laughed at Dayan’s imaginary “family.” A light bulb went off. “My God,” she said to herself. “The great general with so much power over us is stark raving mad.” She almost pitied him.<
br />
  Dayan was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after quitting Begin’s government in 1980.

  During the final family gathering on Joab Street, a brood of grandchildren clamored over the pirate’s chest of Roman sarcophagi, Byzantine gravestones, and bronze church bells. The parting gift the warrior-troglodyte gave his children that day was a macabre swansong: “At the end of the day/ Let each of you cultivate our ancestors’ land/ and have the sword within reach above your bed. /And at the end of your days/ bring it down and give it to your children.” Yael brushed off his ode as “clannish and almost primitive in its brutal lack of any shred of light, only fighting, till the end your days, and of our children’s days. This was his gift, his inheritance.”

  Assi’s showdown with Moshe was one of the greatest theatrical scenes of his career, a soliloquy, or rather a rant at his father’s bedside. The verbal assault could easily be slipped into an Israeli version of King Lear, or Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Moshe in the role of “Big Daddy.”

  Though the two had had nothing to do with one another for years, the prodigal son was running low on cash—cocaine was an expensive habit—and knowing his millionaire father could afford it, thought he could wheedle some money out of him and decided to swing by Zahala. Assi noticed his shrunken figure. “So it’s true, you are dying.”

  Moshe was clearly in no position to slap his children around any more, so Assi spilled out decades of resentment:

  “Listen, I want to tell you a few things.” His voice climbed into a high, reedy, inquisitional register. “I want to tell you that you were OK, you were quite a father till the age of sixteen. Since then just one thing I remember, that you are a SOB, you are the worst person, full of yourself, full of shit. You are the one who invented screwing as a national item; who sends his bodyguard to give my kids chocolate on their birthdays. They don’t know much about you. But I’ll tell them. You are the generation that lost sight . . . of what we were . . . Because at a certain point you thought you were King David.”