An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission

by Anthony David

  In the fall of 1954, Raymonda moved from the straight-laced Nazareth Sisters to a more relaxed convent in Haifa. Most of the girls there were European Jews. Some had converted during the war to save their lives, and their families decided to remain within the Catholic fold and continue their Catholic education.

  Raymonda and the other girls hated them in their fashionable dresses under the school uniform. Their families were living in their homes and neighborhoods. The Jewish State was doing much to help them integrate while keeping Arabs separate and watched over, their movements regulated by pass laws. “Let the dead bury the dead,” the nuns liked to quote from the Gospel, teaching the girls love and tolerance. “You have to live, and to live you must love thy neighbors as thyself.” And they were all neighbors now, the sisters taught the girls, Israel was their shared homeland. The Arab girls learned about Hitler and the Holocaust. “Slowly, we grew to understand each other. Stronger than that. We loved each other.”

  The Jewish girls were more worldly than the Arab Christians; many already had boyfriends, were aware of their bodies, had a repertoire of dirty jokes, and were more modern. Raymonda had a secret attraction to their sexually uninhibited European Jewish culture. These girls never betrayed an air of arrogant superiority; never did she feel she was a stranger in “their” state. “Unlike some generals I’ve encountered over the years, they didn’t feel the need to hold my head under the water.”

  Her dearest friend Dvora was a Holocaust survivor, and it was in the context of such barbarity that she came to understand Dvora’s fierce love of Israel. Dvora described a hatred she could not begin to comprehend, and she cried with her. When Raymonda read The Diary of Anne Frank, she cried even more when a nun, whose family had also been murdered by the Germans, said to her: “In this world you will see evil people, like Hitler. But Anne Frank refused to build her life on confusion, misery, and death. She believed that people were really good at heart.” The only person the nuns taught her to hate—not the Jews, not the Israelis—was the mastermind, Adolf Hitler.

  Dvora lived with her family in the house that had once belonged to Raymonda’s aunt Sylvie, in the German Colony. Her first visit there was harrowing:

  It was a lovely spring morning; the sun was warming up the city after an overnight rain. Two women soldiers stood outside a shop, both chewing gum, a rare luxury in those days. One had a dyed-blonde look and the other was dark; she must have come from Iraq or Iran. The dark soldier said something about a bathing suit to the light one. They were both wearing khaki.

  “No way,” she said. “Navy blue. That’s not my color. It’d look better on you.”

  “You think so?”

  “C’mon, the color brings out your eyes.”

  She’s right, Raymonda said to herself: The light soldier has the same color eyes as mine. Maybe I too should be wearing navy blue.

  “Shalom,” said the light one to Raymonda, as if she knew what she was thinking.

  “Shalom,” she replied, looking at her and thinking how strange it was to speak the same language. She must think I am one of them. . . .

  She continued walking. The church bells still sounded, tolling for parishioners now mostly gone. Raymonda ambled through streets filled with Hebrew, French, German, and English, just no Arabic. More female soldiers were standing on the curb, guns slung over their shoulders. They looked friendly: one was smiling at her and said “Shalom.” “Shalom,” Raymonda said for the second time that morning. The soldier wasn’t her enemy. No one needed to tell her that; her smile told her so. Or does she even know who I am? What I am?

  She continued on a street now renamed Bialik, her favorite Hebrew poet. She was looking for her aunt’s old house; it hadn’t changed in the slightest. She rang the bell and the door opened. Dvora’s mother didn’t step aside to let her in, she stood there in the doorway, as if she wasn’t sure what to do with her. It was awkward having her there; it made her nervous. Or guilty because she occupied a house filled with Raymonda’s aunt’s piano, plates, draperies, rugs, her mother-of-pearl Damascus furniture, the French oil paintings of landscapes, the crystal chandelier over the antique oak dining table, the one with the lion’s feet. Raymonda noticed the tattoo on her arm. Dvora’s mother too was a survivor of the death camps.

  Once inside Raymonda couldn’t help herself. “YOU ARE THIEVES,” she exclaimed, bursting into tears. “This house doesn’t belong to you!” Dvora fled into another room. “Listen,” her mother, a beautiful blonde woman from Poland, began in a gentle, refined voice not without compassion. “We didn’t steal your aunt’s house. We had a house in Poland. We lost everything, too. I understand you because we, we are like you.” She went on to tell her about gas chambers and the murder of her family.

  Dvora’s mother, as though she was reading Raymonda’s mind, said: “Some day, and hopefully very soon, Arabs will return to their homes, and Jewish refugees would find new homes, and everyone would live together in peace. I would much rather have peace than your aunt’s beautiful home.”

  14

  “Maskiteers”

  Ruth was wrenchingly carving out her independence. She had little choice, being married to a man nearing the pinnacle of the military pyramid. In 1953 Ben-Gurion appointed him chief of staff. With his headquarters in Tel Aviv, Ruth’s parents put up the money for him to buy a house in a new neighborhood for top officers named “Zahala.” The street was fittingly named after Joab, the commander of King David’s army. Moshe put a 500-year-old Turkish cannon in the family’s front yard. Ironically, the cannon pointed to the house across the street, which belonged to his young protégé Ariel Sharon.

  Ruth insisted on buying her own furniture, while the three children loved playing hide and seek in the backyard filled with Roman sarcophagi, millennia-old gravestones, and Byzantine church pillars Moshe spirited away at night from archeological sites. The country’s archeological treasures became their playground.

  Ruth and Moshe made a strange couple, and with their three children, they were already the most colorful, and most eccentric, dynasty in Israel. During the day, the generalissimo was building a crack fighting force. He was home every night, for the first time in years, and reading to little Assi lullabies by Nathan Altermann:

  This land. Trodden, just like this, by a wandering sadness,

  Trailing in her thunders, calling her: ‘Where art thou?’

  Speak to her, tell her of things that are other,

  Tell her of fields that are learning to smile.

  The dutiful father who tucked little Assi into bed at night was one of the most brilliant, uncompromising military chiefs of staff in the history of the business.16 Dayan didn’t care for army protocol or for the pressed trousers of the parade ground. He showed up to meetings with dusty sleeves rolled up to his elbows; his boots were caked with mud—even his eye-patch was dirty. To one soldier raising his arm in a salute, Dayan tossed him a grapefruit: “Catch!”17

  The biggest military threat he faced was the Fedayeen guerrillas who “bore in their hearts the memory of the defeat of the War of Independence and hoped for a second round,” as Moshe Dayan lectured his soldiers. “Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers,” he told mourners at a funeral after a fatal Fedayeen attack. For years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homesteads the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we cannot plant a tree and build a home.”18

  In March 1953, a group of Fedayeen crossed over the Jordanian frontier and ambushed an Israeli Egged bus in the northern Negev. The guerrillas shot the driver before turning their guns on the passengers, one by one. All eleven, murdered.

  For these guerillas, former farmers surviving off UN rations, they had nothing to lose. For them, losing their lands was a fate worse than death. Fighting was the only way to restore their shattered honor. These “men of sacrifice” or “suicide
fighters,” so called, were the first foot soldiers of a guerrilla army Arafat, Raymonda’s future son-in-law, would eventually lead.

  To put an end to the killing, the IDF formed a special commando strike force headed by Ariel “Arik” Sharon. The Unit 101 was a clandestine club of fighters trained in the art of revenge and what in a spirit of extreme generosity might be called deterrence. The 101 was less of a military unit than an ad hoc strike force. In a grandfatherly nod of approval, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion dubbed the unit a “hothouse for heroes,” and lauded Dayan’s “almost insane daring balanced by profound tactical and strategic judgment.”

  On a typical Friday Moshe and Ruth, along with Reumah and dashing Ezer Weizman and a couple of friends, headed over to a Tel Aviv movie house, and from there it was on to Greek food at the Acropolis and the dance floor at the Dan Hotel. Her preferred spot was Café Kasit, the popular venue for free-spirited actors, poets, swingers, and a colorful menagerie of other avant-garde types. There was Nathan Alterman and his girlfriend, in front of bottles of whiskey. Or, the drink-sodden poet Amos Kenan once was about to punch Moshe in the nose when Ezer wrestled him to the ground. Ruth took up smoking while in the company of Israel’s Beatniks.

  Several of the people Ruth met in Tel Aviv cafes would later become Raymonda’s friends, too. Whenever Ruth wanted to meet the leftist journalist Uri Avnery or Amos Kenan, it was in a parked car, outside of the former 1948 fighter pilot Abie Nathan’s hip California Café, next to the Cameri, the best theater in the country. She felt the need to arrange such clandestine tête-à-têtes because Avnery, Kenan, and Nathan were notorious leftists, despised by the Zionist establishment. But they were also the only ones who understood Ruth, her dreams, her efforts at living out her old socialist dreams. They understood she needed to escape a lonely marriage with a relentlessly driven and very damaged man, with shrapnel still lodged in his skull.

  In 1953, Golda Meir, then minister of labor, called Ruth into her office. She had heard about all her good work with immigrants and asked her to head up a department for women’s work. Ruth agreed at once. A perfect name was given for the new venture: Maskit, which means “picture” from the Psalms. Her coworkers were the “Maskiteers.”

  Over the coming months, she became the general, leading her troops of Maskiteers, scouring the countryside for craftspeople barely out of the Middle Ages, giving them training, and connecting them with the best avant-garde designers. Ruth was offering these immigrants a future.

  One group of craftspeople Ruth and her Maskiteers discovered during their hunt for crafts was a clan of a hundred families from the deserts of Libya that had, up to then, lived in their own man-made caves of Tripolitania, dug twenty-five feet into the sand, as a defense against wild animals and desert marauders.

  Perhaps their best find was in an abandoned Arab village near Lydda, settled by an ancient Yemenite-Jewish tribe of master silversmiths from Wadi Bayhan, on the ancient Perfume Road on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. In Arabia, they had been the King of Yemen’s personal makers of daggers and swords. In Israel, they lived in squalid tent camps, living off handouts from the Jewish Agency. Even their adobe houses in Yemen were better than their dingy army-surplus tents they shared with chickens and goats. What’s more, they had lost what was essential to their lives: their dignity.

  Ruth promised to help them develop their craft and market what they made. Some of their jewelry and embroidery ended up in high-end shops on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

  Maskit came to be one of the largest employers in the country, by far the largest run by a woman. But in Moshe’s blinkered view, Ruth remained the weak, dependent woman who was too often on the verge of tears, a caricature that rubbed off all too easily onto fourteen-year-old Yael. Plainspoken and churlish, Yael had an aristocratic grace, unconquerable true grit, and was as strong as a stallion; she was clearly the leader of the Dayan brood and the repository of Moshe’s nationalist dreams. Swelling with pride at being the daughter of a hero, she felt vastly superior to her peers—and to most grown-ups, too.

  Everyone tolerated what Ben-Gurion dubbed Yael’s “flamboyance” until rumors cropped up that she was spending too much time with Uri Avnery.

  One day during one of Moshe’s frequent trips abroad an officer from military intelligence called and revealed to Ruth that Yael might have passed on top military secrets to Avnery, secrets on a Commando 101 raid which ended up in Avnery’s political tabloid HaOlam HaZeh.19 The journal was a national sensation because along with the investigative reports attacking Israel’s most cherished national myths and illusions, it featured bare-breasted beauties on the back cover.

  Ruth naturally defended Yael by informing the man on the telephone that Moshe’s daughter, a girl raised on the present prime minister’s lap—Ruth’s “uncle,” Moshe Sharett who had succeeded Ben-Gurion in 1953—would never betray the State of Israel. Never! She slammed down the receiver.

  Had Yael, in fact, done such a thing? Instead of confronting Yael directly, Ruth had Ezer do it. Yael was defiant: no, she hadn’t passed on secrets. Keep your suspicions to yourselves! she thought. Moshe was also suspicious, and the minute he returned from his trip he sent two goons to jump Avnery and break his hands. As for his daughter, he returned home, strode into her room, gave her a warm kiss, and then slapped her so hard she nearly flew across the room, followed by a second flat-handed whack. “I love you very much, but don’t take advantage of it.”20

  In ways only psychoanalysis could unravel, these hard and swift slaps drew Yael closer to her father, and further away from Ruth. “No blames,” recalls Yael, “no psychology, no question marks as to how we ever reached this gap or rift, and above all, no moralizing. Two slaps . . . and a renewed facade of happiness and unity which supplied a good alibi for both of us,” Yael continued. “We both wanted, with different degrees of legitimacy, not to be slaves to the confining dictates of family routine.”

  Against the background of this father-daughter alliance, Ruth pressed on with her work. Maskit’s first public exhibit, at the main Tel Aviv museum in 1954, was a resounding success.

  15

  A Mission in Life

  In 1954, Raymonda began spending more time with her mother during breaks from the convent school. Christmas, delighted to have her back, took her on long tours of their lost life. In Acre, they walked from one mansion to the next. “This used to belong to your Uncle Michel . . . that one over there was your father’s cousin . . . the stone villa with the awnings was your father’s, that one your great aunt’s.” Walking to the edge of town, they reached the checkpoint manned by Israeli soldiers, where Arabs had to show their passes before crossing. They turned around and headed back to the center of town.

  Arab neighbors furtively tuned into the banned Voice of Palestine from Beirut, broadcasting details on Commando Unit 101’s depredations. This was the first time Raymonda heard the names Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan. “No matter what these men do to us, we will never give up our rights,” said Christmas to her.

  By way of Kfar Yassif that summer, she drove Raymonda into the hills near Montfort Castle. They descended into a valley with gnarled olive trees and former tobacco fields now sprouting with JNF pines. Looking up at the castle, Christmas, “her voice trembling,” recalls Raymonda, gave a kind of eulogy of the family, a eulogy with an urgent appeal:

  You should never forget this view because it’s yours. Never mind that it was taken from you and your family. No matter where you are, remember: these olive trees are rooted in an eternal land—they are eternal, and so are we Arabs. When you are older, you must return to the valleys and the forests. Feel and sense the beauty, take in the fragrance of the lilies, the perfumes of the wild flowers . . .

  The two ended up driving to the village of Rama to visit Father Michel De Maria, an Italian priest renowned for his piety and, like the Polish-Jewish Wolf Messing, for his clairvoyance. Jews, Christians, and Muslims lined up to see him. The chief of police of Tel Aviv soug
ht his help in solving the case of a serial killer. Dayan consulted him about missing soldiers. The father’s fame went well beyond clairvoyance. In 1948, after the Israeli military forced the villagers of Rama to leave and pushed them north toward the Lebanese border, he met with Israeli intelligence officers and negotiated their return to the village. Gentle strength achieved what Fedayeen bullets never could.

  Christmas wanted to ask him about her sons George and Yussuf.

  They pulled up to the front of an old stone church topped by a towering cross, visible for miles, and passed through a wrought iron gate, into a garden. The pungent scent of jasmine together with the statue of St. Joseph reminded Raymonda of her convent in Nazareth. She was a damaged child who had spent much of her early years grappling with loss and anxiety. But within the walls of the church, she sensed an ineffable tranquility; it was like snapping out of a nightmare and finding herself safe again.

  A strikingly tall man with olive-green eyes and a head of thick black hair approached them. He greeted Christmas by her first name, and then turned his attention to Raymonda, bowed slightly, and extended his hand.

  “This is your first time you’re staying with your mother, isn’t it?” She and Christmas looked at one another. How did he know? Raymonda grabbed his hand and wanted to kiss it, but he pulled away. “No, my child,” he said. “No need for that.”

  At that point, directing his gaze at Christmas, he said: “I am glad you brought Raymonda to see me. She has had a very difficult childhood, being separated from you for so long. It is a dreadful sin to tell a child her mother is dead. So many people have conspired to make this beautiful child suffer.” He turned to Raymonda. “My dear friend, you are protected by the Virgin and by angels and saints. You have no need to fear.”