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

by Anthony David

  How does he know my name? she wondered. Or about my aunt’s cruelty? Who is this man?

  “Madame Hawa, you too have suffered because of the separation from your children. You are strong, alive, even if your children thought you were dead. They took your children from you, but you have been helping the poor and needy. You are a great woman. A saint.”

  Christmas began weeping, her hands covering her eyes. “Father,” she said, her face still concealed. “Please tell me. How are my sons?”

  Father Michel lifted his eyes to a crucifix hanging on the wall as if it were a hypnotist’s crystal. Raymonda was spellbound. “George and Yussuf are far away; they are beyond the walls of Jerusalem. Do not cry, Madame, because they are in good hands with honest Catholic priests and nuns on the Mount of Olives.” Still with his faced fixed on the crucifix, he described in detail their lives, what they looked like, what they were doing. “Be joyful: they have successful lives ahead of them.”

  “Shall I see them again?” She too was staring at the statue on the wall.

  “You shall, but just for a short time; you will never live with them again. This is your destiny. There will always be a wall between you and them. Walls of wars and bloodshed; dividing you will be oceans and deserts. They will live in strange lands.”

  There were other people in the room waiting to talk to the priest. The priest said with a tender expression, “Take care of Raymonda. She has a mission in life.”

  For Christmas, the way his beard quivered and the rustling of his black wool cowl made it seem as if he had betrayed a dark secret, the grim tidings of a prophet.

  “Father, a mission? Is she going to be a nun?” Her hands, strong from working, covered her face once again. “I don’t want to lose her.” Not even to the Church.

  “No. Her mission will be outside, in the world. She will encounter many dangers and will need our intercession. I know,” he continued with his gaze locked on Christmas, “I know that you have raised Raymonda not to hate. That’s her mission—to show many, many others, Jews and Arabs, the same thing. To help restore love in this promised land.” He said nothing more about the “mission.”

  Back in the convent, from the window of her room, Raymonda contemplated what Father Michel De Maria said. She saw in the “mission” a secret treasure buried in her future and which she now had to uncover. This was her quest, her “Holy Grail,” as she would say.

  16

  Tristesse

  Occasionally, from beyond the frontier, a priest or a nun smuggled a note from George and Yussuf, hidden inside a prayer book. Over the Christmas break in December 1955, Christmas received a letter from her sons, sent via Europe. The invisible masters in State Security opened it, discovered a photograph, and the next day she lost her job as a social worker. She was a “security risk,” an endlessly malleable term that could cover any behavior they didn’t like, such as a mother receiving word from a child.21 Christmas ended up working as a seamstress for a detention center filled with the children of refugees arrested for stealing in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Raymonda watched as her mother’s vitality leaked away.

  Sitting at her antique Singer sewing machine at the detention center one day, Christmas must have seen the embers of anger radiating from Raymonda’s eyes—how dare the Israelis turn you into a menial worker! She took her foot from the pedal. With fatigued yet calm words, Christmas took a long breath and opened her eyes again—they looked suddenly bloodshot. “Listen. The world spins, and everyone gets his turn. We were once the owners of this country, and now we have to work to survive. Don’t be bitter—there is no shame in working. People died in the war; whole villages were destroyed; our friends disappeared. Your brothers are gone too . . . These boys here,” she pointed her chin to the delinquents. “Can we blame them? They are from the villages that were destroyed: from Bassra, Kuweikat, Kabri. Their families were driven across the border, and only they remained, and now they steal from stores in Tel Aviv or Haifa or get into fights.

  “I don’t know why we have to suffer. There is one thing I shall never stop clinging to, and nor should you. As women, we are trapped by men in our society, but we have to keep fighting, even if it seems to be a losing battle. And we fight without hating. Hatred is what men do. We win through love.”

  Raymonda had not forgotten Father Michel’s words. But her life’s mission of “winning through love” was too much to expect from a teenager who listened to clandestine radio broadcasts from Cairo or Beirut each time she went home to Acre. On Radio Cairo, she followed stories of “glorious” Fedayeen operations and “brutal” IDF retaliation. In Egyptian-controlled Gaza, a 120 mm mortar slammed into a market and killed fifty civilians. Eighty-one Egyptian soldiers died in “Operation Volcano,” a revenge operation after Fedayeen shot four Israelis. The radio reports were invariably followed up with nationalistic songs, praise for the heroic martyrs, and a rousing speech by the Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser, the son of a village postman who had risen to be the charismatic leader of the Arab world.

  Back at the convent school in Haifa in January, the head nun, her face pale and hands shaking, stood in front of the students, grasping a piece of paper. She had just received an order from the military authorities: Jewish children were no longer permitted to study at Christian schools. The Jewish girls, Raymonda’s best friends, would have to leave at once. The school itself might have to close, the nun continued, because Jewish students made up most of the student body.22

  At first there was stunned silence. How was that possible? To be sure, there were pass laws for Arabs, but Jews could go and do as they pleased. How could the government bar them from studying with Arabs? The Jewish girls had become their sisters; for Raymonda they were liberators. How could the state of Israel enforce separation? Something must be done. Maybe the cardinal or even the pope could intervene.

  Remonstrations were futile. As the Jewish girls’ parents came to pick them up, Raymonda cried as she hadn’t since she believed her parents had died in the war.

  The school indeed shut its door, and in September 1956 Raymonda moved to St. Joseph’s girls’ school, on the Street of the Prophets in West Jerusalem, run by French, Irish, Maltese, and Lebanese nuns. In the evenings the girls were cooped up inside the gated compound partly because Yiddish-speaking Hasidim, their neighbors, sometimes spat at Christians, as though at the devil himself. A contraband novel Raymonda read at night was Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. The novel fascinated her. It was about the life of a sexualized seventeen-year-old Cécile and her playboy father whose life’s motto he took from Oscar Wilde: “Sin is the only note of vivid color that persists in the modern world.”

  Next to the school was a hospital. The Jewish nurses liked to meet their lovers after work, in the hospital parking lot. Boyfriends with Beatnik sideburns and goatees played love songs on the guitar to the buxom nurses. Raymonda and the other girls would switch off the lights and huddle around the windows to catch sight of flirtation turning to lovemaking. “Aflame with desire, we were all curious to discover the secret for ourselves, the forbidden fruit.”

  Then, overnight, the nurses and their lovers in the parking lot disappeared, mobilized for battle. There was pandemonium in the country: among Jews, there was talk of a second Holocaust, with Nasser cast in the role of Führer. Hebrew newspaper columnists warned of it being minutes before villainous Nasser was strong enough to launch his war of extermination. State propaganda repeated the strongman’s rousing and bellicose rhetoric on Radio Cairo against the Jews, typically right after the Egyptian diva Umm Khaltoum’s concerts.

  The nuns sent the girls home during a general mobilization for war. In Acre, Raymonda saw the French and British warships across the bay, in Haifa. Huddling around at home with her mother and neighbors in Acre, she sang along to patriotic songs on Radio Cairo, and like the other Arabs in town, she fully expected the Egyptians to deliver a mighty and decisive blow against the Israeli military. Adoring Arab throngs called Nasser “Al Rais,�
�� the Boss.

  Meanwhile, the Iraqi-Jewish next-door neighbors were just as certain Israel would win, and not only win, that they would take Cairo, take Egypt, make a sweep of the entire Arab world. “We are invincible,” they said, citing one of Moshe Dayan’s cocksure speeches. “The world is with us.”

  17

  Moshe’s War

  Ruth was always on the prowl for immigrants with skills she could employ in Maskit’s growing operation. She heard about George Kashi, a businessman from Baghdad, who had owned a large weaving factory and exported to England cloth for use in Harris tweeds. Arab nationalists, quoting the Arabic edition of Mein Kampf, had expelled him and the rest of the ancient Jewish community. Ruth looked high and low for Kashi, tenaciously tracking him down in the most unlikely of places: George, his badly crippled wife, and their twenty-two-year-old son Albert, were living in the dilapidated hut she and Moshe had occupied in the defunct kibbutz of Shimron. This former factory owner and friend to people in high places in Baghdad was a defeated man who drank too much.

  She perked up the demoralized man’s mood with the idea of reestablishing the factory. The only hitch was he couldn’t do it on his own. He wasn’t a healthy man. To get the factory off the ground, he needed his son’s help. Albert was a master in the weaving business and all the machinery that went along with it. But Albert dreamed of joining the air force, and was doing everything he could to be accepted into the service. He had already done his army service in a tank unit, and George was terrified at the idea of his son going back into harm’s way. The idea of reestablishing the family business was the perfect tool to keep him close to home. If he just gave up the ambition of becoming a pilot.

  Ruth had been around the military long enough not to be taken in by the legend of its superiority over civilian life. “Albert,” she began, “your father needs your help. Just put this talk of the air force to the side for a year or so. Let’s get the factory up and running first.” He agreed. The family moved out of the hut and into a real apartment in the development town of Migdal Haemek, the Israeli town built on the ruins of the Arab village of Al-Mujdal.

  In late October 1956, with war with Egypt imminent, Albert, the master weaver, was called up for duty in the tank unit. Just before he left for the army base Albert met Ruth at the Café California to talk. His father, he explained, was in the hospital, for an operation. Albert pleaded with her not to breathe a word of his army duty, for fear it might cause his father to have a heart attack. “But if I’m not back within four days you’ll have to tell him, because he’ll have to decide what new work to put in the loom.” Albert had come up with an ingenious new fabric, and there was just enough of the cloth in the looms for a few days of work.

  That night Ruth steered a US Army jeep in the night, without headlights, to a blackened military airport to pick up Yael, on the final commercial flight before the Israeli-French-English sneak attack began. Seventeen-year-old Yael lived in England working for the Jewish Observer and living with H. G. Wells’s daughter-in-law.

  Once again, Ruth was clueless about her husband’s machinations. Her information came from the state-controlled radio. Society ladies gave their gold rings and necklaces to support the war effort. Volunteers dug trenches in public parks; there were blackouts and drills, and people lined up around blocks to give blood.

  Moshe executed his plans with the knowledge that his IDF was an unconquerable juggernaut. The slogan “We are invincible” was no hollow boast. What he envisioned was a victory as decisive as Prussia’s humiliation of France in 1870.

  The Franco-Anglo-Israeli attack began on the warm, clear morning of October 29. The IDF under his command was in fact “invincible.” Moshe raced into action. His jeep was hit, and bullets punctured the outer skin of his plane, but nothing slowed down his hopscotching from front to front. He behaved like the Apaches who believed certain war paint protected them from the US Army’s Winchesters. Brother-in-law Ezer, the commander of a major air base, coordinated air attacks.

  Moshe poetically dubbed his war Operation Kadesh after the spot in the northern Sinai, where legend says the rankled Moses smacked the boulder with his magical rod that brought forth water. The more secular French and British designation for the campaign was “Operation Musketeer.” Whatever it was called, it was a masterstroke of total surprise and effectiveness. After dust had settled, Israel’s flag flew over vast swaths of Egyptian territory, including a narrow sliver of land known as the Gaza Strip.

  To celebrate victory, Dayan took the family to Sarabit al-Khadim, a mountaintop, the site of the Egyptian sanctuary of the XII Dynasty, dedicated to the Goddess Hathor. Moshe commandeered his army helicopters to loot antiquities, including three half-ton 3,500-year-old stelae covered with hieroglyphs. A statue of a bird ended up in the family garden on Joab Street.

  In the wake of a brilliant campaign, Ruth’s life seemed more glamorous than ever. She was the wife of the conquering hero, deferred to everywhere she went. Even among the newly conquered Arabs in Gaza.

  Israeli newspapers almost never mentioned the two hundred thousand Palestinian refugees in Gaza. Politicians avoided the subject, as well. But Ruth knew they were there. The day after returning to Tel Aviv from the family outing to Sinai, she hopped into a US surplus WWII-era army jeep and, with her secretary named Esther, dashed off to Gaza, across the old fortified Israeli-Egyptian border, maneuvering through blasted out tanks.

  She drove directly to the mayor’s office in Gaza City and, after introducing herself as Mrs. Dayan, asked if he could help her find jewelry makers whose work she thought she could use in Maskit, along with supplies of amber. Gaza had no amber and no jewelry industry, he informed her, just rugs and carpets. The mayor took Ruth to a factory, owned by six brothers, with over a thousand medieval looms and baths filled with deep indigo blue dyes. She was treated with rounds of black sweetened coffee.

  Back home in Tel Aviv, she was soon in touch again with the six brothers, asking that they begin working together. They were easy to convince. Within the brief period of Israeli occupation—by March 1957, President Eisenhower forced the Israelis to give Gaza back to the Egyptians—Ruth put some new life in the Gazans’ ancient craft by sending modern designs, better dyes, and new materials to the brothers’ factory.

  Part II

  1957–1970: Two Friends

  18

  Punished by Love

  Israeli soldiers, returning to Migdal Haemek, were at first full of good news. One of Albert’s friends claimed that he was savoring the victory, and was still with his unit down in the Sinai. There was some mopping up that needed to be done there. But as days went by, and there was still no word from Albert, worries mounted. Ruth, visiting his father in the hospital, told him about his son’s role in the war. At first his parents were relieved when one of Albert’s friends assured them he was alive and well, and was heading home soon.

  Ruth, sensing something was wrong, set out to find Albert on her own. She headed south in the jeep to find his tank unit. No one there knew anything about his fate. Perhaps, they told her, he might be in a village deeper in the desert where someone supposedly had spotted him. So on they drove. Again, no luck.

  Ruth spoke to the army’s chief chaplain back in Tel Aviv and learned that a Sergeant Kashi might have died on the first day of the fighting, trapped in his tank and burned to death. There was just no proof. The only bit of identifying evidence on the charred body was an embroidered undershirt. Ruth returned to the Kashi home and asked Albert’s mother if she embroidered his shirts. “No,” said the mother, trembling. She sensed what was coming and denied the truth if only to live in the illusion for a few more minutes that Albert was still alive.

  Ruth was determined to do something not just for the memory of Albert but for all of the young, beautiful boys she had known in her life—Zorik and Zvi and so many others crowding Israel’s military cemeteries. She set her designers to work on turning fabric, created by Albert, into the most stunning line of dr
esses and blazers she would present to the fashion world in the United States.

  She was in the bar of the Dan Hotel, meeting with her designers, when an Italian journalist buttonholed her and asked her, “Is it true you are divorcing General Dayan?”

  “Divorce? What are you talking about?” The fashion designers, clearly feeling awkward, got up and left Ruth alone with the journalist.

  “Well, everyone’s talking about it. Word is that you’re divorcing your husband.”

  “Why on heaven would I do that?”

  “Mrs. Dayan, because of his affair, of course.” This was the first time Ruth heard about his tryst with Rachel. For months, people had seen Moshe arm in arm with a stewardess he had met on a Rome-Tel Aviv flight. He was known to have had flings already, with young, old, big, and small. He fell in love with Rachel.

  As Ruth heard more details from the journalist, she felt faint. She had experienced many deaths in her life, just nothing so devastating, so debilitating. It finally forced her to admit that the farmer she married was no longer there. The kibbutznik she loved, and still did, would never have deceived her so publicly, as if her feelings were unimportant.

  Back home, Ruth confronted him with details she had managed to glean from the Italian journalist, and without a hint of guilt, with the same sangfroid with which he took enemy fire, he said, “Yes, you are right. I have met someone else. And I won’t stop seeing her. It’s up to you. You’re the mother of my children, and we’ve had a good life together. We still do. I won’t ask for a divorce, but if you want one, I won’t stand in your way.”

  The indifference struck her just as hard as the affair itself. Questions exploded like fireworks in her mind. Why was he being so cruel? Did he want to punish her for loving him? She didn’t want to leave him—divorcing the minister of defense, and a war hero to boot, was bound to be spread all over the newspapers, his tawdry behavior exposed. It would hurt the children. Yael especially, with her newfound European sophistication and her constant quoting from Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, would blame her for dragging the family through the mud. She was a forty-year-old, working eighteen-hour days, and wasn’t about to start over with someone else. Ruth decided to tolerate the affair.