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

by Anthony David

  While she continued feeding Moshe his favorite cookies and cornflakes, she went into a period of mourning and of hoping for a return of the Moshe, the farmer she had married.

  19

  Mandelbaum Gate

  Days following the end of the 1956 war, word reached Raymonda that her cousin, the daughter of Christmas’s sister, died in a playground in front of a church in Gaza, killed by a stray IDF bullet. Far more chilling rumors circulated among the girls at the convent about a massacre in the village of Kafr Qasim, inside Israeli territory, near the border with the Jordanian West Bank. The victims were like Raymonda: though citizens, they were considered a danger to state security.

  The first time Raymonda thought of crossing through Mandelbaum Gate on the one-way journey to King Hussein’s Trans-Jordan, irrevocably surrendering her right to return home, was just before the holiday break in December 1956. Christmas got a pass and paid a visit to Jerusalem. They stood on the roof of the Pontifical Notre Dame Hotel, looking out toward the Old City and at the seam of barbed wire that was cutting her off from her brothers. Christmas talked to Raymonda about the natural freedom she had as a woman growing up in New York—“and then I came to this country, still in the Middle Ages.” Her words were reinforced by the barbed wire down below, as if the shackles she was expected to wear as an Arab woman, and the geopolitical scars below, were of the same order of magnitude, driven by the same male will for power and domination.

  Christmas’s face darkened: it was wrenching to be so close to her sons George and Yussuf and yet hermetically cut off. She offered a prayer, asking the Virgin to tear down the walls and blast open Mandelbaum Gate.

  Raymonda, too, looking down at the slithering seam dividing Jerusalem, felt the ghastly injustice of separating people. The Jewish friends she had made in Haifa were not responsible, nor were the adults protesting against the government, nor the average Israelis she met on the streets of Haifa or Acre every day. Female soldiers chewing gum and talking about bathing suits hadn’t committed the crime. But someone had.

  State Security strictly forbade Arabs to have contact with anyone on the other side. The Jordanians were just as draconian. But since she lived in Israel, the leaders whose names she knew from the radio—Dayan, Sharon, and their ilk—came to personify the chilling logic behind separation. In her inner court of law, she tried and convicted Sharon and Dayan for innumerable crimes, including severing her ties to her Jewish friends.

  She would also come to blame these leaders a month later at the Interior Ministry office in Haifa, when she witnessed a soldier, spittle from chewing tobacco running into the black stubble on his chin, savagely kick an Arab man on the ground, over and over, in his side.

  The main reason she chose to leave to Jordan was Habib. She was his only daughter and, with George and Yussuf for so many years on the other side of the border, the only child he felt he knew. This penniless aristocrat, the prince who lived in a rented room and hustled as an unlicensed lawyer, carried with him the pride of his heritage, along with old-world snobbery and class prejudices. Raymonda, tall and beautiful, attracted whistles from men, Arabs and Jews. He had no doubt that soon she would yield to someone’s amorous attention. He just wanted to make sure it wasn’t someone beneath him. A commoner. If the Hawa family was to claw its way back from catastrophic loss and penury, she had to find the right match. Impeccably dressed—he had enough money to do that, at least—his hair gray, walking with a walking stick because of the bum leg, he asked her to join her brothers.

  “What we have here,” he exclaimed, referring to the Arabs who remained in Israel, “is not your society.” The families he considered socially acceptable, and still rich, were in East Jerusalem, Amman, Beirut, or somewhere else. “I will not permit you to marry a villager!” He was like the legendary Kingfisher whose kingdom, the family’s aristocratic honor and wealth, could be healed by Raymonda crossing over to the other side. She had to leave her mother and her friends behind, and join George and Yussuf in Amman.

  By agreeing to be an instrument in Hawa family honor, would she be abandoning her mother? Was her father trying to separate her, once again, from Christmas and her influence? What about the “mission” Father Michel De Maria spoke about? How could she fight against the hatred poisoning the Holy Land by leaving it?

  She vacillated. Her “mission” was clearly to stay. She contemplated asking Father Michel but was afraid he would counsel her to defy her father, something she couldn’t do. By crossing the border she would never again wander the valleys of the Galilee with her mother, never again would she see her Jewish friends in Haifa. She might as well have stepped into a rocket ship with no way back to earth. The Jewish mayor of Acre, a friend of her mother’s, urged her to stay. “Raymonda, leaving your imma, your mamma, is wrong. You mustn’t leave.”

  Habib’s influence was stronger.

  In March 1957, Christmas drove her to Mandelbaum Gate. The Israeli officer who led her across the border permitted them one last tearful hug, and he took her to his Jordanian colleague on the other side. It was a hot spring day when she left the Jordanian border station, shaped like an oversized doghouse, and stepped into the heat. Her brother George was standing a few meters away. She hadn’t seen him since she was eight years old: he was tall and had a dashing pencil mustache, along with Habib’s noble pose, with a straightened back and fixed, direct gaze. She paused for a moment before rushing into his arms. It was as if she were at the edge of a cliff, bending over to see the bottom and seeing nothing. Her heart was racing, unsure whether she should continue. Was the mayor right? Would she ever see her mother again? But it was too late. The Israeli border authorities held her passport, and they wouldn’t give it back, even if she begged and implored.

  George too was crying because, craning his head, he was unable to see Christmas, who had already been ordered away from the border. As he tried to catch sight of her, the Jordanian soldier pointed to a woman in the distance. “You see that shadow? That is your mother.”

  20

  Under the Shekhina’s Wing

  George and Raymonda embraced. He led her to a decrepit taxi that, hissing and braying like an old mule, drove down to the Jordan Valley and up again to Amman. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that her brothers expected her, following Arab tradition, to be modest and know her place in society: to submit blindly to their will, and all for her own good, George never ceased assuring her, because Jordan was such a conservative society. “You should never leave the house alone; we are not in Israel; we are in an Arab country.”

  The first evening in Amman, George took her to a villa in a compound for top military officers. Instead of going to sit with the other women, she drifted over to the room with the cigars and cognac, lured by animated conversation.

  When George tried to shoo her away—“go back with the women”—the Jordanian army’s chief of staff, Field Marshal Sadek al Shareh, intervened. “My dear friend,” he turned to George, “why are you sending away such a lovely lady?” The field marshal had an important question for Raymonda: he asked her if she knew Father Michel. Indirectly he had recently communicated with the clairvoyant priest about missing Jordanian pilots. Father Michel received photos of the missing men and, in a vision, saw their frozen bodies on a mountainside in central Turkey.

  By sharing her own story of Father Michel, the debutante attracted the admiration of the men in the room. Too much so for George’s tastes, and back at home, he slapped her across the cheek. “You are not going to become like our mother! Do you hear me! You are going to be respectable.”

  In Amman, there was no easy escape from George’s control. Muslim zealots were known to fling acid at westernized Arab women immodestly showing their kneecaps. Most of the people on the street were men with kaffiyehs and women with hijabs.

  The social circles her brothers belonged to can best be compared to White Russian barons and dukes, in Paris in the 1920s, with their genteel ways, their nostalgia, and their delusion
s of returning to their old way of life. These faded men of impeccable manners met for drinks and cigars in their clubs and, when George let go of his leash, they grilled her with questions about Israel and the Jews, and what was happening to their former lands and villages and cities, in what was now the Jewish state.

  Marooned in a masculine culture, Raymonda no longer had a mentor—no Christmas with her feminism and humanistic values, no nuns, no Father Michel, no worldly Jewish friends. The only guides she had left were books. If only to escape from the tyrannies of life in Amman, she married an affluent Oxford-educated banker named Daoud: he called on the family three times before submitting his marriage request. Following the wedding and a European honeymoon during which she couldn’t stop crying, he whisked her off to the provincial northern town of Irbid, in antiquity a Roman settlement famous for its wine and its shrines to Dionysus. Only ruins remained of those happy, bacchanal days. Daoud founded the Ottoman Bank in the town, and at night, while he was reading the paper or talking business with friends, his teenaged bride reread volumes of Simone de Beauvoir and Françoise Sagan. In secret, under the covers, she scribbled lines in her diary about feeling trapped by a stultifying Arab patriarchy and longing for the “free-and-easy existence” she had had in Israel. The poetry of Hayim Bialik came back.

  Wind blew, light drew them all.

  New songs revive their mornings.

  Only I, small bird, am forsaken

  under the Shekhina’s wing.

  Alone. I remain alone.

  The Shekhina’s broken wing

  trembled over my head.

  The closest she could get to returning home to Acre was the West Bank. She needed two years of cajoling before Daoud agreed to move to the Palestinian city of Nablus, the ancient Roman Neapolis. Raymonda liked to head up to a sacred mountain outside the city, where the Samaritans believe Abraham had nearly sacrificed Isaac. From there, she could see the Mediterranean coast in the distance.

  Who was she? A Jordanian? Never. A Palestinian? Yes, but what was Palestine but lines on an old map. Was she an Israeli? Yes and no. She no longer had citizenship in the country, even if by sensibility she was a product of the mongrel Jewish-Arab, Hebrew-Arabic culture of Haifa and Acre. Her only links to the country were Israeli radio broadcasts and reports from the rare travelers crossing the fortified borders.

  Raymonda gave birth to her first child, Diana, in 1958, in the St. Joseph’s Hospital run by French nuns in Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. Through the window, she could see Mandelbaum Gate and the Israeli flags flapping blue and white on the building beyond no man’s land. A nun smuggled a note to Christmas telling her of the birth. The same nun told her of Raymonda’s next child, Jubran, in 1960. It wasn’t until the end of 1961, with the birth of Leila, that Christmas was permitted to visit Raymonda and meet her brood of grandchildren.

  The Israelis were now permitting Christians to cross the border on Christmas Eve, and so Christmas used the eponymous holiday as her chance to see the new baby. Flinging herself in her mother’s arms, she sobbed on her shoulder out of joy but also out of a melancholy awareness that the visit of a few hours would end all too soon. Christmas was only forty-seven, still beautiful despite her hardships.

  Later at the party, she noticed in her mother’s lively hazel eyes a flicker of indignation. Its source wasn’t the division of Jerusalem, or the surly Israeli and Jordanian border guards; Raymonda’s behavior was causing it. During a reception for businessmen and notables, she had withdrawn to be with the other women like a dutiful Arab wife. “Why don’t you sit with the men?” Christmas, as fiery and free as ever, scolded her for mauvaise foi. “If you don’t claim your rights, you’ll be doomed to eternal submission!” She paused and continued. “I gave you independence. When you were a teenager, you went everywhere—to Tel Aviv, to Haifa. And now—this? Why are you allowing them to turn you back into . . . into an Arab wife?”

  Shivering, Raymonda was too ashamed to respond. She wanted to rush into a washroom and burst into tears. She drove with Daoud back to Nablus, a disillusioned mother of four, having failed her mother and betrayed her “mission.” The idea of finding true love, that impetus for crossing over Mandelbaum Gate in the first place, seemed like a cruel joke.

  21

  New Face in the Mirror

  “Until we extend the circle of our compassion to all living things, we will not, ourselves, find Peace.”

  —Albert Schweitzer

  Bottling up the pain of betrayal, Ruth poured her energies into Maskit. By 1960, Moshe had retired from the military and began pursuing more private hobbies. Along with digging up Maccabee coins and oil lamps and marble torsos, there was Rachel and a bevy of other lovers. One distraught lover rang up Ruth to complain that Moshe was cheating on her with a fourth woman. The mother of a different mistress, who was Yael’s age, placed a tape recorder under her daughter’s bed hoping for blackmail material.

  Among Jews in Israel, growing prosperity meant that few Jews wanted to work in handicraft. With her brief experience in Gaza working with the six brothers, Ruth decided to venture into Arab villages inside Israel, starting with the women of Umm al-Fahm, at the time a two-mule town, because there was no industry and the Arabs, given the military regime controlling their movements, couldn’t freely seek work elsewhere.

  Ruth charged into town with a Romanian-trained technician and an expert on looms named Mandel Vasseli. Mandel, having only read about Fedayeen in the tabloids but having no direct experience with Arabs, was a bigot filled to the brim with every stock cliché current at the time: Arabs as violent, lazy, anti-Semitic, inveterate thieves and liars. But since he loved rugs, he agreed to set up a workshop in the village. Ruth was the perfect matchmaker, and Mandel ended up adoring the women who worked the looms, and they reciprocated the affection. Mandel and the women of Umm al-Fahm produced the most exquisite creations, including a rug that wound up in the lobby of the Tel Aviv Hilton; another, the “Agam” rug named after the artist who designed it, decorated the presidential mansion around the corner from Villa Lea in Jerusalem.

  Maskit still had no money in the bank, and the only way to get some was to drum up business abroad: in those days few Israelis could afford high fashion. Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, an old friend of Ruth’s and the general director of Ben-Gurion’s office, promised to help. He knew the biggest names in American Jewry, including Stanley Marcus, head of a retailer for high-end Neiman Marcus. Marcus agreed to organize an exhibition of Maskit’s latest fashion line. But at the last minute, due to the faltering health of the manager—he had terminal cancer—Marcus backed out. Undaunted, Kollek put Ruth up in a suite, at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, and set up a meeting with Barney Balaban, the legendary president of Paramount Pictures. Balaban began his career as a messenger boy at a cold storage company to become one of the most powerful and feared moguls in Hollywood. Kollek knew that he was a close friend of Andrew Goodman, the head of the Fifth Avenue department store Bergdorf-Goodman.

  Kollek and Ruth stood in Balaban’s office when he made the call to Goodman. “Not interested,” exclaimed Goodman in a loud growl over a speakerphone. He gave money to Israel, loved the country, kept a picture of Herzl in his wallet; he just wasn’t going to do business with Israelis. In his view, they had nothing of value to offer his company. Israeli fashion? It sounded like an oxymoron. What did Mrs. Dayan expect him to do? Introduce khaki shorts into the summer catalog? Balaban was so unrelenting that just to get him off the phone, Goodman fobbed him off by agreeing to at least send one of his buyers up the street to the Plaza to meet Ruth.

  The buyer took one look at the Maskit dresses, stripped to her panties, and began trying things on. She fell in such instant love with the clothes that a few months later she helped put together a fashion show, organized to sell Israeli bonds, in which Lauren Bacall and Shelley Winters stood next to Ruth on the stage, in front of two thousand fashion aficionados in Miami, to watch top models present coats and dresses.
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  Ruth told the story of Albert and how he was burned to death in his tank. You could hear a pin drop. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, an American-Jewish legend in the audience, told Ruth he had never heard such a poignant address. That night the fashion show raised $16 million in bonds, a whopping $100 million in today’s dollars.

  Lonely, desperate Raymonda got her first glimpse into the secrets of the Dayan family when in one sitting she devoured Yael’s roman à clef New Face in the Mirror (1959), one of the most successful novels to arise out of the Bonjour Tristesse craze. Someone smuggled the banned book into Jordan, and it ended up with Raymonda. She couldn’t put it down until she’d read through it twice. Sitting in straight-laced Nablus, a town without the basics of cosmopolitan life—no university, no theater or concert hall, the only cafes inhabited by men smoking hookah and playing cards—the Yael she imagined was a Françoise Sagan in khaki, a proud, emancipated woman; and each time she picked up the book she was reminded of the freedom she had had in Haifa. That Yael was the daughter of Moshe Dayan didn’t matter. It was Yael’s courage to defy the norms of society that made her into a kind of alter ego.

  Prudish Israeli critics, taking umbrage at Yael’s brazen sexuality, accused her of “undressing on Jaffa Street.” She wrote the book in English, and American readers snapped it up. A Life magazine photographer, fated to die in the Six Day War, captured Yael in a photo titled “La Femme Fatale.” Dressed in an IDF uniform and posing beneath a set of skull and crossbones, her eyes are cast into a corner, and her mouth is opened slightly as if reciting a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. In another photo she stares right into the camera, the skull hovering over her head like a macabre nimbus, her military shirt unbuttoned. In the same series, she is in Paris smoking a cigarette with a silver filter, reading a book in French.