Saigon was in the middle of war. Already in the airport Ruth saw only soldiers, and she could hear the sound of bombs from the incessant Vietcong attacks. The driver who took her to a run-down hotel on the outskirts of town, where the electricity had been cut off by a recent guerrilla attack, told her to keep the window of the car open in case someone tossed in a grenade. Just pick it up, he instructed her, and lob it back. “Be quickie, quickie, or we deadie, deadie!” The same driver told her she wouldn’t be able to visit the villages where much of the best handicraft came from because they were under Vietcong control. The rebels would kill him if he drove her there, and take her hostage.
From the hotel, Ruth sent a message to the American top man General Westmoreland’s office asking them to pass on the news to Moshe that she was in town. Within a couple hours, Moshe turned up in an armored jeep.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to see you,” she replied. “Why else would I be here? Are you happy?”
“A little. Well, yes.” And he was. The two had the last romantic evening of their marriage. They went to a Chinese restaurant, where they laughed and drank, and then at the club they danced the fox trot, all the while bombs were exploding outside, the rattle of gunfire rose above the wailing sounds of horns and trumpets of the orchestra.
The next day he returned to the jungle, and Ruth spent two days in Saigon listening to the tragic tales of Vietnamese prostitutes in the bars, serving the American boys.
In early 1967, Raymonda was reading Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit about a crippling, profound ennui. She had a lot of time on her hands for contraband books because the king had imposed a strict curfew on Nablus, with orders to open fire on anyone moving around at night without permission. She had to mothball her literary salon.
Brute suppression was the palace’s response to a popular protest movement against the government for its weak-kneed response to an Israeli raid on a West Bank village. Operating from Jordanian refugee camps, Arafat’s guerrillas snuck into Israeli territory and killed three soldiers with a bomb. The Jordanian government, fearful of Israeli reprisals, offered to use bloodhounds to hunt down the men responsible. The king sent a neighborly letter of condolence to the Israeli government.
Chief of Staff Rabin ignored Jordanian entreaties and unleashed six hundred soldiers, backed by tanks, across the Jordanian border. They targeted the village of Samua. While the villagers had had nothing to do with Fatah, meting out justice was not the purpose of “Operation Shredder.” The scores of civilians killed or wounded and the homes blown up by sappers delivered the message that Israel was invincible.
As soon as word reached Nablus, people poured into the streets chanting, “Yesterday it was Samua, tomorrow it could be Jenin or Nablus.” The monarchy’s loyal herdsmen, Bedouin nomads resentful of better-educated and wealthier Palestinians, beat demonstrators with rifle butts, flayed them with their camel whips and fired live rounds into crowds. Hundreds of demonstrators ended up in El Jafar, the dreaded desert concentration camp. The regime slapped a strict curfew on everyone else.
On one occasion Raymonda was at home in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, and she looked up to find a soldier outside the window. He kept the rifle raised and drew a bead on her chest. She let out a scream, and the soldier scurried off.
With her neighbor Sahar Khalifeh, a friend and novelist from the Women’s Union, Raymonda sped into action.25 In one of her contraband feminist books she read about the women in ancient Greece who had called a sex strike to put an end to war. In a variation on the theme, and with politically active men sitting in prison or otherwise muzzled, she and partners in the Women’s Union sent word to hundreds of women, and the following day they marched to the governor’s mansion with their demands. To the soldiers, too dumbfounded to open fire, the women chanted at the top of their lungs, “Arms for self-defense! An end to the brutality of the army! An end to the curfew! Release the imprisoned intellectuals and political leaders!”
A few days later the government suspended the curfew, while keeping the regime’s repressive apparatus in place. The king, fearful of overthrow by restless Palestinians who made up half the population of his kingdom, learned one fatal lesson: next time the Israelis start shooting, he had to respond with at least a symbolic show of resistance.
25
Six Days
“Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! And evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day.”
—Genesis 1:31
It was in an atmosphere of clampdown and the muzzling of dissent that over the radio Raymonda listened to Nasser stirring up the Cairo mob with heartrending addresses. “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” Nasser said, emboldened by fresh shipments of Soviet weaponry. “The Arab people want to fight.”
The more histrionic the rants, the louder he beat the war drums, the more bloodcurdling the threats, the more Raymonda suspected that the man nicknamed Al Rais—“The Boss”—had no intention of taking on American-backed Sparta. From Sartre and her mother, she developed a disdain of inauthenticity, so evident in the play-acting of Arab leaders. Nasser was posturing.
During the days leading up to a war that would change the lives of Israelis and Palestinians for decades, most Israelis weren’t nearly as perspicuous as Raymonda and felt like outgunned underdogs facing a dastardly maniac. Newspapers and radio commentators made references to the Führer and described how mustachioed Nasser had hired ex-Nazi rocket scientists to execute his evil plots. From the press came deafening drumbeats to get Dayan back at the helm of the military. For most Israelis he was like the masked hero coming to the rescue of the innocent victim, tied to the railroad tracks.
Ruth felt the same way. Moshe might have been a womanizing rascal but his love for the State of Israel was unquestioned.
The wave of national hysteria pressured Prime Minister Levi-Eshkol to hand over the Ministry of Defense to Dayan. The old team was back: Moshe, Rabin, Ezer Weizman, and Arik Sharon. Weizman, elated to have his brother-in-law in charge, talked about “leadership walking on two legs and having one eye.” Ezer provided him with a detailed plan to destroy the Egyptian air force with a preemptive raid.
The morning of the sneak attack, on June 5, Moshe had toast and cornflakes with Ruth followed by coffee and croissants with his mistress Rachel. His mood was “fantastically optimistic,” Rachel said later, and not least, because a fortuneteller he consulted assured him that the war would end in glory.
According to Israeli plan, the US-supplied Phantom and French-supplied Mirage jets, dipping and diving over the Egyptian desert, decimated the Egyptian air force.
In the West Bank, the seething discontent of King Hussein’s subjects, barely contained by his camel-mounted soldiers, was the reason he opened fire once news reached him of the Israelis’ attack against the Egyptians. His feeble efforts led to the Israeli military juggernaut’s conquest of what was left of Palestine.
The following day, June 6, brought to Raymonda’s mind the Jewish fortuneteller who had warned Habib against giving her the name “Raymonda.” Instead of celebrating her birthday with American-style frosted cake, candles, and balloons as her children had planned, she listened to sporadic BBC reports of Israeli advances on Jerusalem. Nablus was graveyard still. Radio broadcasts from Cairo spoke of an assault by “enemies and cowards,” and other verbal exercises in self-deception. King Hussein feebly pleaded for Palestinians to “kill the infidel wherever you find them, with your arms, hands, nails, and teeth if necessary.”
Switching stations to Israeli radio, Raymonda heard a husky male voice, like that of a sports announcer, proclaiming, “We have taken Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkarm, and Kalkilya. Our troops are now approaching Nablus. The enemy forces are surrendering.”
The Tawil family lived in Nablus in the greenest corner of Palestine, and throughout the day before the fall of Nablus they sat in the basement because troops from the Israeli po
sition were firing a hailstorm of bullets at the side of the house. On the other side of the valley, above a copse of pines, Weizman’s jets launched rockets at a company of tanks belonging to the Jordanian army fleeing from the hopeless fighting in the north. Within minutes the tanks were split open like tin cans, their turrets blown open, their cannons facing random directions.
When Raymonda headed upstairs to grab water and food, what she saw out the window—bodies littering the orchards—brought flashbacks of 1948. Down in the valley were thousands of refugees streaming out from the city of Kalkilya. Pushing wheelbarrows, dully, ploddingly, the people were dressed in whatever they could grab before running, as if the devil himself were at their heels. Society ladies, flinging away their high heels, hobbled barefoot.
She threw on a pair of sneakers and, waving a white bath towel in her hand, dashed out of the house until she reached a group of women, children, and a few old men. One woman, bleeding from shrapnel wounds in the kidney, collapsed in front of her. “What’s happening?” They told her that Israeli leaders had ordered their evacuation, and the Israeli army was systematically destroying the town, using tanks and dynamite. “We were forced to leave.” A dozen voices rose at once. “The soldiers—they brought everyone to the mosque and ordered us to get out of the town. Even when we left, they shot at us.”
The refugees were in desperate need of food and water. She and Daoud did what they could, which wasn’t much; there were hundreds, thousands, and more arriving by the hour. As dusk approached, she and her neighbor Sahar Khalifeh drove along deserted roads to the St. Luke’s Evangelical Hospital in Nablus to see if they could send anyone to tend to the wounded. Nablus hadn’t yet been conquered, and the king’s soldiers manning the checkpoints let the two women pass. It was getting late; the sun dipped down behind the bare brown hills. There was dust in the air, and a strange smell, a portent of the horror that was to strike later that night.
The chief surgeon at the hospital was screaming, “What do you mean help you? I can’t operate here in the hospital.” Wounded people from Kalkilya filled the corridors. “I need plasma; all my supplies are bad because of the electricity.” Power outages cut the juice for hours at a time, and the hospital lacked enough diesel fuel to run the generators. Some of the wounded were Egyptian and Iraqi officers. Raymonda went home to get hand-tailored business suits from Daoud’s closet and gave them to the wounded officers so they could be smuggled out before the Israeli army showed up to arrest them.
“Hey, where the hell are my suits?” Daoud later wanted to know.
“Well, with some luck they’re on their way to Cairo.”
The next day, instructions from the mayor of Nablus for citizens to hang white sheets from their balconies removed all doubt: Palestinians had lost the city before putting up a fight. It was dead quiet as Sahar and Raymonda jumped back in the car and returned to Nablus to find the director of social work in Nablus at home in his house slippers. They pushed the reluctant man into the back seat of the car like in a hijacking, painted a crude red cross on the hood, and headed directly to the provisional headquarters of the Israeli military. They dodged roadblocks, whizzed past wrecks of jeeps, burned out and still smoking, and dodged bodies on the street, most of them civilians. Bullet casings littered the ground.
Then suddenly, there they were, Israeli women in uniforms. They were foreign invaders, and as such, Raymonda had to oppose them, even though she had more in common with them than the docile wives of Nablus. The IDF women, crackling with health, were less like invaders than a group of idealized women in a fashion ad.
The director of social work assumed the soldiers would either shoot or arrest them. “You don’t know these people,” snapped Raymonda. “I do; believe me, we’ll get through.” Given her education in Haifa, she was one of a handful of Palestinians who could distinguish between soldiers following orders and their invisible, all-powerful leaders giving them. The only Israeli leader whose face she could conjure up was piratical Dayan’s. Soldiers hadn’t initiated the destruction of Kalkilya: that much she was certain of. Soldiers hadn’t ordered napalm dropped on peasants’ fields.26 Generals did.
Speaking Hebrew, she dazzled a clutch of male soldiers who let them pass all the way to the command post. The men, their caps canted at rakish angles, whistled and shouted at Raymonda and Sahar, Ezeh chatichot! What babes! The director of social work, too faint to move, remained silent.
“Raymonda!” She stared in disbelief. There in front of her was one of her Jewish neighbors from Acre, an Iraqi. They had played hide-and-go-seek together as children.
“What the devil are you doing here?”
“I should ask you the same question,” she rejoined after they hugged one another, all to the astonishment of Sahar and the other soldiers. “We are going to Damascus, Raymonda,” he said with a boyish excitement in Arabic. “We’re on our way to Syria. We’re gonna kick the shit out of them!” She had family in Damascus, and to hear her childhood friend boast about “kicking the shit” out of the Syrians and attacking Damascus, the jewel of the Arab world, horrified her just as much as the senseless destruction she had seen that day. She turned cold. “Instead of giving him a slap, I brushed past him.” The next day in the Golan he died when he stepped on a land mine.
One of the older officers asked Raymonda where she learned Hebrew, and she told him her story. He turned out to be an old schoolmate of Habib’s. “In honor of your father,” he said in a refined literary Arabic, “I will help you,” he said. He took the three to the director of the Israeli Red Cross, but when they asked him to transfer plasma to St. Luke’s, the director, sworn to the Red Cross’s motto “with humanity, toward peace,” barked out some vulgarities and called Arabs “primitives.” “Yeah sure, you attack us, you want to drive us into the sea, and now you come to us for blood! Go to hell!”
Raymonda wanted to lunge at him with her polished fingernails. “You Israelis are the ones who cut the electricity to the hospital. You ruin our blood supply and then call us primitive!”
Habib’s old friend intervened and demanded that the Israeli Red Cross transfer blood to the hospital. He then introduced Raymonda to an extraordinary man, Dayan’s military governor for the West Bank, a veteran kibbutznik and scholar named Zvi Elpeleg.27
She told Colonel Elpeleg about the refugees from Kalkilya, and at first he didn’t believe her. “Then come to my home this evening and meet them,” she replied. He did. The sight of hundreds of people camped out in fields, hungry, thirsty, evicted from their homes, shocked him into sending jeeps and tanks to deliver milk and bread to the refugees, and to evacuate the wounded to St. Luke’s. Raymonda struck up a conversation with one of the soldiers, an immigrant from Morocco who spoke French and expressed boundless bitterness at what he had witnessed during the fighting, things that went against what he called the “democracy and humanity of the Jewish people.” He lifted up his assault rifle with a look of almost deranged horror. “You must believe me, madam, I didn’t use the rifle. I saw soldiers shoot down children, but I didn’t. Croyez-moi, Madame.” The cruelty he had witnessed wasn’t Jewish. “What’s happening to this country?” he continued with a string of curses. “The land of our ancestors, the land of the prophets. Like Dayan, the great prophet!”
Raymonda translated as some of the refugees asked the French-speaking soldier if they could return to their homes. “Ask Moshe Dayan if you have a place to go to. Kalkilya no longer exists! Finished!”28
26
The Dayan-asty
“Dayan is wearing Jerusalem like a new pair of shoes.”
—Halim Isber Barakat, Days of Dust
The closest Ruth got to the fighting was when an Iraqi Russian-supplied Tupolev bombed a neighborhood close to Nahalal, wounding twenty-one and killing a distant member of the Dayan clan. Ezer phoned her to assure her that Zorik’s son Uzi, serving in the paratroopers, was safe and sound in the freshly conquered Sinai.
In a matter of a few short weeks Dayan cata
pulted from being a washed-up retired general gluing together Iron Age pottery shards to being featured on the front cover of the June 16 edition of Time with the banner headline “How Israel Won The War.” An English tabloid voted him the fifth sexiest man on earth, and fashion models in London, Paris, and Tokyo took to sporting eye-patches.
Most people associated him as the leader of the daring Jewish underdogs, a modern David that knocked out the villain in as few days as God conjured up the cosmos. The iconic picture of Moshe marching to the liberated Western Wall in the Old City reinforced the message that the Jewish people were finally in control of their own past, present, and future. The listless years of retirement made him receptive to myth-mongering, and standing in the narrow passageway between a wall built by King Herod, the Wailing Wall, and the Maghrebi Muslim quarter, the oldest in the city—Arafat had spent four years there as a child—he surveyed the scene. Some of his soldiers wept openly just by touching the legendary stones that once belonged to the Second Temple. Moshe waxed poetic on Jewish history: “How many times did the Jewish people have such a victory? Not since King David and Alexander Yannai.” From between the Herodian stones he plucked a flower for his mistress Rachel.
Assi, a soldier in the paratroopers, sat out the war in the north close to the Lebanese border, playing chess. Udi, a six-year veteran of the Navy Frogs, landed in the stockade because he commandeered an army jeep and roamed around the freshly conquered Golan Heights. Lieutenant Yael, the most Alpha among the lot, was a correspondent in the Negev and Sinai deserts, the main theaters of war. At one point she found herself in a ruined enemy outpost, and despite the fact that Daddy was far off, she sensed his ubiquitous presence, more powerful than ever. “His face was with me, his strong, stable gaze, his calm, composed confidence, brain ticking away like a radar searching for options in a circular movement.”
An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission Page 11