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

by Anthony David

  After she had got word of the killing, she rang up Ruth in Tel Aviv. “You know what that husband of yours did! He . . . he killed . . . O my God . . . he killed my friend! How cowardly to gun down people . . . people in front of their families.” Kamal Nasser was the best example of a nationalist choosing peaceful means of resistance. “How could Dayan do such a thing?”

  “What do you think I can do about it, Raymonda?” Ruth had a sharp edge to her voice. “You think I’m God and can resurrect him?” Raymonda was angling for a public statement, but Ruth demurred. Maybe the dead man really was a terrorist. Ruth wasn’t about to defend people planting bombs and firing on Israeli school buses.

  To protest Kamal Nasser’s death, thousands of students and other Palestinians converged on the village church in Bir Zeit, to attend a memorial service. Raymonda wrote a petition signed by a dozen politicians, writers, and intellectuals, declaring that the PLO was the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Raymonda sent the petition to local and international newspapers—and fired off a personal copy to Moshe Dayan. The petition caused such a commotion in the Israeli press that Dayan admitted publically for the first time that most Palestinians backed Arafat and not King Hussein of Jordan.40 Few Israelis wanted to admit that they had an anti-colonial war of liberation on their hands. A Vietnam.

  The more people the Mossad eliminated, the worse violent opposition to Israeli rule grew. Bitter disputes within the ranks of Fatah broke out over balancing human lives with the desire for revenge for 1948 and 1967. There were those who agreed with Raymonda that hijackings and bombings and rivers of blood would never bring the IDF to its knees. More peaceful, political means, ultimately resulting in direct negotiations with the Israelis, were needed. Arafat eventually came around to the view.

  The “rejectionists,” led by a psychotic killer by the name of Abu Nidal, considered any hint of compromise with the “Zionist entity,” including mentioning the State of Israel, or having anything to do with Israelis, no matter how left-wing they were, treason. Treason deserving of death.41 Abu Nidal, a man who would later try to kill Raymonda, and even Arafat, was like Raymonda a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Palestine. Unlike her, though, his mission in life was revenge, not love. He bragged about being the “evil spirit lurking around only at night causing . . . nightmares.”

  36

  L’pozez Akol (Blow Up Everything)

  “I will tell you a story

  A story that lived in the dreams of people

  A story that comes out of the world of tents . . .

  It is a story of people who were misled

  Who were thrown in the mazes of years

  But they defied and stood

  Disrobed and united

  And went to light, from the tents

  The revolution of return

  in the world of darkness.”

  —Kamal Nasser

  In spring 1973, following Kamal Nasser’s funeral, Ruth sat in the front row, as Raymonda told a roomful of Israelis, at a New Outlook conference in Tel Aviv, that so long as people in the West Bank and Gaza lived under the jackboots of a military oppression, and security forces continued arresting, expelling, or otherwise silencing the best and brightest Palestinian writers, Tel Aviv’s freewheeling ways couldn’t last. Raymonda, all smiles, surveyed the audience. “One day,” she said, “we’ll come out of the sky with rockets and guns, we’ll fall from the clouds like bombs.”

  “Like bombs,” she repeated. She was wearing a long, tight-fitting satin dress with a slit up the side; her hair dyed raven black. From the stage, Raymonda hammed it up, showing the swell of her breast. “We will destroy Tel Aviv! If you don’t listen to us, let’s just blow up everything. L’pozez akol.”

  Her words flowed uncontrolled, uncontrollable, like lava, spilling, spewing, bubbling out.

  Ruth applauded. She knew Raymonda was telling Israelis a bitter truth; a woman a few rows back, however, bawled out, “Get out of Israel, you terrorist, and never come back.” Matti Peled, one of the more humane generals serving in the West Bank, went up to the stage, took the microphone, and said about Raymonda: “She is coming to us with beautiful eyes but then all of a sudden bullets and missiles are firing out from her rosy lips. We Israelis can only ignore her at our own peril.” Ruth applauded again.

  Raymonda more or less repeated her warning in early 1973 on CBS television when she told the Israeli journalist, Amos Elon, that to snap Israelis out of the inebriation of the Six Day War, they had to be “hit over the head.”

  With Olympian delusion, Dayan persisted in his multi-prong strategy of eliminating militants, buying off local Palestinians with jobs while settling the territories he had conquered with Jews. His cocksureness reached such a height that in early 1973, he gave secret instructions to Sharon to chase away three thousand Bedouin families from a part of the Sinai Moshe wanted for Israeli settlement.42 He and his next-door neighbor Arik cooked up an ambitious program to introduce two million settlers into the West Bank. Who could stop him? The Arabs? A joke going around has a general saying to Dayan. A fellow general pipes up, “How about invading another Arab country?” “Not a bad idea,” Dayan slaps his thigh in merriment. “But what would we do in the afternoon?”

  With Ruth no longer around to act as the emotional bridge, the relationship between the general and his children grew more and more distant; months would often go by without his children having any contact with him. Even Yael found it hard to reconnect with her father. Now that she had her own children, what bothered her most was his cavalier indifference to his family. “Father . . . would rather not have had children.”43 Now left to his own devices, without Ruth, he fell victim to “shallow, expensive personal grooming.” In his new look he sported cashmere sweaters and Dunhill suits, a favorite of Agent 007 in the James Bond movies. Moshe, the first born of redemption, was also the first of a now common Israeli type: the millionaire ex-general.

  The egocentric father put Ruth’s role as mother in a fresh light. Though Yael still couldn’t resist taking a jab at Ruth’s “martyr complex,” she was coming to realize how Ruth, “poor and too generous,” was the only person who kept the family together. “Mother flooded us with gifts from the nothing she had, and Father charged us for everything.”

  In October 1973, Ruth was with Yael’s former boyfriend Michael Cacoyannis exploring the Sinai for his film The Story of Jacob and Joseph. It was a lackluster production, but for Ruth the filming brought her back to the happy days of Zorba the Greek, drinking ouzo with Anthony Quinn on the Island of Crete. Maskit’s artisans did all the costumes and jewelry for the movie.

  Ruth was back in Jaffa when she got a phone call from someone from the Ministry of Defense. Egyptian and Syrian forces had opened hostilities. Israel was under attack!

  The Arab onslaught on Yom Kippur left the IDF flatfooted. Once the Egyptians broke through heavily fortified Israeli lines, Dayan cracked up and feared that the “Third Temple”—the State of Israel—was in mortal danger. Golda wasn’t quite so panicked, though she asked for pills from a doctor friend “to kill myself so I won’t fall into the hands of the Arabs.”44

  The Soviets and Americans stepped in to stop the fighting, but for the Israelis something had snapped. It was the national id—Raymonda heard the sound all the way in Nablus. Moshe’s patina of superman rubbed off. One Israeli government official, referring to his failures, said, “In another army, this man should have gone into another room, found a pistol, and we should have heard a shot.”

  Yael blamed the “treacherous” Arabs for the debacle, while Assi let the world know what he thought about his father, and the army, with the cult film he directed, Halfon Hill Doesn’t Answer. The Israeli equivalent to M*A*S*H, it was the first satire on Israel’s sacred cow, the IDF, and is widely considered the best Israeli comedy ever made. The film features a conman, a fat cook, and a horny commander of a base in the Sinai.45 Assi’s other 1973 film, Invitation to Murder, is about a serial killer
on the loose in Tel Aviv.

  Ruth refused to come out in public against her ex. But she did bring a bottle of cognac to support an IDF reserve officer who pitched his tent outside Golda’s office on a vigil to get Dayan to resign for mistakes that had cost three thousand Israeli lives.46

  Dayan continued his fight against Palestinian nationalists as a way for him and Golda to win back some of their tarnished credibility. “There will be no safe haven for you any longer,” Golda was now threatening Fatah leaders. “Our long hands, extended in vengeance, will find you and kill you.”

  Raymonda was testing Israeli patience with her war dispatches that ended up in the international press, in particular her claim that in the West Bank during the fighting, IDF soldiers had abandoned their weapons and fled helter-skelter back to Israel across the old Green Line.47

  37

  Mission Renewed

  Abie Nathan became a pacifist during the 1948 war out of a sense of shame: from the cockpit window of a Dakota plane, he dropped bombs on villages where members of Raymonda’s family lived and owned vast properties. Two days after the bombings he took a truck to see the damage. Wandering through the ruins, he saw burned bodies scattered everywhere, acts of “destruction, wreckage and death” caused by him and those who sent him. Now, twenty years later, no Israeli was more critical of his country’s occupation of Palestine. To liberate Israelis from themselves, with support from the Jesuits and John Lennon, he bought and equipped a ship he turned into the pirate station “Peace Radio.”

  Ruth was one of his first guests. The leaking barge was steered just beyond Israeli territorial waters and from there beamed out a message of peace to Beirut, Cairo, Amman, and to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Young Israelis, reeling from the war debacle, wanted angry anti-war protest songs—“21st Century Schizoid Man,” “The Grave,” and “People, Let’s Stop the War.”

  It was probably the first time the Arab masses heard “Rocky Raccoon,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” When they weren’t dancing to The Beatles and The Doors, the Tawil children were regular contributors to Nathan’s call-in talk ham radio shows. The show Ma La’asot (What to do?) was the only uncensored forum for Jews and Arabs to debate the past and present, and dream about a better future.

  In early 1974 Ruth began traveling the world on behalf of Maskit and the World Craft Council, a UNESCO-backed organization.48 The long missives she wrote to her children describe a state of mind, shifting between loneliness and excitement, and sometimes a sardonic humor such as her depiction of a visit to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, the self-proclaimed “Might of the Trinity” and “direct-descendent-of-King-Solomon-and-the-Queen-of-Sheba.” Not long afterward, he was toppled in a military coup, executed, and buried beneath a latrine in the Imperial Palace.

  Whenever she returned to Israel, Ruth always visited the West Bank to check in on her Palestinian “Maskiteers” making rugs and embroidery. The orphans in Bethlehem couldn’t wait to see her pull up in her Saab. It meant more toys. Her and Raymonda’s friendship grew through regular conversations over tea in Nablus, Ramallah, or East Jerusalem. The two women had a lot to talk about—women’s issues, children, jobs, various permits from the military authorities, and occasionally politics: Raymonda would bring up a list of atrocities she claimed were committed by the IDF.

  Raymonda accused Moshe of complicity in the disappearance of the young American-educated journalist, Joe Nasser. The two women had yet another of their standard quarrels in which Raymonda hurled her hurt and vitriol against Dayan, by way of his ex-wife, who stamped her foot exclaiming, I AM NOT MOSHE DAYAN.

  Nasser, from a prominent Christian family, was the editor of the Fatah-aligned newspaper Al Fajr (“The Dawn”). In a series of articles, he insinuated that Dayan was the ultimate dark force behind the assassination of Fatah leaders in Beirut. He got himself into much deeper trouble by pointing an accusing finger at a prominent Hebron sheik for helping General Dayan get the land for the Jewish settlement Kiryat Arba. A biting caricature in Al Fajr showed the sheik with a dusty shoe on his turban, a bruising insult.49

  After Nasser vanished, rumors made the rounds that the sheik’s goons had abducted him.

  It was then that Father Michel De Maria came to Raymonda’s mind. Twenty years had passed since her first meeting with him, where he had told her the importance of her life’s mission. Now, with a picture of Joe in her purse, she set off back to the village of Rama.

  The village church jolted her back in time. She felt the same sensation she had as a child, that sense of holiness in the small chapel illuminated by candles that lit up the altar and made the icons glow. The old man, buckled over, his noble face shot through with wrinkles, grabbed her hands with a firm grip and prevented her from dropping to her knees in a sign of respect.

  Raymonda didn’t need to tell him about the death of her parents, about her life in Jordan and the West Bank; he seemed to know everything. He caught her off guard when he asked about her “activities”—what was she doing with her life? He didn’t have to use the word “mission.” She knew what he was asking. The old priest followed her account of her activism, her disguises, her “Kalashnikov” with a mildly disapproving expression, as if to say No, Raymonda, your mission is elsewhere. “Raymonda, what is poisoning this land is not a lack of news; it is a lack of love.”

  Nothing had changed. The message was the same.

  Without betraying how much his words gave her a tight pain in the chest, and without mentioning Nasser, Raymonda pulled the photograph of Joe from her purse and handed it to Father Michel. “I’d like to know if this man is alive.” He took the picture and disappeared into a room on the second floor of the stone building. Returning half an hour later, he told her that Nasser was still alive. He was being held in a cave in the mountains outside of Hebron.

  Raymonda returned to Father Michel the following week hoping for more details, but someone had in the meantime discussed the matter with him, and he was clearly nervous. He only agreed to see her after long pleading. “Raymonda, you need to be careful,” he said.

  “Father, just tell me how we can find my friend.”

  He turned his back and faced the wall. He lifted his chin, a quick gesture, to free his neck from his clerical collar. “They moved him. He’s at the Moskobiya,” the former Russian monastery-turned-Israeli prison in Jerusalem.

  Proof of Father Michel’s vision came the next day in the form of a threatening telephone call from the police chief at the Moskobiya warning her that by getting involved in the investigation into Nasser’s disappearance, she was “endangering the security of Israel,” a “very dangerous” mistake. VERY DANGEROUS, he repeated with a raised voice to make sure it sank in. The final word Raymonda heard from Father Michel about Nasser was that he no longer “saw” him. Nasser had been “hit on the head.” His body was never found.

  Raymonda’s name was now being widely mentioned in the Israeli press as a nettlesome troublemaker. This was when Colonel Yigal Carmon, a Shin Bet agent, began tracking her movements. Her activism, and the uncomfortable facts she kept dredging up, kept the well-mannered, industrious Carmon busy.

  In spring 1974, the French-Jewish writer Marek Halter and his wife Clare rang Raymonda up with an intriguing suggestion they believed was more disruptive to the Israeli occupation than hijackers. As a child, Marek had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and, before becoming a novelist in Paris, he studied pantomime under Marcel Marceau. Clare ran a leftist Parisian literary review. The two convinced Raymonda to jump on a plane and head for the United States, which for Palestinian activists seemed like one continent-sized lobby of support for Israel. They wanted her to stand before audiences, Jewish and non-Jewish, and present the Palestinian case; and, with some luck, she might manage to loosen the stranglehold that Israeli propaganda had on the American mind.50

  Daoud hit the roof. He was resigned to the life surrounded by scandal and rumors—how many times had he heard that his young
wife was a CIA agent? But going on her own to America went too far. No! No! No! He would NEVER allow it. In the end, of course, he acquiesced—and he went with her.

  In the air over New York Harbor in May, Raymonda felt the familiar sense of anticipation visitors have the first time they crane their necks to see the Statue of Liberty. It was a stirring experience to see the big, brawny police with silver badges in JFK airport—and to feel no fear of arrest.

  She and Daoud ended up staying in a hotel on a derelict street in Manhattan. Choked with yellow smog most of the time, those were the days of New York City’s collapse. It barely registered: she felt like flying through avenues filled with muggers and perverts and panhandling drunks—but no soldiers. She was free.

  She gave a dozen speeches from the East Coast to the West. Inevitably, someone in the audience would ask her to renounce terrorism. She skirted the issue: no Palestinian nationalist could afford to come out against the “operations,” even if in private she knew violence almost always boomeranged. In a related line of questions, she was asked what she thought about Arafat; pro-Israeli Americans considered him a scruffy desperado, no different from Fidel Castro and other Enemies of Freedom. IDF soldiers were the noble cowboys with Winchesters; Palestinians little more than bloodthirsty savages.

  She wasn’t a member of the Fatah, she told audiences, but where she agreed with Arafat was his call for a “secular, democratic state for Muslims, Christians, and Jews.” She would add: “Don’t believe what you hear about us, that we are anti-Semitic killers. We are like the Jews. We Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world.”

  And for this she got smeared with every name in the book: anti-Semite, Nazi, the pretty face of a bloodthirsty cabal. One woman with bluish hair and kidney-red lipstick rose from her chair and was a lot more hyperbolic even than the Israeli at the New Outlook conference: “You come here with your smooth voice and your refined manner, pretending to be humane—but we know who you are! Your people are terrorists, hijackers, murderers! I HATE YOU.”