Instead of dishing out hatred in return, Raymonda turned to her, asked for her name—it was Debby. “Debby,” she began with a soft voice, speaking into a microphone, “I was raised by nuns from Europe who taught me to love the Jewish girls in my school in Israel. The nuns’ love and serenity, their great silence before birth and death, their devotion to humanity and to its great prophets, to the suffering Mother and Child on the Via Dolorosa: this remains for me a source of power and hope, a mystical hope one can almost say, which is accessible only to those who have lost everything.”
Most American Jews were more willing to set aside shopworn prejudices and listen. On the West Coast, in San Francisco, an anarchist anti-war radio station invited her to talk about a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, and her dream of a return to her childhood home of Acre.
The next day, a Friday evening, she visited a synagogue in Los Angeles, with a pipe organ and a pervasive atmosphere of affluence and security. She soaked up the spirit of the place and was mesmerized by the singing and the liturgy and a prayer from the Baal Shem Tov, a prayer that took her back to the nuns in Haifa, and to the primacy of love: “When senseless hatred reigns on earth, and men hide their faces from one another, then heaven is forced to hide its face; but when love comes to rule the earth and men reveal their faces to one another, then the splendor of God will be revealed.”
Back on the East Coast, in Washington, DC, on May 15, she was met with a very different atmosphere. She was in a cab when she first heard a radio report of the slaughter of Israeli schoolchildren in Ma’alot, in northern Israel. Fedayeen fighters had taken over a school. Dayan ordered his soldiers to storm the school, and in the ensuing firefight two dozen children died, mostly by Palestinian fire. This put Raymonda physically in danger; members of the Jewish Defense League threatened to kill her “in reprisal for Ma’alot.” And in the first speech she gave after the killing, at a Quaker building in Philadelphia, she didn’t explicitly condemn the terrorists. Instead, she quoted Sartre’s bon mot, that terrorism is a “terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others,” which predictably spawned catcalls from the audience, “Terrorists . . . maniacs.” Midway through the evening the head of the center walked onstage with his arms up. “We just got a call from the police. They have received a warning that if Raymonda Tawil appears at the public meeting tonight, she will be executed.” The Quakers, famous pacifists, canceled the event.
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“Guns and Olive Branches”
The first time Raymonda met her future son-in-law, Arafat, was just after he gave his “Guns and Olive Branches” speech in front of the UN General Assembly in October 1974. Over his military fatigues, he wore a badly fitting cream-colored blazer of thrift store quality and bright tennis shoes. Topping off the outfit was a long checkered white and black keffiyeh. His chin was shaved, more or less, leaving his signature handlebar mustache over his thick upper lip. Arafat slipped off his dark sunglasses and read, in his seductively musical Arabic, the greatest speech of his life. He spoke of the Palestinian yearning for “self-determination” and their desire to “pour all our resources into the mainstream of human civilization. Only then will our Jerusalem resume its historic role as a peaceful shrine for all religions.”
I appeal to you to enable our people to establish national, independent sovereignty over its own land. Today, I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.
In the West Bank on the day of the speech, students poured out from schools to celebrate. The state of Israel had started with a UN General Assembly vote in 1947; the Palestinians were now using the same forum to kick off their own political revolution. Dayan ordered his soldiers to break up demonstrations. When Raymonda’s daughter Diana waved a Palestinian flag, they knocked her down and dragged her by the hair.
Raymonda, back in the West Bank, was accompanying a New York Times correspondent to a demonstration when whipping around a corner came a military jeep. Soldiers pointing Uzis forced her into the back of the jeep. The military authorities didn’t want foreign journalists to see the hooping and dancing and general euphoria among Palestinians, or the tear gas canisters fired by soldiers in response. In custody, a Shin Bet interrogator let her know she was once again skating on thin ice. “You are singing the praises of that terrorist bastard at the UN, and now you’re telling The New York Times that Palestinians support him. Well, we’re not going to allow you to distort the truth.” But one of her admiring generals ordered her release.51
For Christmas 1974, Raymonda and her family headed to Beirut. Her first encounter with Arafat took place when one of his advisors, convinced that having a feminist on board might help improve Fatah’s public image as unshaven thugs, sent her a message inviting her to the organization’s underground headquarters, in the Fakhani district, largely inhabited by Palestinian refugees.
Dozens of men from Force 17, Arafat’s personal army of bodyguards, rushed her through the streets. It was well past midnight when they arrived at an unmarked building surrounded by a cinderblock wall with broken pieces of Fanta bottles and pickle jars on top. Arafat’s small office was stuffed to the rafters with papers and books and gifts still in their wrappers from supporters; leaning against one wall was a Kalashnikov.
A Fatah man introduced her as a “militant and a feminist.” Arafat nodded. Raymonda knew about his daredevilry, his skill at surviving assassins, his vision and ability to unify a fractious Palestinian people. What surprised her was the hypnotic charisma radiating from his half-smile and bulbous eyes. The man’s physical vitality was bursting out of his military surplus jacket. His warmth, the frenetic movements of his hands, the drum-roll of his words, conjured up the image of a selfless militant: from Nasser he picked up the knack of alternating between the buoyancy of street language, and the cadence of classical Arabic—one of Arafat’s favorite Koranic verses was “The mountain cannot be shaken by the wind.”
He seemed equally impressed with her. “You know, I know all about you,” he said while stirring honey into his glass of black tea. “You’re a daring militant. Ahlan wa Sahlan. Welcome.”
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Neve Shalom
“We are a thorn in their throat.”
—Mahmoud Darwish
By 1974, Ruth and Raymonda were a well-known pair, racing around Israel and the West Bank, usually in Raymonda’s sleek new Citroën SM. The two were an odd couple: Ruth didn’t care about style, while for Raymonda it was always important, both out of the natural pride of a francophone and because she was determined to defy the occupiers as a beautiful woman. “I should never wear mustard yellow,” she once found herself musing, approaching a company of soldiers. “Next time I’ll put on the brandy-colored blazer. Much better.” Without fail, she always attracted the amorous, curious eyes of men.
The most public event they did together, with lots of snapping cameras, was a tree planting in the “Peace Forest” of Neve Shalom, the Arab-Jewish village founded by the Jewish-born Dominican monk, Bruno Hussar.
This wasn’t a simple photo op: for Raymonda, the setting alone made it dangerous. Neve Shalom is close to the “Canada Forest,” which spreads a gentle carpet of pine needles over the ruins of three villages depopulated on Dayan’s order in 1967.52 Abu Nidal and ilk frequently turned their guns on Palestinians engaging in “dialogue” with Israelis. Raymonda had to be cautious.
Bruno, a friend of Father Michel’s, was a remarkable man. Having converted to Catholicism for philosophical reasons in the 1930s—as an engineering student in France he had been studying the nature of human evil—he fled France after the Nazis began rounding up Jews. He founded Neve Shalom in 1950, as a place where members of the three Abrahamic religions could live together, as a testimony of what was possible. The message resonated deeply with Raymonda and Ruth.
At the ceremony, the two friends took their shovels and were ready to start
digging a hole for trees when Raymonda spotted an Israeli flag flapping white and blue in the wind. If she were to be shown in an Israeli newspaper, with the Star of David in the background, it could spell trouble.
She dashed over to the back seat of the Citroën and pulled out a long green and red Palestinian flag she and her daughters had made out of scraps of cloth. She draped the illegal flag, an act punishable by a year in prison, over her shoulders like Superman’s cape.
“Raymonda, take that thing off!” Ruth banged her shovel into the dust.
“Why?”
“Because trees aren’t politics, for heaven’s sake.” Ruth merely wanted to plant the saplings, smile for the cameras, and call it a day.
Raymonda gripped the flag tighter around her shoulders. Yeah, she was thinking. That’s convenient for you to be above politics. No one’s going to shoot you down for being a collaborator. To keep from shouting, Raymonda hummed to herself a Janis Joplin song she heard on Abi’s Peace Radio: “Somethin’ came along, grabbed a hold of me, honey, and it felt just like a ball and chain.”
“Everything is politics here, Ruth,” she finally told her, refusing to back down. “Trees, rainclouds, pantyhose, everything.” Their eyes locked, and Raymonda wondered if their friendship would end—over a symbol. She saw a smile forming on Ruth’s face. “OK, Raymonda, hang your pantyhose on a flagpole.”
“I have a better idea, Ruth. You plant a tree under your flag, and I’ll plant one under mine.” It was a sort of impromptu two-state solution, even though Raymonda’s real dream was for everyone to live in the same state, as equals.
Ruth was willing to go along, but the other Israelis now chimed in with indignation and catcalls. Even a few pinecones were tossed in Raymonda’s direction. The level of the hostility rose to such a pitch that the organizers, people of good will hoping for peace and not a lynch mob, called off the event.
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The Quest
Dayan left the Ministry of Defense in 1975, never to return. Over cheeseburgers, at California Café, Raymonda joined Abie, Amos, and Uri in uncorking champagne for the occasion. Amos, his wavy hair starting halfway back on his head, shared stories of war crimes, his and Moshe’s. One of the last things he said before he nodded off in his chair, drunk, was that he and the general deserved a firing squad. “But Dayan has to go first.”
The new top man in the Ministry of Defense was Shimon Peres, at the time deemed a civilian security hawk little better than Dayan, and in some ways worse because he lacked Dayan’s virtue of candor. Of the two, poetry-loving Dayan was by far the more natural fighter—Peres never said, as Moshe did, “I know nothing more exciting or dramatic than war.” Dayan’s military ethos wasn’t a product of arrogance; unlike Peres, a francophone who never bothered to learn Arabic, Dayan liked the culture, language, and mentality of the people regrettably living atop ancient Israelite pottery shards. He felt in his bones the tragic nature of the Arab-Jewish competition over the same territory, in ways that Peres didn’t, or at least not yet.
Peres picked up the pace of settlement expansion in the West Bank and beefed up censorship laws. The relative press freedom in the West Bank, Dayan’s legacy, covered novels and glossy celebrity magazines, but anything smacking of support for Arafat or evidence of the ha-Nakba ran afoul of laws 87 and 97 that barred anything deemed to endanger “public order.” What really got the system baring its teeth were public calls for civil disobedience, such as strikes; and when the newspaper Joe Nasser had worked for dared call for one, Peres’s response, citing undisclosed “PLO terrorist threats,” was a total closure of the West Bank, a hermetic clampdown with half the IDF patrolling the streets to make sure it was enforced. The Palestinians of Nablus hadn’t experienced such heavy-handed repression since King Hussein sent in his Bedouin tribesmen.
For Raymonda, it brought back memories of reading Nausea during the Jordanian curfew. A welcome loophole to this closure was that Israelis could still move around freely. Uri and most of his friends had beards, so they just had to slap on yarmulkes for soldiers to wave them past checkpoints. Avnery showed up at Raymonda’s with some friends who had hacked electronics in the army. From them, she learned how to transmit voice recordings by connecting up her “Kalashnikov” to the telephone line. The beautiful thing about the hack, or so they assumed, was that it was impossible to trace. Shin Bet phone taps were useless. The trick enabled Raymonda to transmit taped interviews on Peres’s siege to the San Francisco radio station she had visited the previous year. The station broadcast the interview, a report duly and vigorously denied by the Israeli government. Once other news agencies picked up the story, Peres found himself under diplomatic pressure to end the clampdown.
Raymonda redoubled her efforts at engaging with the Israeli left, and the stream of activists, Palestinian and Israeli, converging at her house became a torrent. The upswing in the number of cars with yellow plates, parked in front of the house, attracted the attention of the “rejectionists” who had picked up the pace of murder. A fellow Palestinian brave enough to sit down with Israelis, Aziz Shehadeh, who as a young lawyer in Jaffa had worked with Raymonda’s father Habib, attracted unwelcome attention. Meeting with Israelis was a sort of acknowledgment that Israel was an established fact. Palestinians should seek to establish their separate state. In a radio broadcast from Damascus, militants lambasted him as a “traitor, a despicable collaborator. . . . You shall pay for your treason. We shall silence you forever.” Abu Nidal even tried to assassinate Arafat and his main political advisor, Abu Mazen, for being too “conciliatory” with their talk of an “olive branch” replacing the gun.
Daoud responded to a series of threatening anonymous phone calls by wanting to shut the front door to Israelis—he didn’t want to become a widower. The five children sided with their father. Like their mother, they had been raised by nuns, but they didn’t have the example of Jewish friends, survivors of the Holocaust, to balance out the rage of seeing friends arrested, or in Diana’s case, being dragged on the ground by her hair. Suha watched on as soldiers looped belts around the necks of demonstrating students at her Rosary Sisters School and herded them into military trucks, like wayward cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse. Her political heroes were Jesus, Che, and Arafat.53
“Mama,” Suha said sharply when an Israeli leftist showed up one day, wearing an army uniform, “I don’t think we should welcome soldiers into our house.” Her voice rose several octaves into a shout.
Raymonda did her best to reason with her, telling her that she shouldn’t assume all Israelis thought alike, and reminded Suha that Uri and Abie had also been soldiers. What choice did Israelis have, anyway? They had to serve.
“Yes, mama, but when they’re in uniform they can’t disobey orders, can they? They have to kill.” They were in the kitchen at the time, and the eldest son Gabi (Jubran) chimed in and reminded Raymonda that during the war in Europe, the French branded as a traitor anyone who received Nazis.
“Gabi, Israelis might be our enemies but never say they are Nazis. They aren’t.”
Raymonda decided to take her chances again with the Shin Bet, by returning to Beirut to get an explicit endorsement for engaging the Israeli left. Badly scarred Bassam Abu Sharif set up a meeting with Abu Mazen. The armed drivers picked Raymonda up at her hotel and drove her back to the Fakhani district, heavily fortified because of the civil war raging at the time.
The loud chatter in the basement room, the nerve center of Arafat’s movement, stopped the minute she entered, dressed in a knee-length silk dress and her customary high heels. Her hair flowed freely down past her shoulders in the Bridget Bardot fashion. She recognized few of the faces now riveted on her; Arafat wasn’t in the room.
Gentlemanly, Abu Mazen stood up to welcome her. In introducing her to his men in the basement, he mentioned her engagement with the Israeli left. At once, there were objections. “Which Israelis?”
Raymonda remained standing, and without a hint of trepidation, she mentioned
Uri Avnery, Abie Nathan, and Ruth.
“But they are Zionists,” a large man in military dress interjected.
“What are you talking about,” Raymonda faced the man and said. “I AM A ZIONIST!” She herself was shocked at what she had just said, but she continued. “Do you even know what Zionism is? The word comes from Zion—it is about a longing to return to the Holy Land. There isn’t a day that passes that I don’t think about Acre and Haifa. Just because Jews feel an attachment to what they call Zion doesn’t mean that a man such as Uri Avnery wants to steal our land, or oppress us. Why can’t two peoples love the same land?” Her quest, she told them, was to find a way to do so.
Of all the men in the room, Abu Mazen understood her the best. He was a refugee from the Galilee. A short rather colorless man, he was nodding along, cautiously but affirmatively, as she made her case. It made no sense, Raymonda continued, to shun all contact with the other side, as if all Israeli Jews were like Dayan or Sharon. Just look at universities in Europe and the United States. They’re rebelling against their elites; young Israelis are turning against theirs, and we should support this. “We all know that eventually Jews and Arabs will have to find a way of living together.”
Abu Mazen followed up her speech by calling her a “very courageous woman” because she was “willing to risk her life to meet with Israelis.” It was a ringing endorsement from the man who would go on to become chief architect of the two-state solution with Israel.
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An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission Page 16