She could no longer see Arafat because of the tanks in the street. Soldiers shot a neighbor in the head while she was hanging out the laundry on her balcony.
“Tiftach—open up!” Raymonda heard one morning. Dressed in a night robe, she unlocked the door and soldiers—it seemed like an entire company of them—filed into the house.
“What do you want?”
“We’re here to get him.”
“Get who?”
“Get out of our way.” They pushed her to one side. A nervous eighteen-year-old stood guard while the others searched the house.
“Who are you looking for?”
“Arafat,” said the soldier guarding her. “The one who wants him is the Fat Man,” army lingo for Prime Minister Sharon. “We have intelligence that you smuggled him out of the Muqata, and he must be here,” under a bed or crouched in the bathtub or hiding in a closet.
“Are you insane?” she scoffed. “Not even the birds can fly out of the Muqada without getting shot. How am I supposed to get him out?”
Soldiers tore apart the house, looking everywhere for him. They even opened the stove and refrigerator, as if he were hiding in a yogurt container. One of the soldiers with a Russian accent called out from her bedroom, “Here’s the man. It’s him.” It was a picture of Arafat holding Zahwa in the hospital in Paris.
Two days later, Raymonda heard over the military loudspeakers outside, “In one hour we are going to blow up the Muqata.” Sharon decided to take out a nemesis he had hunted down for nearly half a century. Upstairs in the Muqata, Yasser was rubbing his prayer beads and repeating like a mantra that he was willing to die a martyr’s death. The only thing of value he owned, much more than his life or even his family, was his honor, and he wasn’t about to allow the Fat Man to take it from him.
Within minutes, a different set of loudspeakers belonging to mosques all over Ramallah instructed people to go to the streets to save their leader by defying the curfew and forming a human shield around the Muqata. Shots rang out from outside as the first people to answer the call were shot down.
Raymonda’s cell phone was still working, and she called Ruth. “You must do something!” she said, looking out through shattered glass at the soldiers in their jeeps. “Ruth, do you hear me? Are you there? Call this bloody Sharon of yours. He’s going to kill Arafat. Call Uzi! For Christ’s sake, do something.”
“Raymonda,” Ruth replies, “what on earth do you imagine I can do? You think I can just call up Arik and order him to stop?”
“YOU CAN’T JUST SIT THERE, YOU MUST DO SOMETHING!” Her words turned into shouts. “He’s going to kill him in less than an hour.” Eliminating Arafat would turn the Holy Land into even more of a cauldron of hatred than it already was, she reminded Ruth. An inferno. “Ruth, we are running out of time.”
“Well, I have a surprise for you. I am NOT Arik Sharon!”
It was President George Bush, not Ruth, who yanked the leash on Sharon and kept Arafat alive.
After Arafat fell mysteriously ill in October 2004, Raymonda navigated the rubble of the Muqata to spend with him what would be his final days in the “liberated” homeland. She saw him for the last time when he left to a Parisian hospital, where he died in November.
Raymonda, too, soon left Palestine, never to return. She wasn’t around to witness the way Uzi Dayan headed up the so-called Public Council for a Security Fence whose mantra was that a wall be built between Israel and the West Bank according to “demographic principles,” with as much empty land on the Israeli side and as few Arabs as possible. Working under Sharon, he transformed his concept into watchtowers and a twenty-foot-high, reinforced concrete barrier that fit together like Lego pieces and separated families and friends, a Berlin Wall snaking its way through the middle of the Holy Land. The Great Wall of Zion.
At a backyard party thrown by the rock star Avi Geffen, Uzi and I discussed the Security Wall. He was so sure of himself, so emphatic with a sort of serene yet determined smile on his face. I wondered what went on in the mind of this man, so honest and mild-mannered and intelligent, when he inspected his walls with his engineer’s eye.
Since I first met Ruth and Raymonda in 2009, we’ve spoken dozens of times about the injustice of putting masonry between peoples whose worlds are so interwoven that separation, far from being a natural product of mutual antipathy, has to be forcibly imposed from above. The largest impediments to peace they both believe, more than terrorism, are laws and barriers preventing Jews and Palestinians from meeting. Right-wing Israelis and the holy warriors of Hamas share the same fear: empathy.
Raymonda’s pet theory on the Wall goes like this: Separation, be it the old law forbidding Israelis to cavort with Arafat and his ilk or the more draconian laws of more recent provenance making it illegal for Israelis to venture into Palestinian areas, have less to do with security than with preventing human contact, because contact leads to understanding. Moshe Dayan and his generation, though they fought war after war with them, nevertheless knew, respected, and understood Arabs. Today’s technocrats ignore the human factor altogether.
“If we want to be secure in this country,” Ruth said to me in May 2013, “we’ll have to tear them all down, all the damn walls. Moshe realized this, believe me he did, but when I tell this to Uzi, he thinks I’m loony. You may not like Moshe—that’s your problem. But there isn’t one Palestinian—not one!—who wouldn’t prefer his Open Bridges over what they have now.” Ruth made this declaration sitting as usual in her easy chair. From my position on the couch the colorful painting from Haiti hanging behind her looked like a nimbus. She struck me in fact as exceptionally saintly that morning.
During my last trip to visit Raymonda in Malta, in summer 2013, we got Ruth on Skype and Raymonda read to us a passage from her and Ruth’s old friend, the Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti: “Man is a tree in the field—that is not us. Our love of the land is a love that we imposed on the land and foisted on the land. With the Arabs, it is the opposite. Their love for the land truly sprang from the soil. Love of the fig, of the tree, of the house.”
“Yes,” Ruth smacked her lips. “Meron is right.” That was all she said. All she had to.
“That’s why we need this book you’re writing,” Raymonda chimed in.
In the years since beginning the project I had visited Ruth a hundred times in Tel Aviv, and had flown off to see Raymonda twice in Dubai, twice in Malta, and once in Baltimore. But we rarely discussed what they wanted out of the book. This book. They certainly couldn’t expect a happy ending with Raymonda living in exile and Ruth shouting at the television each time the nightly news comes on.
“So Ruth, what do you want readers to take away from the book?”
“Ask Raymonda. She’s the one who put us up to it.” Ruth was pointing at the computer screen as she spoke. I thought back to the first time I met Ruth and how she told me about a “very special lady” with a “mission.” What also came to mind were the many spats between them I had been witness to, and for the simple reason that Ruth is a proud founding member of an admirably successful state, a secular miracle most people in the world continue to see through the prism of the film Exodus, a story of overcoming all odds and rebuilding an ancient nation from the embers of the Holocaust. Raymonda, living in exile, belongs to a people still occupied and whose pre-1948 lands and cities remain well beyond reach or recovery.
“First of all,” Raymonda cleared her throat and began, “let me tell you that I understand people like Uzi.” Thus spoke again a woman raised by nuns. “They are so fearful . . . Much of what they do is also driven by guilt. They know they have wronged us but can’t see any way to stop. It’s like a sleepwalker attacking a man on the street, and when he wakes up he realizes he’s strangling a perfect stranger. He just can’t stop because if he does the stranger will turn on him. So he keeps squeezing.”
“Is that the reason right-wingers feared you?”
“Oh, those people. Sharon till the bitter end—in
a coma he probably still has nightmares about people like me and Ruth; and it’s getting worse because the two sides no longer meet. At least in the 1970s and ’80s we could join forces with the Israeli left. And that was what terrified the right.” Raymonda was too much like the best Jewish intellectuals in the diaspora, humanists fighting for rights and equality and basic dignity. “We drove Sharon and his friends crazy. Why do you think they sidled up to the Islamists? Islamic holy war, because it sounded so far-fetched at the time, was music to their ears. Anything but the secular, educated Palestinians, and in particular people like me calling for non-violent resistance. They’d rather have suicide bombers.”
If Israel really wanted peace, the country would name streets after Raymonda and Ruth. The two would have their own TV talk show. Women, proponents and products of a dialogue, would be celebrated instead of ignored and exiled.
“Raymonda, you didn’t answer my question. What do you want out of this book? In a sentence or two.”
Raymonda thought for a moment. Outside the window, down on the beach, there was a procession for some Catholic saint. Fireworks lit up the sky.
“Let me tell you why I admire Ruth so much. It’s because, like me, she’s a product of the history of our country. She’s full of contradictions—who isn’t in that place?” Raymonda was pointing out toward the sea. “She still loves Moshe, and she sees in him the farmer and not the general. But she’s honest. She doesn’t go around apologizing for what and who she is, or pulling out bones from archeological digs to make a point. Most important for me is her compassion. She loves. Humanity could use more people like her. A few million more.”
The funny thing is that Ruth, word for word, offers the same vaulting praise for Raymonda. That’s what makes them friends.
“Yes, Raymonda, I understand that. I’d like to go back to the book . . .”
“We’ve already talked a hundred times about the mission Father Michel gave me as a little girl.”
I didn’t see the connection. “How can you fulfill your mission here on Malta?”
“With this book, of course.” From the expression on her face, she couldn’t believe I had never figured this out on my own.
Raymonda’s tenacious “mission” remains the same, to break the forced silence between the two peoples. Letting people know just how much she loves and admires Ruth is her way of leaping over Uzi’s wall in her mind, and going home.
Notes
1 In 1972, a Mossad bomb blew the novelist and playwright to shreds, along with his seventeen-year-old niece.
2 Ruth describes the family bliss this way: “The cat was asleep, the dog waiting for her dinner, and all in all it was a cozy domestic scene.”
3 Once the British forces were gone, predicted General D’Arcy, commander of British forces in Palestine, the “Haganah would take over all Palestine tomorrow.”
4 The real reason for the bombing was retribution for an Arab terror attack on the refinery in Haifa in which forty-seven Jews died; the other motivation, in the words of the planner, was to “force the Arabs out of the quarter and change the psychological climate in the city.”
5 Deir Yassin
6 The plan, called Tochnik Dalet or Operation Danny, called for controlling as much of Palestine as possible before May 15. The only way to do so was first to score a decisive victory over the guerrilla fighters, and then to clear out large swaths of territory of the Arab population. The Israeli historian Benny Morris considers Operation Danny to be an expulsion plan. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 163 ff.
7 Ben-Gurion spoke of “cleansing” the country of Arabs, and the introduction of Jews in their place. Yehuda Slutzky, Summary of the Hagana Book, pp. 486–7. Cited from Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine 2006, p. 128.
8 A reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times, a witness on the ground, writes of Dayan’s men in jeeps and half-tracks surging through the towns in “blitz tactics.” With a huddle of Jordanian troops firing madly down at them, Moshe and his men returned fire and “practically everything in their way died,” including scores of civilians.
9 Lea came from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, and she ended up leaving her husband for a British officer. Heart-broken, during the war Dr. Bey rented the house to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.
10 Other more or less permanent guests were Moshe’s sister Aviva, her husband Israel Geffen, and their son Jonathan, who was Assi’s age.
11 His name was Reuven Shiloah.
12 His name was Yigael Yadin.
13 Digging also backed up Zionist “claims to the land,” writes Yael Dayan about her father, which can explain the “wonderfully primitive bond between him and the archeological artifacts he was pulling out of the ground.”
14 Yael Dayan, My Father, His Daughter.
15 Avi Shlaim, “Israel’s Dirty War,” London Review of Books (August 8, 1994). Review of Benny Morris’s Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1993.
16 Ariel Sharon wrote about Dayan that he “was the greatest revolutionary the IDF ever had. Dayan’s imagination absorbed and encouraged every daring operational plan, and he breathed a spirit of battle into the army.”
17 Mordechai Bar-On, Moshe Dayan: Israel’s Controversial Hero.
18 Avi-Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
19 Avnery published an article exposing details of a retaliatory raid by a commando Unit 101 against the Arab village of Qibya. Terrorists had killed a Jewish mother and her two children by tossing a grenade into their house a few kilometers from the frontier with Jordan. In response, Sharon had orders to make “Qibya an example for everyone.” Ben-Gurion, praising Dayan and Sharon for the operation, said that it would teach the Arabs a lesson and “give us the possibility of living here.” (See Avner Falk, Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict [Terrace Books, 2005], p. 46.)
20 Yael Dayan, My Father, His Daughter, p. 99.
21 Interview with Raymonda Tawil.
22 In Raymonda’s words, “There had to be separation; the regime didn’t want us to know one another. And it wasn’t because the nuns tried to push their religion on Jews, because they didn’t. Anyway, many of the Jewish girls were now Catholics. But this didn’t matter to the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education.” Interview with Raymonda Tawil.
23 The friend’s name was Marie-Louise.
24 Urquhart was a founder of Amnesty International.
25 Sahar Khalifeh would go on to write the novel The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant.
26 For more on Raymonda’s claim that the IDF used napalm, see comments by the British commander Glubb Pasha who reported that the Israeli army employed napalm during the war. See Arthur C. Forrest, The Unholy Land (1971), p. 16.
27 Raymonda’s son-in-law Ibrahim Souss co-authored the book with General Elpeleg, Dialogue entre Israel et la Palestine.
28 Dayan reversed his order. Interview with Raymonda Tawil.
29 Time praised Yael’s account of the war as “an exhilarating chronicle of the Israeli victory over the Arabs,” while the American-Jewish journalist Tony Judt lashed out at her for her “self-satisfied arrogance.”
30 Not long after the 1967 war, Dayan laid out what he wanted in the West Bank: the permanent borders would be the ceasefire lines; there would be peace talks with the Arab governments; the government would prevent a bi-national state; and there would be no Arab majority in the conquered territories. See Bar-On, Moshe Dayan, p.145.
31 According to Dayan, the Open Bridge was a “breathing spell enabling us to create additional facts on the ground, and so it will go on. I believe that this way we shall be able to achieve a part, or even most, of the goals we want to accomplish.”
32 Shlomo Goren wanted to erect a synagogue on the Temple Mount.
33 Mercouri had done a film with Yael’s for
mer boyfriend Michael Cacoyannis and was best known for her role as a prostitute in The Children of Piraeus.
34 “It was not one of [Dayan’s] more glorious victories. . . . We did not consider ourselves defeated.”
35 Amos Kenan, “Those of us who couldn’t restrain ourselves would go into the prison compounds to fuck Arab women.” Quoted in A. Clare Brandabur, “Reply to Amos Kenan’s ‘The Legacy of Lydda’ and An Interview With PFLP Leader Dr. George Habash,” in Peuples & Monde (April 11, 2007).
36 See Chaim Herzog and Shlomo Gazit, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East from the 1948 War of Independence to the Present (Vintage Books, 2005), p. 205.
37 New Outlook was founded by Polish-born Simha Flapan, a legendary leftist and author of The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities.
38 Ibrahim Souss was Palestinian Delegate General to France from 1978 to 1992.
39 See Ahron Bregman, Israel’s Wars: A History Since 1947 (Psychology Press, 2002), p. 147.
40 According to an interview with Raymonda Tawil.
41 Abu Nidal, nom de guerre for Sabri Khalil al-Banna, grew up in a family beachside mansion in Jaffa (it now serves as the Israeli military court). In 1948, the family ended up in a refugee camp in Gaza.
42 See Haaretz, February 12, 2014, p. 3.
43 “Once we were grown, he owed us nothing, and in his egotistical, self-centered pattern it was not his duty to contribute to our happiness when he was alive or consider our pain and distress when he was gone.”
44 See Amnon Barzilai, “Golda Meir’s nightmare,” Haaretz, October 2, 2003.
45 The film is a spoof on the 1954 patriotic classic Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. In contrast to the drunken escapades of Halfon Hill, Hill 24 presents Israeli soldiers as humane, generous, and merciful, and their foes as little better than genocidal Nazis. In fact, there is one scene in which a soldier captured by the Israelis during a fight against the Egyptians turned out to be a former SS officer bereft of human morals.
46 The reserve officer was Motti Ashkenazi.
An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission Page 26