An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  For the first time since moving to Nahalal as a teenager, Ruth had free time on her hands. As the maid cooked and cleaned, Ruth began meeting a friend Betty, a born New Yorker, for morning coffee at Cafe Atara on King George Street. The two had a lot to commiserate about: Betty’s husband was the founder of the Mossad, and the spy chief was even more secretive than Moshe.11 One bit of cheerful news Ruth got from Betty was that her husband had intercepted letters of foreign diplomats praising Ruth’s—and the maid’s—cooking.

  Moshe lived in the same house as Ruth, and she saw him every day. Absorbed in the monumental task of keeping the city safe from attack, Moshe’s hard-driving work routine from crack of dawn till late at night reintroduced the terrible loneliness that had plagued Ruth since his underground days. Ben-Gurion’s favorite commando was sucked up into the vortex of geopolitics when he negotiated with King Abdullah’s top general Abdullah El-Tell the “Absolute and Sincere Ceasefire.” Moshe and Abdullah El-Tell conducted clandestine talks to stabilize the long fortified border and bring a modicum of normalcy to deeply scarred Jerusalem.

  Dayan set up Mandelbaum Gate, established on the ruins of a villa built by a Russian-Jewish manufacturer of stockings. The Gate was the Checkpoint Charlie of Jerusalem and for Arabs a symbol of the loss of their country and their forced separation from families, neighbors, and friends.

  Ruth tried her best to be a part of his life. One of her attempts to have a toehold in Moshe’s world was a spy course organized by Betty’s husband; but she flunked because she didn’t have what it took to betray people: passing the course meant she would have to spy on the foreign diplomats who praised her cooking.

  The children worshipped their increasingly famous father. Yael would later describe her father as a “tribal patriarch,” and his world became theirs. There was a more human side to the hero, like peeing in the garden behind the villa or cleaning out earwax with the house key.

  Yael rambled with her father through the “abandoned” Arab villages surrounding Jerusalem, where they gorged themselves off the fruit from orchards whose owners were vegetating in tent camps. In her child’s eyes, rambling through the empty countryside and scampering through haunted ruins was a new Eden. Her brave father was the first Adam, she his mischievous little Eve.

  On a different occasion, it was Udi’s turn to be dazzled by his father. Moshe took the nine-year-old on a pigeon shoot not far from Gaza, a thin strip of land then under the control of the Egyptians. Moshe liked to bag the birds and take them home for Ruth to cook. By chance the hunt was around Tel el Hesi, which was the first major archeological site to be excavated in Palestine. There was so much rain that year that a part of the slope had been washed away, exposing a clay jar. Moshe pulled it out of its mud and, curious about its provenance, took it to an army colleague and part-time archeologist who dated it back to the Iron Age era of David and Goliath.12 Moshe was hooked. Over his long career as an amateur archeologist, Moshe assembled a private museum full of ancient treasures.

  For a man who never lost his boyish love of discovery, Eretz Yisrael, which in his imagination had been neglected and fallow for millennia by Arabs in their “mud hovels,” was the world’s most thrilling sandbox. With pick and shovel, he pursued his fetishistic mysticism of pure and authentic Hebrew roots, his tactile encounter with the epoch of the Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings.13

  He had never been happier. Ruth still missed life on the farm, and whenever she could, she took prominent visitors on a tour of the cowsheds. In his book Strange Lands the US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas describes one such visit “to a pleasant, fertile spot” owned by the “famous Colonel Moshe Dayan and his attractive and brilliant wife.” “Brilliant” was an adjective neither Moshe nor Yael would ever employ in talking about Ruth. Married to the State of Israel, Moshe was too busy to notice that his neglected wife was beginning to blossom in unexpected ways.

  11

  Ave Maria

  Like all the Palestinians who fled to Lebanon, Habib Hawa planned on going back to Haifa the moment the fighting stopped. But he heard reports that soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as the Haganah now called itself, were opening fire at people who tried to return to what was now the State of Israel. Gripped by panic, at once he headed back to find Raymonda, sneaking across the heavily fortified frontier at night. Soldiers spotted him in an olive grove and shot at him, hitting him in the leg. They dragged him half alive to a nearby building for interrogation. He would have bled to death if the officer who questioned him—Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, the future Israeli minister of police—hadn’t been his friend. A decent, humane man, Sheetrit drove him, his clothes drenched with blood, to a hospital; and unlike hundreds of thousands of others, Habib was allowed to return to Haifa.

  Others weren’t so lucky. Christmas’s sister, born in New York and married in the castle, fled to Gaza with her family; there was no return for them. Eighty percent of Palestinian Arabs were gone, and those who remained were kept on a tight leash by the new Israeli government: Arabs needed permission to leave their cities and villages and this prevented Christmas from traveling to Nazareth to see her daughter. She was even more cut off from her two sons George and Yussuf on the Jordanian side of Mandelbaum Gate. When Habib showed up at her front door, half crippled with ragged clothes stained by dust and sweat, she fed him and gave him a place to stay. With a pass provided by his friend Sheetrit, he set out to find Raymonda.

  In the bitterly cold, rainy January of 1949, the head nun woke Raymonda with a message that there was someone to see her. Downstairs, in the dark chapel, a man emerged from the shadows, stepped across the light cast by a row of candles, his long shadow bending and angling along the cracks of the stones. She noticed the way he stooped and stared, his face was pale, and a pipe drooped from his lips. He struggled to smoke because his two hands gripped the handles of crutches. Her dashing father, the Syrian Prince, had the long, untrimmed beard of a pauper. She flung herself into his arms. From him, she learned that Christmas had also survived. Her Ave Marias had worked once again: the Virgin had brought her back her parents.

  Back in Haifa, stripped of Montfort Castle and his properties and with a bum leg, Habib ended up living in a small apartment with mold on the walls; sometimes he stayed with Christmas. He kept hunger at bay by hustling as an unlicensed lawyer. Habib often quoted Victor Hugo’s poem “La Tristesse d’Olympio” to describe his life after 1948: Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus. He was a stranger in his own home.

  Christmas continued working as a social worker in Haifa and throughout the Galilee. She was among a handful of educated Arab women left in the country, so the Zionist women’s organization WIZO hired her to work with Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrants from the Maghreb and Yemen. She took the job without hesitation: the war had violently unraveled the elaborate fabric of numerous peoples, and not just Arabs. Vast zinc and corrugated iron settlements sprung up all over the country, in appearance vaguely resembling the tent cities erected by the UN for displaced Arabs. Many of these Jews arrived from isolated areas of the Middle East with worms and disease.

  She used to take Raymonda to tent camps where they sat on the ground and listened to the stories of the displaced Palestinian peasants who had nothing, and who risked imprisonment or a bullet by returning to their fields to pick olives. “Do you want to be a snob like your Aunt Sylvie,” Christmas scolded Raymonda the first time she wrinkled up her nose at the smell of open sewage, “or be with your people?”

  Christmas, to drive home the message of shared suffering, took Raymonda as well to Jewish tent camps. One Yemenite woman, looking at her children sitting on the dirt floor among the goats, asked Christmas, “Is this the paradise we have been promised? I want to go back home; I feel like a stranger here.”

  Christmas thrived in her job with WIZO because, for the first time, she felt valued as a woman: Jewish feminists, bucking the patriarchal traditions of Jewish Orthodoxy, ran the organization. Christmas also volun
teered her time with UNRWA, working with refugees in tent camps from now dynamited Arab villages. Ever the free spirit, ever a forceful and tireless opponent of injustice, when she gave an interview to UNRWA officials about the situation in the Arab camps, WIZO fired her.

  12

  Women of Valor

  Dayan was so good at his job in Jerusalem that Life magazine wrote glowingly about the “handsome young soldier with the eye patch . . . who is regarded as a possible future prime minister.” Ben-Gurion was impressed enough to send him to the Negev where there was a lot more action than in Jerusalem. He became a major general in October 1949, and was the commanding officer of the Southern Front, the most important in Israel as it faced the Egyptians. This was a vast region of desiccated warrens, jackals, venomous snakes, and roaming Bedouins, but also smugglers, a few armed fighters itching for revenge, and thousands of refugees trying to return to their lands.

  Dayan loved living in a desert camp, going unshaven for days at a stretch, eating wild game, and boiling his coffee over an open fire. Yael, on an extended visit, experienced him as a “Spartan nomad” at heart, crossing the Negev in his battered army jeep along the old Silk Road, a millennia-old caravan path. In what were the happiest days of her childhood, he introduced her to the ferocious beauty of the desert, the hidden life behind the seemingly barren, desiccated hills: its venomous snakes and scorpions, the desert bushes with thorns as “sharp as spears,” the soaring raptors. “His bedtime stories had to do with our ancestors who walked this desert, or very close by, and filled my imagination. Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and his brothers, Moses and the Children of Israel . . . Between slavery in the green pastures of the Nile and the promised land of Canaan lay this desert. Only those who traversed it deserved freedom.”14

  One liberty he took—she said nothing to Ruth—was satisfying his amorous appetites for female recruits.

  Moshe was given an important task by Ben-Gurion: to empty much of the desert of Bedouins by herding them into small fenced-off areas, and keeping them there under lock and key. People who had been moving in and out of the Negev since the Iron Age were now deemed “infiltrators.” As for the refugees filtering back from across the Gaza border, soldiers under his command loaded them onto trucks and drove them over the border, often with volleys of bullets fired over their heads for good measure, just so they got the message. When they persisted, harsher measures were used: hundreds died each year because of landmines and a “free fire policy.”15

  With a maid running the household and her husband rattling along the ancient Silk Road with his jeep, chasing Bedouins from their ancestral lands, Ruth and Moshe’s mother Dvorah began working with Bulgarian Jewish immigrants. The project was called Eshet Hayl, from a Hebrew hymn sung on Friday nights to a “woman of valor.”

  Unlike the Jewish immigrants from the wilds of the Arabian deserts or the Atlas Mountains, the Bulgarians were well-heeled, urban, educated professionals like many other Central and Eastern European Jews. Directly from the boat, government officials bused them into an isolated region of abandoned Arab villages near Jerusalem.

  It was an apocalyptic scene. Armies of rats had eaten all the food left in abandoned houses; fattened, the population exploded. When the food ran out, the vermin began to prowl the countryside. The Bulgarians faced rats who had gnawed through wooden windowsills to get into their homes. The horrified women wanted nothing more than to be back in a city and work in their professions. But they had no money, and no way out.

  Ruth discovered during her visits that these displaced immigrants, barricaded inside their homes and lamenting their move from green Europe, possessed handmade lace curtains, tablecloths, intricate embroidery and other needlework made all the more striking by the rats swarming around their homes. Ruth, who had never shown any interest in fashion or design, lit upon the idea of working with handicraft as a way of providing these immigrants with an income. She came up with the idea of them making crude bags from jute sacking and bits of scrap wool. She supplied materials, and the Bulgarians made bags by adding bamboo handles and knitted patterns onto the jute. Ruth then made a deal with the director of WIZO, a friend, to sell the bags through the WIZO shops.

  Ruth travelled by bus or hitchhiked on her journeys around Israel. On one occasion Moshe’s car zoomed past, but the driver didn’t see Ruth with her heavy bags of material. She repressed her first impulse—of crying her eyes out—by gripping her bags and defiantly sticking out her thumb. “Damn him,” she said to herself. She loved him fiercely but wasn’t going to be crippled by him.

  Soon, however, she demanded a car from Moshe, and was able to drive up and down the lengths of the country, from the Negev desert all the way north to the Lebanese border looking for people with handicrafts. She found women from Yugoslavia able to knit; others from Hungary and North Africa who embroidered. With the help of Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, she organized a training course for new Jewish immigrants from Iran, Libya, Algeria, Romania, and a dozen other countries.

  13

  The Beauty Contest

  Christmas’s experiences in the 1950s continued to be bitter, though punctuated by a few triumphant notes. She smuggled a prisoner out of Acre fortress by dressing him in a nurse’s uniform and driving him to the Lebanese border, where he scampered undetected over the frontier, to freedom. When Shin Bet agents showed up at her home to interrogate her, she greeted them with a poker face and uncharacteristic falsehood, and convinced them she’d never do such a thing.

  Acre, where she lived, was no longer the old prewar town she had known. Its original population had left. After the war, homeless Arab villagers came and occupied some of the abandoned houses. The State of Israel gave away the mansions to Jewish families from Poland and Germany, Iraq, and Tunisia. Such a population mix lent the city a rich polyglot flavor. Each time Raymonda visited Christmas on school holidays, the spices, music, and the Arabic on the street made it seem as if she were living as equals in a shared land. If only someone would do away with the pass laws, the soldiers, the barbed wire, and Mandelbaum Gate. Why shouldn’t Jews and Arabs, including her brothers in East Jerusalem, live as equals in the same country?

  The few European Jews living in Acre, refined and educated, were her mother’s closest friends. “You need to get to know my friend,” Christmas told Raymonda during one of her visits back home, introducing her to a strikingly beautiful woman from Germany with a bluish tattoo on her arm: “the woman reminded me of Marlene Dietrich.” Josef Mengele had “performed an operation on her so she couldn’t have children.” Raymonda should never blame the Jewish people as a whole for Arab suffering, her mother told her. European Jews had experienced unimaginable evil.

  By 1954, Christmas had a new social work job in Acre. Always energetic and filled with ideals, always prepared to swallow humiliation and loss and move on, she raised money for an ambulance to serve Jews and Arabs alike. When the ambulance arrived, the citizens of Acre decided to celebrate. People unbuttoned their emotions: there was drinking, dancing, singing. In the middle of the carousing and merrymaking, the organizers announced an impromptu beauty contest for girls.

  Christmas grabbed her daughter by the hand, whisked her off into the ladies room, smoothed out her tangled hair, put a thick coat of lipstick on her lips, and led her out again and into a row of other girls lined up before judges.

  Her mouth gaping open, fourteen-year-old Raymonda stood there, wanting nothing more than to snap her fingers and disappear.

  One by one the other girls fell away, until she stood, trembling, next to a Jewish girl. At first, people in the crowd assumed Raymonda, with her chestnut brown hair, was Jewish. As she stood there as a finalist, Raymonda noticed people whispering and pointing. From the scraps of conversation, she heard “she’s an Arab.” The judges, all Jewish, gave the blue ribbon to the other girl. Raymonda, relieved that the ordeal was over, left the stage and darted back toward Christmas. Bedlam broke out. A clutch of Arabs and a few Jews protested, which elicit
ed a cacophony of catcalls. A Moroccan Jew said in Arabic: “You piece of Arab shit, you can’t be prettier than a Jew.” A fellow Jew pitched a beer bottle at the man. “You’re the piece of shit . . .”

  Emotions were stoked even more as an elegiac poem was being read by an Arab, beseeching his “beloved” to come back “home from across the iron border. I am your lover in the Galilee. I am awaiting your return on a white horse. You will ride across the mountains, and no invader will keep you away.”

  The head judge, grabbing the loudspeaker, vainly appealed for calm. Folding chairs began flying. People ducked under tables from projectiles thrust in every direction. Fighting broke out—Arabs against Jews, Jews against Jews—with fists and feet and even teeth, and the brand new ambulance went into service by ferrying the wounded to the local hospital.

  After hours of pandemonium, the judges huddled together. A compromise was reached: both girls won. This round of the Arab-Jewish conflict had been solved.

  As a prize, Raymonda got a dark chocolate cake and a bottle of champagne, which she presented to her father. Habib appreciated the gift—it brought back sweet memories of his dandyish exploits in Cairo. Why had she participated in such a contest? For him, the whole episode had been degrading for a member of the Hawa family, his little princess. “Mother had to assure him I hadn’t worn a bikini but was dressed modestly.” Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus, he sighed.

  In the fall of 1954, Raymonda moved from the straight-laced Nazareth Sisters to a more relaxed convent in Haifa. Most of the girls there were European Jews. Some had converted during the war to save their lives, and their families decided to remain within the Catholic fold and continue their Catholic education.