An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  The Israeli government, too, was running out of patience. Two days before the explosion, she agreed to debate the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. The topic of the debate was 1948: French Television would air it live in France. The idea of being on the stage with Eban was frankly terrifying for her. Not only was he the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Knesset, not only had he been the longtime Israeli ambassador to the UN and high-ranking member of the Knesset for the Labor Party, not only was he famously loquacious with a ready witticism for each occasion—he coined the bon mot “Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity”—but he was also a lawyer with a razor-sharp mind and an astounding gift for language.71

  It was like stepping into the ring with a prizefighter. The day of the debate, she boned up on some facts about the conflict and downed half a bottle of cognac.

  The TV cameras were set up in the Pasha Room upstairs. Eban was a large, impeccably dressed, walrus-looking man with round glasses and soft eyes; Raymonda put on bright red lipstick and a polka dot dress.

  It must have been the cognac. Soon into the debate, triggered by Eban’s canard of Arabs attacking the Jews in 1948, therefore having got what they deserved, she asked him point blank: “And what about the four hundred villages the State of Israel bulldozed off the map to make room for your kibbutzim and supermarkets and universities?”

  He denied it.

  “Oh really, shall we drive over to Deir Yassin and take a look around? I’ll bring my friend Amos Kenan.”

  At that point, Eban unclipped the microphone from his lapel, stood up, and left the Pasha Room, with the television crew and the audience gaping in astonishment. It may have been too much for him, not her words, not what she said, but the sudden confrontation with what his country had done, acts hidden away in archives and people’s memories, not allowed to be brought up, and certainly not in front of French television cameras.72

  The following morning at five came the familiar banging sound on the front door of the Tawil family home, a message from the military governor relaying an order from the new Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin barring her from leaving the country.

  The car bombing took place forty-eight hours later. She had just returned home with Daoud. They went inside the house, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed when they heard a blast powerful enough to cut the power supply on the entire street. Outside the upstairs bedroom window, she saw a wall of red flames and dense billows of black, acrid smoke. Throwing on a nightgown, she flew downstairs and out the door to see a heap of twisted metal; the powerful bomb had blown the car to shreds. Neighbors in pajamas watched as their cars caught fire.

  Daoud stood rooted in the garden aghast. “Christ!” his eyes opened wide and he shook Raymonda, her nightgown black with soot, by both shoulders. “I told you years ago to stop this suicidal activism of yours. You must want to get us ALL killed.”

  Raymonda couldn’t respond because the blast sent a clear message. She had tried someone’s patience too far. If she kept it up, she’d end up as human confetti.

  The next morning, the military governor swung by the house and, viewing the crater left by the bomb, with great self-assurance informed Raymonda that “your people did this.” She accused the Shin Bet. Only the Israeli security service could have built such a bomb.

  It was then that Father Michel De Maria came to mind. Once her nerves calmed down enough to steer a borrowed car, she returned to the village church.

  Sensations from childhood surged back again as she stepped into the small stone chapel, breathed in the frankincense, and stared at the candles illuminating the altar and making the icons glow. The old man took one look at her and knew why she was there. As if in a trance, he described a “terrifying” scene in which her whole family could have been killed in the car.

  “The Israelis wanted me dead, didn’t they.”

  “Raymonda, how can you be so naïve?” he replied without naming the bomb-makers. He said “outsiders” were responsible. “They wanted the inferno to be a lesson to others. Don’t you normally park the car close to a large gas balloon in the garden, in front of your house? If it had been parked there, the gas balloon would have destroyed your house and those of your neighbors. Many people would have died, you and your family and some of your neighbors.”

  With his hands the old priest, his curls now mostly white, made patterns in the air, as if writing a letter. “For the love of God, Raymonda, you don’t need me to understand their message.” He spoke as if he had a mental picture of the bomb-makers. “This time God has spared you. Many times, they’ve almost taken your life. You are protected, yes, but time is running out.” The next words came out as a reprimand: “Why are you still in this country?”

  “You once said I have a mission, father. To fight against hatred . . .”

  “Yes, that remains your mission, just do it from the outside. You must leave with your family. Otherwise, you will die; there is no doubt. Do you want your children to lose their mother just as you lost yours?” He was silent for a moment, waiting for the effect this might have on her.

  “Leave! I can’t let them win—they already took away Acre and Haifa from me. I want justice.”

  She noted a sepulchral sadness in his face when he told her about a future of bloodshed, “because people shut their hearts to God and embrace hatred rather than love. This Holy Land . . . it is filled with darkness.”

  “Father, how can this be? Won’t there be peace?”

  Taking her by the hand, he replied: “Just go away.”

  “And my mission?”

  “Raymonda, what life has taught you—talking to your enemies because you have compassion for them—that is what you must take with you to the outside.”

  Raymonda closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Okay,” she said. “Where am I supposed to go?”

  He turned and left the room. She tried to call him back, but he closed the door behind him.

  Ruth was with Raymonda during the frantic days that followed. Her life was clearly in danger. Prime Minister Rabin’s travel ban prevented her from leaving. She was trapped.

  Ruth approached Rabin, asking him to reverse his decision. The French-Arab Friendships Association had made Raymonda their “Woman of the Year” and invited her to Paris to receive the award. Laconic Rabin grunted “No.” President Francois Mitterrand turned to Shimon Peres, Rabin’s foreign minister, to get the ban lifted. Peres brushed him off. Bruno Kreisky and German Chancellor Willy Brandt tried, also in vain.

  Fearing for her friend’s life, Ruth headed back to Rabin, and this time she refused to leave his office until he granted Raymonda an exit permit.73

  52

  A Debt of Love

  “The only reason to fight death, to avoid danger, and to prolong life is not in order to achieve something but rather because of a kind of responsibility. A debt of love to those who may benefit from the fact that I am alive.”

  —Yael Dayan, My Father, His Daughter

  On the eve of her departure, Ruth invited Raymonda to meet Yael at the Philadelphia restaurant, off Salah al-Din Street. In their long friendship, it was usually Raymonda who asked Ruth for a favor. Now it was Ruth’s turn.

  An Israeli soldier, in a tank, had been killed in Lebanon, and Ruth wanted her help in getting the remains returned. Raymonda suddenly had political pull because her chosen place of exile was to be Paris, and her daughter Diana had married Ibrahim Souss. Dr. Souss had an open line to Arafat.

  Another reason for the lunch was to introduce Yael to Raymonda. Yael had inherited a number of Moshe’s qualities, some good and some bad; what she didn’t pick up from him was greed for land and indifference to nuptial vows. Unlike Udi and Assi, she was a devoted partner and mother. And few people in Israel despised the gun-toting settlers fanning out across the West Bank as much as Yael, who was beginning to emerge from her father’s shadows, becoming his much-improved successor, his missing eye, by assi
duously ignoring his swansong about the “sword within reach above your bed.”

  What she lacked was real human contact with Palestinians—which Ruth set out to provide.

  Raymonda, with the ethos of turn-the-other-cheek drilled into her by the convent sisters, wanted nothing more than to embrace Yael. Yael was far more reluctant, and Ruth had to drag her to the restaurant.

  The three sat at a round table with a green tiled surface and clawed iron toes gripping the marble floor. Yael emptied a packet of sugar into her tea. Raymonda studied the clockwise movement of Yael’s writing hand, so strong, her skin perfectly smooth. At first she could hardly speak. There, the woman she had so admired since her early years in Jordanian captivity was dressed simply but elegantly, trim, sparkling with life, and smelling of Allure Sensuelle. Her eyebrows looked plucked in the style of a French fashion magazine, high and noble, and her almond-shaped eyes were bright and smart. It was the clenched jaw that communicated Yael’s ambivalence. Ruth sensed the lack of chemistry between them.

  “So,” Yael began. “What should we talk about?”

  Raymonda searched for words. “Whatever. You, perhaps.”

  “Me?” She tossed back her head, her face looked suddenly as hard as granite. “I’d prefer to talk about you.”

  What Yael came out with over a lunch of hummus and grilled lamb, with Ruth biting her nails, was the standard lines about how Arafat was a pathological liar. She was delivering these lines smoothly, without rancor, like a judge reading an indictment. She didn’t mention any specific atrocity, only that Arafat, as a kind of dark wizard, was at fault for driving their peoples into war after war.

  Ruth remained silent, not wanting to intervene and unwilling to side with Raymonda against Yael even if that was what her conscience was telling her to do.

  Yael’s hand was shaking enough for her sparkling water to spill over the side of the glass. Ruth handed her a cigarette. It wasn’t what Yael said that startled Raymonda most; she had heard it all before a thousand times. It was the unbridgeable chasm that seemed to separate them. It was as if their primordial loyalties and the inability to understand the other’s experiences closed the two off from one another.

  At first, unsure how to respond, Raymonda stared into her face and pictured her as an infant with her father rocking her in his arms.

  Trying her best to keep her voice calm, Raymonda finally said: “My family was expelled from our lands when I was a child. My father tried to return, and your soldiers nearly killed him because he wanted to go home. And today? We don’t have some ideology telling us we own Tel Aviv. Keep Tel Aviv. Take it.” Raymonda put down the fork and scribbled “Tel Aviv” on a napkin and handed it to her. “We just want the same freedoms you have. We want to be free.”

  Yael listened, puffing nervously on her cigarette. “I’m sure I’d feel this way if I were you,” she finally said under her breath, without moving her lips.

  Yael was relaxed, sipping arak with the voice of the Umm Kulthum singing in the background. She looked around the restaurant and made a comment about the open, mixed atmosphere of the place, with Arabs and Jews and foreigners sitting in the same place without one group lording over the other. Raymonda, turning to Ruth, asked if she remembered when Umm Kulthum performed at the Alhambra Cinema. The art deco building, the crown jewel of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan Jaffa, seated over a thousand people, and no one cared who was Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. “Remember that? Before these idiotic wars turned our beautiful country into a hell.”

  Raymonda reached over and held Yael’s hand. Raymonda met her now warm gaze and thought: It’s so easy. Peace takes no more than a human touch.

  53

  “Better a Living Woman Than a Dead Hero”

  Just as Raymonda’s fierce tongue landed her in exile, Ruth took her quiet humanitarianism to apartheid South Africa as her greatest project of all. It began with a phone call from the South African ambassador who delivered a message from the hidebound Afrikaner Foreign Minister Pik Botha. He wanted Ruth to create a Maskit for Bophuthatswana, one of the “homelands” engineered by the South Africans.

  Ruth was in a bind. Clara, one of her closest friends, had for years been a major ANC supporter. The boycott movement against apartheid was building up steam—Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band was spearheading it. She told the ambassador that she detested apartheid and didn’t want to work for the “whites.”

  “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You won’t see any white faces in the homelands.”

  When Ruth arrived in Johannesburg, the high veld was baking. The embargoes against the South African regime were having an effect, and the once proud white city was turning seedy and dangerous. Wearing her favorite twenty-year-old Maskit dress, she rented a car and drove to the sprawling township of Soweto, a vast ramshackle city, and hotbed of ANC support. “Necklacing,” that is to say, putting a tire around someone’s head and lighting it on fire, was the preferred way of dealing with collaborators. From Soweto, she headed to Bophuthatswana.

  For the text two years she traveled back and forth between Tel Aviv and the homeland creating an African Maskit, bigger and better than the original.

  The letters Ruth wrote from Africa or Tel Aviv to Raymonda were addressed to a Paris apartment on rue Raffaelli in the sixteenth arrondissement. What for thirty years had defined Raymonda as a woman in a man’s world—the salon, the press office, a theater filled with admiring officers—had been stripped from her. Father Michel’s words on her “mission”—counteracting the hatred between Palestinians and Jews—became fixed in her mind as she rebuilt her life. This was probably just as dangerous for her in Paris, the assassination capital, as it had been in the West Bank.

  Through her son-in-law Ibrahim Souss, Raymonda was in regular contact with Arafat and his right-hand man, Abu Jihad, the man behind the coastal road killings, but now a convert to the moderate wing of Fatah. Raymonda was, for him, an important asset because she knew the Israelis so well.

  Perhaps the most dovish man of all Arafat’s men was Dr. Souss. To bring the entire organization over to the side of the moderates, Souss sought formal French recognition of the PLO. To this end, Raymonda found herself shuttling back and forth between Paris and Arafat’s office in Tunis. One of her trips could have easily ended in a fireball.

  In October 1985, she was reclining in the lobby of the Abou Nawas Hotel, on the seashore in Tunis, with her brother George and the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Father Michel had been spot-on when he told Christmas that George would live in far-away places: from his base in London, he ran businesses in Kuwait. He was in Tunis with Raymonda because he wanted to meet Arafat.

  Raymonda was more relaxed than she had been for years because she was far, she thought, from harm’s way. The previous evening she, George, and Darwish had shared martinis and bowls of jumbo shrimp with some of the Fatah people Raymonda came across in Beirut, characters straight out of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. These men, “veteran fighters from the mountains and deserts of Jordan and Palestine, men who had survived Israeli missiles and daggers flung by rival Palestinian factions,” were cultivated, their minds sharp and curious; and they had a stockpile of jokes. Their joie de vivre was not what you’d expect from guerrillas.74

  So where did their lust for life come from? That was the question they debated that morning in the hotel lobby waiting for the Force 17 men to escort them to PLO headquarters. They never showed up. Raymonda phoned Arafat’s office, but the line was dead.

  Raymonda conjectured that the life-loving fighters around Arafat had come under the salutary influence of Beirut’s beaches, nightclubs, and cafés. They had learned to combine fighting for freedom with a liberated lifestyle, so unlike the monkish Arafat whose only luxuries were pots of fresh Langnese honey and Tom and Jerry reruns.

  They were still chatting in the lobby when word came of an Israeli air strike on Arafat’s Tunis headquarters and apartment. What? How could the Israelis bombard the capital of a peaceful, neutra
l, tourist paradise? How could the Americans permit it? Never. In fact, President Reagan gave his tacit nod of approval for the Israeli retaliation raid for a Fatah attack that killed three Israeli tourists on a yacht. Lyrically dubbed “Operation Wooden Leg” after Captain Ahab, it was carried out under the leadership of now Prime Minister Shimon Peres—his Likud rival, Shamir, was minister of foreign affairs. Using intelligence received from the spy Jonathan Pollard, Operation Wooden Leg killed 270 people, including many of the men Raymonda had shared a convivial evening with the night before. Shimon Peres called the carnage an “act of self-defense. Period.”

  The attack seemed to signal the Israeli desire to kill Arafat. Ezer Weizman knew better. “Yasser Arafat is alive today,” he confided to an American professor, “because we want him alive. Don’t believe the news reports. We knew where he was. We always know where he is. If we wanted to put a missile through his bathroom window while he was sitting on the toilet, we could do so . . . and we know when he’s on the toilet.”

  The raid didn’t kill Arafat, and it left alive his chief military strategist Abu Jihad. Raymonda was convinced that Abu Jihad was the chief reason she was still alive. He had a checkered history, from guerrilla training with Che in Algeria to the bus massacre that Letty Cottin Pogrebin and her delegation from Ms. magazine had witnessed. But like Sartawi, he realized terror wasn’t going to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Israelis needed to be engaged, and he pushed the more militant factions inside the PLO to adopt a political, two-state solution.

  Abu Jihad gave the green light to Raymonda to fly back to Tel Aviv in 1986 to sit down with Weizman at the Tel Aviv Hilton, a conversation Ruth managed to arrange from Bophuthatswana.75