An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  Ezer wanted to hear if Arafat and Abu Jihad would be willing to enter into dialogue with Israel, an unexpected thing to hear from a minister in the Peres-Shamir-Rabin government that had just pulverized PLO headquarters.

  Ezer knew that the Israeli talk of autonomy in the West Bank was a sham, and inside the cabinet he began pushing for unilateral separation from the conquered territories before addled messianic settlers hijacked government policy. Israel had to vacate the Biblical homeland of Judea and Samaria in order to stop the “zealots” and “fanatical dreamers” from undermining the State of Israel and its democratic achievements. Israel needed a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

  At the Hilton, Raymonda repeated to Weizman what Tarazi had already told Ruth: that Arafat was willing to consider a ceasefire with Israel as a prelude to direct negotiations, leading to two separate states. It was a political direction she grudgingly accepted even though it meant no return to Acre and Haifa.

  Raymonda wasn’t back a week in Ramallah when someone, late at night, threatened her in Arabic over the phone that “if you do not leave the country within three days, you will end up like Aziz Shehadeh,” in other words, dead.76 This time she didn’t bother going to Father Michel. She knew what he would tell her. Morris Draper, the American consul general at the time, echoed more or less what she’d already heard from Father Michel: “Get the hell out of this place, Raymonda, and never, never come back. Better a living woman than a dead hero.”

  54

  Uprising

  Yitzhak Rabin must have regretted letting Raymonda out of Israel. Soon after she arrived in Paris, the Minister of Culture, Jacques Lang, invited her and Amos Kenan to address the Assemblée Nationale. The house was packed with the intellectual elite of France and the world. Mitterrand sat next to Ruth’s latest hero, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu. Raymonda and Kenan were supposed to address the assembly separately, each making a statement on peace and the two-state solution. “What are you going to say?” Amos leaned over and asked her just before he spoke. She retorted that she wanted to talk about the return of refugees to their homes. “Never, never, never,” he blustered. There was booze on his breath. “Have your state, but just don’t swamp ours with all these people . . .” He lost his train of thought.77

  With Tutu in the audience, she was determined to stick to her guns. “Amos, maybe we should have two states, I don’t know. What I can tell you for sure is that people have the right to return to their homes in Acre and Haifa and the Galilee.” There should not only be peace; there should be true friendship between Israelis and Palestinians. But she added something she had heard from Dvora’s mother so many years earlier: once peace comes, the expelled must be permitted to return. This was the essence of Raymonda’s speech before the French nation.

  Raymonda could see Kenan wincing at her words. It was his turn to speak. He pulled out a small flask, took a swig, and zigzagged his way to the front, embracing her on the way. “I’m an Israeli,” Amos said with clear, steady, strong words, avoiding the issue of refugees. “I’m asking for the Palestinians to have their state and for the PLO to be their representative.”

  That day, the Assemblée voted to accept PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, and to call for a separate, independent Palestinian state.

  An interviewer on French television asked Raymonda following the event, What’s next for you? Without thinking, she announced she was going to create a PLO press bureau, in France. Though this was the first time the idea crossed her mind, since everyone agreed it was a good idea, she flew to Tunis to discuss the matter with Arafat and Abu Jihad, and the two men promised to provide the funding for an office she then opened on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, close to the Arc de Triomphe.

  She had barely opened up for business when the first Intifada broke out in the West Bank and Gaza in December 1987. Ruth had wrapped up her South Africa Maskit and was mostly living back in Tel Aviv. Hardly a week passed without the two women talking over the phone about the bloodletting of what people called the “children’s revolution” because they were the ones throwing rocks at soldiers. From her years of working with craftspeople in the West Bank, Ruth knew hundreds of people in villages and cities, and dreaded the harm meted out to them. When she got the chance, Ruth let her old friend Yitzhak Rabin know that brute force alone wouldn’t stop kids from throwing rocks.

  Ruth passed on to Raymonda the message from Weizman that he urgently needed to talk again. Raymonda got the go-ahead from Abu Jihad, now her main backer inside Fatah. But in April 1988, ten days before Raymonda left Paris for Tel Aviv, the Israeli inner cabinet, dominated by Shamir, Rabin, and Peres, decided to put an end to Abu Jihad’s career.

  A family man, Abu Jihad was reclining on the sofa with his wife Um Jihad, in their middle-class apartment in the Sidi Bou-Said neighborhood of Tunis. The children were in bed, and the two were laughing about the latest gossip, that Anthony Quinn was considering playing Arafat in a Hollywood movie. Hearing a noise, Abu Jihad, pistol in hand, went to the door. The head of the Mossad team was standing there, wearing a surgeon’s mask and gloves. Abu Jihad tried firing off a shot, but the man coolly, without words, emptied the clip of bullets into him. Not a word was said. A second commando, disguised as a woman, videotaped the scene.

  A cold fear gripped Raymonda when she heard the news. By killing the strategist of civil disobedience, the Israeli hawks proved they would stop at nothing to preserve the occupation. She felt as if the Israelis had also signed her death warrant. Who was going to protect her against Abu Nidal or a host of other enemies wanting to teach the feminist, with the acid tongue, a lesson? Why risk her life and the life of her family? She called up Ruth and canceled the follow-up meeting with Weizman.78

  Ruth ran up a sizable telephone bill trying to get her to change her mind. Ezer finally got on the line and snapped out an order. When that didn’t work, he pleaded long enough for Raymonda to acquiesce.

  At the Hilton bar, the first thing she asked, before even shaking his hand, was about the killing. “Abu Jihad encouraged me to contact you!” The suspicion of him being a “monster” was creeping back. “How many more Israelis have to lose their sons?” She was referring to his son Saul.

  His face was pale as parchment. He took his elbows in his hands, glanced around the lobby, and then refocused back on her. “Listen,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

  “Complicated? Seems simple to me. You killed a man who . . .”

  He cut her off. “Raymonda, I fought that decision.” He raised both arms as though he was being held up at gunpoint. “But what was I to do? Do you think I could have sent Abu Jihad a telegram warning him? I want peace, Raymonda, but I’m no traitor to my country. Don’t ask me to be.” He leaned forward to grab the finger of Scotch left in his glass.79

  “Well, shame on you, on you all!”

  Weizman dropped his head and stared down at his empty glass. The tough old soldier was biting his lower lip.

  “OK, Ezer, why are we here now? What do you want from me?” Weizman, ordering another drink, revealed an approach that would eventually succeed with Oslo, but in 1986 was still unthinkable in Israeli government circles: Israel and the PLO should recognize each other’s legitimacy and the two sides should enter into secret negotiations for a two-state solution. “What do you say?”

  Her long years of contact with decent generals, including a few psychotic ones, gave her the ability to assess the seriousness of the offer. My God, she thought. This could be it!

  From her Paris office, Raymonda sent a message to Arafat, asking him if he agreed to have indirect contact with Weizman. Using an encrypted code, Arafat conveyed his willingness. She then asked Arafat into agreeing that his new Number Two, Abu Mazen, conduct secret talks with Weizman in Moscow. The meeting never took place because the Soviets didn’t give Weizman an official state invitation, a necessary cover for the illegal meeting that, if exposed, could have opened him up to charges of treason.


  Arafat and Weizman were in fact so eager to get started that they spoke directly over a tapped line: Weizman didn’t know that someone in the security apparatus deemed him enough of a threat to snoop in on his phone conversations. In January 1990, word leaked of his telephone call with the arch-terrorist. The Shamir, Peres, and Rabin triumvirate, lashing out at his “betrayal,” sacked him from the government. Weizman, in his inestimable RAF manner, cursed the three of them as “sons of bitches.”

  That Weizman lost his job at least proved his sincerity to Arafat. Just as Raymonda had been telling him for years, some Israelis sincerely wanted to come to terms with the Palestinians. Arafat contacted Raymonda and told her he was now open to dialogue; he even asked her to set up a meeting with Ruth.

  “Anytime, any place,” was Ruth’s natural response, but since even muttering the name of Arafat in Israel was like waving a copy of Mein Kampf, she asked Defense Minister Rabin for his okay, to which his answer was a predictable no.

  55

  Living with History

  Arafat, in constant fear of assassination, spent most of his time in his Dassault Falcon 20 jammed with weapons in every available spot, including the lavatory. With the military option no longer realistic, and with an uprising in the territories in full swing, he was sold on the idea of gaining broad diplomatic respectability. The man spearheading the campaign, in Paris, was Dr. Souss, Arafat’s soon-to-be brother-in-law. A musician Arafat nicknamed “the pianist,” Souss won over French President François Mitterrand through his performances of Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin, his poetry, and his book on Jewish-Arab reconciliation, Letter to a Jewish Friend.

  Dr. Souss’s friendship with President Mitterrand turned Paris into the central diplomatic hub in the Palestinian effort to shed the old image of wild men menacing international airliners. The first official meeting between Mitterrand and Arafat took place in 1989, at the time when crowds in East Berlin were using sledgehammers to bring down the Wall.

  “I have come in the spirit of your revolutionary tradition,” Arafat said to the French parliament during his visit, reading a speech largely written by Souss. “I have come searching for the peace and liberty of my people. Peace for us, and peace for the Jewish people. Peace and co-existence between our two peoples.”

  At Raymonda’s request, Souss hired Suha as an emissary carrying sensitive documents back and forth to Arafat’s headquarters in Tunis. She was an excellent French-Arabic translator, having been raised with both languages at home. While studying French literature at the Sorbonne, she had begun working as a journalist; she even made a name for herself in France by interviewing the Egyptian feminist rebel Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, whose book Women and Sex was banned in Egypt when it came out in 1971. She had sat in a dungeon for months for writing her book.

  At the time, Suha had plans to marry a French lawyer, a suitable match for the stylishly coiffed blonde with her haute couture outfits and her well-turned ankle.

  During her trips back and forth between Paris and Tunis, monkish old Arafat, who preferred crumpled military surplus outfits to a suit and tie, set his bulbous eye on her. Suha succumbed, less to Cupid’s arrows than to the aura of a legend. To what she called “living with history.”

  The entire courting game was short and necessarily clandestine for the simple reason that Arafat’s men were dead set against her. The Arafat brand, that of a selfless hero wedded to the revolution and sitting in the trenches with his troops, had no room for a Valkyrie-type intellectual in Giorgio Armani stilettos.

  When Suha broached the topic, Raymonda let her know it was a bad idea. Raymonda had, after all, struggled most of her life to win her independence from men, and now her dear daughter contemplated tying the knot with a man who was charismatic, but also well over twice her age and a constant target for a hail of bullets. There was also the small matter of character: given his line of work, Arafat was necessarily secretive and equivocating. Raymonda’s hero, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, noted the way he “contradicts himself every five minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is.” Hardly a formula for nuptial bliss.

  Undeterred, Suha pressed on with her plans. Following Arafat’s request, she told no one, not even her mother.

  It was a secret wedding that took place in the Tunis bunker: no white lacy dress, no layered wedding cake, no champagne, no flying grains of rice. In a sop to hardline Muslims, she went through a perfunctory conversion to Islam. Nor was the crusty bridegroom one to carry her over the threshold of his closet-sized digs in Tunis. There were bodyguards everywhere: even on the roof of the building, men peered through binoculars, looking for Israeli helicopters.

  Raymonda was kept in the dark; all she knew was that Suha was mysteriously living full-time in Tunis. In July 1990, she was on a plane flying to Vienna to attend Bruno Kreisky’s funeral when one of the top PLO functionaries, a man close to Arafat, sat down in the empty seat next to her and whispered that she should “control” her daughter. “We are a very conservative society. Fatah is a liberation movement, but we don’t allow girls to behave this way.”

  “Which way?” Raymonda had no idea what he was talking about. The words “girls” and “behave” made her want to eject the man from the jet.

  “Your daughter, Raymonda, is the mistress of Yasser Arafat.” The way he said “mistress” sounded like misogynist gossip. Joining fury at the way the man spoke was a dread of her daughter being branded with the same scarlet letters as she had been. The Fatah man chipped in that Suha’s “life may be in danger.”

  On the ground, Raymonda checked herself into a Viennese hospital because of heart palpitations she feared could lead to a heart attack like the one that had killed Christmas. No, she wasn’t going to allow men to destroy Suha’s life. From the hospital she called Suha, at Arafat’s office in Tunis, and insisted she return to Paris. “This has to stop. Do you know what people are saying about you?”

  Arafat got on the phone and without saying a word about the marriage or the rumors assured Raymonda that he was “a serious and honest man.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me, me and the world, if you’ve married my daughter?” There was dead silence on the other end. Click.

  From Vienna, Raymonda flew directly to Tunis to confront a man she had supported for decades and continued to believe in—as a revolutionary leader, at least.

  She arrived at his office during a meeting between Arafat and his main advisors. Raymonda demanded to see him, raising her voice loud enough to penetrate the bunker’s walls. Arafat, rubbing his eyes in disbelief, left the meeting to see what she wanted. He didn’t exercise anything close to the level of dictatorial control as Saddam, Assad, Mubarak, Gaddafi, and other Arab leaders; over the years he had learned the art of light banter with foreign journalists and leftist supporters. Still, he didn’t tolerate dissent within his own ranks and his own people, and he certainly didn’t put up with women telling him what to do—which was exactly what Raymonda had in mind.

  In an adjoining room, Raymonda repeated to him what she had heard on the plane and demanded to know if he’d married Suha.

  “You are not my mother, so don’t mix into my business,” he screamed at her. The poet Mahmud Darwish, in the meeting in the next room, registered each and every word of an unprecedented row. Raymonda shouted back, “This is my daughter . . . people are saying she is your mistress. YOU MUST TELL PEOPLE THE TRUTH.”

  He tried to deny they were married, but Raymonda exercised her legendary tenacity until she forced him to pull from his pocket the marriage certificate, signed by a sheik. “There, are you happy?”

  “NO, I AM NOT. You are not just the father of our nation; you are the husband of my daughter. You have a duty to defend your wife. One of your men told me her life is in danger. You cannot let your wife be denigrated as a mistress!” No one had ever given Arafat so much cheek. “You have to tell our people about the marriage.”

  He looked chastised for a
n instant. But afraid of stirring up opposition within Fatah ranks, not to mention enemies such as Abu Nidal, by compromising his guerrilla image, he called in his Force 17 people and ordered them to escort Raymonda out of the building and to lock the door behind her.

  Seized again with painful heart palpitations, Raymanda checked herself back into a hospital. A controlled leak to the young Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, through Ibrahim Souss’s office, informed the astonished world about the marriage.

  56

  Ring of Fire

  The revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 brought hope but also fresh dangers. Ruth had met Suha a hundred times and thought such a beautiful and intelligent woman, a sophisticated and freethinking feminist, would have a salutary effect on the old revolutionary. By 1989, Arafat had renounced terrorism and embraced diplomacy as the only way to win Palestinian independence. She was seeing flickers of hope after two years of intifada.

  Ruth’s worries were more on the Israeli side, as the Likud government continued to tighten the screws on the Palestinians. The government strategy was to hunker behind the slogan of “security” and a “war against terror,” as a cover for rapid settlement expansion and thus to prevent a two-state solution. Prime Minister Shamir and his Likud colleagues denied there was any such thing as a moderate Fatah leader—all were terrorists. Shamir’s government strictly enforced Israeli laws barring contact between Israelis and the underground movement.

  Raymonda saw Suha less and less because she was married to the world’s most wanted man. He spent most of his time traveling, and when he was in Tunis, the two moved from one cramped place to another in order to keep potential killers guessing. Suha’s makeup was in one safe house, high heels in another and the collection of avant-garde French poetry in the third. She couldn’t even speak freely on the telephone because everyone knew the lines were tapped. To leave the guarded compound she needed clearance from security. “Can I go out? Is the road open?” Little wonder Suha began suffering from headaches and hypertension.