An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  “When I go to see her,” Raymonda told a reporter, “frankly speaking, I feel like I am in a jail. It’s like being in jail.”

  Raymonda soon reached out to Father Michel one last time. In the spring of 1989, one of Arafat’s top men phoned Raymonda to say that Arafat’s Russian-built plane had crashed overnight somewhere in the Libyan desert during a sand storm. Was it shot down? Was he dead? No one could say.

  Cascading thoughts tumbled through Raymonda’s mind. What would happen if he was dead? Arafat was willing to sit down with the Israelis and negotiate a political solution to a conflict that had raged since before she was born. With all his flaws, this monkish warrior, this man who reached out to Weizman, embraced Abie Nathan, and still wanted to meet Ruth—he was the only Palestinian leader able to fulfill Raymonda’s “mission” to get Palestinians and Israelis to talk.

  Raymonda immediately called Ruth to see if she could find out anything from Weizman. He knew nothing. The Israelis knew nothing.

  She next picked up the phone and called up a cousin in Kfar Yassif in Israel and asked him, in the middle of the night, to wake up Father Michel in Rama and ask him about Arafat’s fate. The cousin did as she requested, and the old priest, who rarely slept anyway, was up waiting for him.

  “Tell Raymonda there is no need to worry. Yasser Arafat is alive. I see him in the desert; there is a circle of fire around him” protecting him.

  Arafat was found wandering around the wreckage of the plane two days later. The circle of fire Father Michel referred to was a shallow ditch the survivors of the crash dug, filled with airplane fuel, and lit on fire as a signal for rescuers and to ward off hungry jackals.

  57

  Oslo

  In 1990, Abie Nathan, the Jewish “Don Quixote” who, as The Guardian commented, preferred to “light a candle than curse the darkness,” sat in an Israeli prison because he had met with Arafat. From Paris, Raymonda had been the matchmaker.

  Nathan got out and at once returned to Tunis to create “hope and understanding.” This time, the Israeli authorities sentenced him to eighteen months in prison. Nathan went on a long hunger strike that nearly killed him. After three weeks Arafat sent him a note from Tunis, requesting that he end the fast. The struggle was important. More important was that he stayed alive. Nathan kept it up for forty days. Ruth was, again, one of his faithful guests.

  He got out, and like a boomerang, he went back to Tunis. Nathan was awaiting trial in Tel Aviv when the 1992 parliamentary elections brought the Labor party back to power, headed by Yitzhak Rabin. Ruth spent election night celebrating Yael’s election as a Labor MP. The Dayan legacy lived on, this time with a sharp turn to the left. In one of Yael’s first acts as a politician, and in defiance of the law that put Nathan behind bars, she flew to Holland to meet one of Arafat’s advisors.

  Raymonda remembered the conversation with Yael at the Philadelphia restaurant, her lovely face contorted by suspicion; and now Yael was taking calculating, pragmatic, jack-knifing steps in the right direction. Not like Ruth with her emotions but rationally with her mind she agreed with Uncle Ezer: Israel had to give up her father’s territorial war booty.

  Raymonda felt like dancing: it was as if she and Ruth, indirectly through Yael, were helping overcome the abyss of hatred and mistrust separating Palestinians from Israelis. “You did it!” she shouted into the telephone to Ruth. “Bravo!”

  Rabin not only didn’t send Yael to prison for meeting the PLO, he scrapped the law that forbade such contact, ironically the same day the Knesset legalized prostitution. Rabin, who six years earlier had supported the killing of Abu Jihad, and had said that the dream of all Israelis was to wake up one bright morning and all the Palestinians would be gone, knew he had no choice but to deal with Arafat.

  At once Raymonda, directly and through Suha, began working on Arafat to invite Yael to meet him face to face. It didn’t take much convincing, and Yael’s visit to Tunis, in late January 1993, stirred a din of objections and recriminations back in Israel. Images of the daughter of Moshe Dayan standing shoulder to shoulder with a man they had always equated with Amalek, the Biblical enemy of the Jewish people, shocked Israeli television viewers and newspaper readers the next day.

  Raymonda did another jig in honor of Ruth’s defiant, insolent, liberated daughter. Right-wing Israelis dismissed the trip to Tunis as a self-promoting stunt, seeing in it a spiritual connection to the Knesset’s recent legalization of prostitution. “Yael Dayan has hastened to Tunis to embrace the greatest enemy of the Jewish people since Hitler, PLO chief Yasser Arafat! The legalized degradation of women was thus followed by the legalized degradation of a nation. Or to put it another way: by placing whores on the same level as decent women, the law also placed Arab thugs on the same level as Jews.”

  In the foreign press, the story of the daughter of the war hero meeting with his former mortal enemy made for perfect copy. He was “nicer” than she had expected, she told The Independent. “He has a public appearance that is not very appealing. But that quickly disappears. He is a good listener. Very quick. Humorous and gentle.” She began telling people that if her father were alive, he too would be sitting down with Arafat. You make peace with enemies, not friends.

  Her Uncle Ezer soon had a new platform to push for peace. With Rabin’s backing, in March 1993, the Labor and leftist parties in the Knesset voted him president of Israel, an ostensibly ceremonial role, but one he used to promote his peace agenda. President Ezer and First Lady Reumah had traveled far since they met on his botched Irgun mission, in 1946.

  With her sister installed in the presidential mansion on Jabotinsky Road around the corner from Villa Leila, Ruth wandered the old neighborhoods. Cafe Atara on King George Street, where she and the wife of the Mossad chief used to sit in the mornings, was still around. Ruth walked to her parents’ old house where she was raised, and to the tall stone building from whose rooftop she watched the 1929 riots. Another fifteen minutes by foot, through Damascus Gate to the other side of the walled city, was the kindergarten her mother ran in the 1930s for Arab and Jewish children. It was now a parking lot. On these long peregrinations, Ruth reflected on Moshe, the flawed hero. She agreed with Yael: were he still alive, he would join his friend and sometimes rival Rabin in making peace with Arafat. Of this, she had no doubt.

  From the presidential mansion, Ruth made long calls to Raymonda; she even put Ezer on the line. Ruth predicted that her friend’s exile would soon be over.

  Raymonda, mindful of her “mission,” wanted nothing more. With Weizman, Yael, and Ruth, who continued to go on her tireless trips into West Bank villages, she was certain she could fulfill her “mission” of bringing Palestinians and Israelis together. There would be peace once the two sides got to know one another.

  Daoud refused to entertain the idea of returning to anything like her salon days when activists camped out in the family living room and death threats got slipped under the door at night. Besides, none of the children lived in the West Bank any longer.

  Neither Ruth through Weizman nor Raymonda through Arafat had any inkling of the secret negotiations going on in Oslo. When news of an agreement between the two sides came late 1993, Ruth rang up Raymonda with the animated tone in her voice of We finally did it! “Raymonda, when are you coming home?” There was such euphoria in the air. Ruth felt it; Arafat felt it—he was describing Rabin as the “Israeli de Gaulle.” Switching from rocks and Molotov Cocktails, schoolchildren in Ramallah were handing out olive branches to IDF soldiers.

  Raymonda prevaricated on the phone and even sounded somber as if they were discussing a funeral and not final peace. Oslo meant no more settlements, no more hijacked planes and raids on schools, and, for Raymonda, no more exile. She should come home and resume their work, Ruth said. It wasn’t about a tree-planting ceremony like earlier years. Now they could really be partners. True soul mates. “Raymonda, we’ve done it!”

  Why “we,” Raymonda wanted to reply but stopped herself. The two o
f them had had nothing to do with Oslo. The agreement had been done in secret by a closed group, of men, mostly by academics no one had ever heard of. How could such a secretive pact work? For two generations, both sides had spent their best energies demonizing the other, killing one another, assuming the absolute worst and, as Father Michel said, spreading the poison of hatred. And now an agreement, which just a handful of people had read, was supposed to wipe this away? Raymonda didn’t criticize the agreement because her son-in-law had signed off on it. But she wasn’t going to toss confetti, either.

  And what about the spoilers, Hamas, on the Palestinian side, and the vitriolic right among the Israelis? Ariel Sharon, with the young politician Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed that once their party regained power, they would refuse to abide by the agreement with Arafat, a man they continued to portray as the terror chieftain. Arafat “deserves a bullet in the head,” intoned a member of the Knesset from one of the religious parties. A former chief rabbi, agreeing with him, said it was every Jew’s religious duty to assassinate Arafat. The Council of Jewish Settlers offered 30,000 dollars for anyone who captured him “dead or alive.”

  “Are you coming home?” Ruth wanted to know.

  “Return? Not so fast, Ruth.” Daoud, she explained, preferred Paris.

  Daoud, the six-foot aristocratic gentleman who had been in his wife’s shadow for years, all the while bankrolling her free-spirited ways that had pushed the family into exile, wasn’t nearly as passive as he seemed. Through all the years, he sat on the leather sofa, legs crossed, his polished shoes tapping in impatience but also absorbing what the activists were saying. Now, before almost anyone else, he put the pieces together and assessed Oslo as a ruse. “The Israelis were building a big mouse trap for us,” he told Raymonda. “This Oslo thing sold off Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, Nazareth to the Israelis, and for what? Scraps of territory in Gaza and the West Bank? You tell Arafat,” he pointed his finger at Raymonda, “that the Israelis are going to put him and us into a cage. Arafat agreed to reestablish apartheid here, under our noses.”

  Daoud had no intention of going back under those conditions. “I’d rather die in Paris.”

  For the official ceremony, slated for October, President Bill Clinton chose the south lawn of the White House. Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres represented Israel. Arafat could invite his closest allies, and he asked Daoud and Raymonda to attend. Daoud put his foot down, solidly and implacably: No, he wasn’t going to a ceremony celebrating a bad deal. For the first time in their marriage, he won the battle of wills; Raymonda too declined the invitation.

  She got a taste of the new reality of Oslo after she and Daoud flew to Washington, DC to watch the festivities on television. Back in Paris, someone broke into the Tawil apartment, and, stealing nothing, emptied out Raymonda’s desk, closets, and cabinets, rifling through utility bills, lingerie, and linens looking for something they obviously didn’t find. French police combed the apartment suspecting the intruders had also planted a bomb.

  58

  Life According to Agfa

  Abie Nathan was so wrapped up in the Oslo euphoria that he sank his peace ship. McDonalds opened its first fast-food outlet in the country, and Starbucks soon followed. There was the new Israel, the new Middle East.

  Assi commemorated the Rose Garden ceremony with a line of coke and a screenplay about two lovers, an Arab and a Jew, in the Galilee. The dystopian story ends with the Jewish state “going down the tubes.”

  His aunt Reumah and President Ezer couldn’t make it to the premier of Assi’s Life According to Agfa (1993), considered by critics his best film. Ruth sat in the front row watching a film that ends in a bloodbath committed by a broken-legged IDF commander named Nimrod and his gang of soldiers in a seedy Tel Aviv bar named “Barbie,” Hebrew slang for a mental asylum.

  The film has the dark, nihilistic violence of Taxi Driver coupled with the existentialist mood of Deer Hunter. In making it, drugged out Assi was a prophet on a mission, a mission described by his producer as a sort of futuristic nostalgia: “When the Zionist experience comes to an end, and we’re all living in Europe and all sorts of other places, I think that this film will express beautifully the existence we had here.” “It was this point in time in Israeli reality,” added an actress who played the barmaid in the film, “where it seemed like the end of the world was near, and we had come to warn people. We were sure we were headed for the end of the state, that a terrible disaster was looming; we felt we were doing something that went beyond a film.”

  Shortly after the release of Assi’s follow-up film, An Electric Blanket named Moshe, he was arrested and hospitalized for psychiatric observation. Police accused him of splashing acid in their faces.

  If Assi was the ideological gravedigger of Israel, Yael remained the pugnacious believer; and she knew that helping build a Palestinian state was the only way to prevent the Zionist dream of statehood, because of the settlements, from degenerating into an apartheid regime.

  Along with a thousand Peace Now activists, she joined the PLO’s Jerusalem man Faisal Husseini, the son of the guerrilla leader Abdel Kader al-Husseini, on a march across the Green Line to the West Bank. The group held symbolic “peace talks” in a town just across the old Green Line. In response to a phalanx of army jeeps blocking their advance, Yael grabbed a mike and said in a strong, unhesitating voice, “Faisal Husseini’s father and my father fought each other to the death. Today I am proud to stand next to him in a peace meeting. I am sure that his children and mine will live, each in his own country, in peace. . . . I’m grateful they set up a roadblock. They’ve demarcated the border. This is not Greater Israel. . . . The State of Israel ends here.”

  Yael’s activism made her a target for hate mail and even death threats. She once got a letter in the mail with six bullets inside.

  59

  Separation

  In Israel for every Ruth or Yael there were a hundred bearded believers excoriating Rabin for embracing “Amalek.” Many people, brainwashed for years to hate Arafat, accused an out-of-touch elite of forcing Arafat down their throats. Some rabbis went well beyond calling for Arafat’s death; the ancient cabbalistic curse they directed against Rabin wished on him a painful death.

  On February 24, 1994, the American-Israeli doctor Baruch Goldstein, graduate of Albert Einstein School of Medicine, walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and emptied a clip of bullets on the Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding 125. To prevent reprisals, Rabin responded by introducing new roadblocks and a hermetic closure of Palestinian towns and villages. The Islamic movement Hamas lashed out at Arafat for his peace deal: he was less a liberator than a traitor, a collaborator with the Zionist enemy. His chic blond wife was further proof of how removed he was from Islamic purity.

  Five months later Arafat and Suha flew from Tunis to the Sinai in Egypt, got into a black Mercedes, and were escorted by Egyptian security to the border with Gaza. Israeli soldiers waved Arafat through. From the border to Gaza City, fifty thousand jubilant Palestinians lined the streets tossing rose petals and showers of white rice. Raymonda stayed behind in Paris to tend to Daoud, who was gravely ill. The genteel ex-banker, who considered Oslo to be a national catastrophe, wasn’t about to swap Paris for gun-infested Gaza. “No, I will never go back,” he repeated by phone once more to his son-in-law. “Jaffa is my home, not Gaza and not Ramallah. Give me Jaffa, and I’ll change my mind.”

  According to the terms of the Oslo agreement, Arafat wasn’t a triumphant Salah al-Din bringing liberation to the country, but at least he didn’t have to crawl on his belly under barbed wire as in the old days. The most recognizable Arab leader on the planet, the subject of a dozen biographies, hundreds of studies, tens of thousands of news reports, and a myriad of cabbalistic incantations, was the liberator of a few postage-stamp-sized enclaves in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, for which he was feted by the masses with their flags and smiles and sadly misplaced hopes.

  Oslo changed the logic of the c
onflict. The Israeli military still controlled 90 percent of the West Bank, and thousands of Palestinians still languished in prison. In this respect, there was no liberation—far from it. But nor could Fatah carry on an armed struggle against a country it had agreed to settle its disputes with through negotiations. Arafat and his men needed to strike a balance between cooperation and resistance, international respectability, and the support of the street. Finding a workable formula became equally urgent and elusive.

  With fanatics on both sides vowing to kill one another, Rabin and Arafat ordered their security services to separate the populations, the theory being, the less contact between Israelis and Palestinians, the less chance for violence. From Raymonda’s perspective, and from Ruth’s, the precise opposite was needed. The less contact Israelis and Palestinians had, the more suspicion remained the primary prism through which they viewed each other.

  As usual, Ruth preferred actions to words. A week never passed without her jumping in her ancient Saab and sputtering off to Palestinian towns and villages, working with groups of women making rugs or embroidered bags.

  Arafat and Suha lived in cramped quarters in Gaza, one of the poorest territories on earth. Revolutionaries in Algeria moved into mansions after they turned out the French; Lenin got the Kremlin. Arafat insisted on taking over a concrete building with the charm of a furniture warehouse. He and Suha had vastly different esthetic standards. She said to Vogue that he took one look at her shoe collection and likened her to Imelda Marcos, the wife of the Philippine dictator. As for their living quarters, “luxury,” he told her, “was in your father the banker’s home, not mine.” The compromise they worked out was for the monkish ex-guerrilla leader to live upstairs in a room with a cot, leaving her to decorate the entire second floor more to her francophone sensibilities.