An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  The four women and the diplomat were still chatting when through a set of double doors Arafat appeared, his eyes blinking excitedly. “Why didn’t Suha tell me you were coming?” he oozed in a familiar voice as if they were old friends. He aimed straight for Ruth, who bolted up from the sofa in time for him to grab her and give her a warm hug. The cameraman took a close-up of the two.

  He was so excited that he began kissing Ruth on one cheek, then the other. He repeated his kisses three times and told her how proud he was to have had her deceased husband as a foe. He was the “best enemy a man could hope for,” a real “Bedouin warrior.” The living quarry was singing the praises of the dead hunter.

  Ruth was wiping away the tears as Arafat lauded Moshe, words that confirmed her complex love: though abusive and deceitful, Moshe was also a great man, magnanimous and heroic; and if he were alive, he and Arafat would together make a peace of the brave.

  62

  Suha

  Ruth’s visit to the presidential palace in Gaza brought out the best in Arafat—his boyish, spontaneous, exuberant side. But the Tawil women received less and less of his warmth, as more and more Palestinians sided with Hamas against Oslo.

  Some of his top advisors wanted to force Suha into the role of a meek, docile, and most of all silent “Arab wife.” They didn’t trust a woman raised by a notorious feminist who for twenty years had bedeviled the “liberation movement” with her refusal to toe the line, with her brazen defiance of male privilege.

  The advisors were far from pleased when Suha began exerting herself in a manner unheard of from the first ladies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, or Libya. She channeled Raymonda by quoting her manifesto from the Palestine press agency days, “When our women have a chance to get out from under masculine domination, you’ll see what they’ll do for Palestine.”

  With Raymonda, Suha paid a visit to La Crèche to meet the women and their children. The two listened in horror to stories of women too afraid to give their names out of fear their families would find out where they were, kidnap them from the convent, and butcher them. In Gaza, Suha became a magnet for women threatened by their families, because the old Jordanian laws still on the books made honor killing a minor offense with, if at all, a few months behind bars. She took women into her home to save their lives, and asked Arafat to intervene on their behalf. To his credit, Arafat sat down with the women’s fathers and brothers and stressed the virtue of mercy.

  To handle the long line of desperate women outside the front door, Suha opened up a center for abused women in a refugee camp where she heard tales of lives getting worse, not better, under the regime of “liberation.” She grew more and more pessimistic about the PLO’s grip on Gaza; she saw a “black” future—or one colored the green of radical Islam. She could barely contain her rage at the gambling casino launched in Jericho by Fatah men whose business partners included Israeli politicians. “I hate it . . . right across from a refugee camp, no less.”

  As if anyone asked you, retorted her husband’s men.

  In February 1999, she ruffled more feathers by giving an interview to The New York Times. The article, “Suha Arafat Is a Very Different Sort of Palestinian Freedom Fighter,” describes how the “Arab Militant in High Heels” maneuvered her blue BMW on her way to the children’s clinic, “blond hair flying,” with veiled women and donkeymongers looking on. Suha’s deadpan line, “every beautiful flower ends up surrounded by weeds” hardly endeared her to PLO men. Boiling under the surface, what she said about her husband’s allies was even worse: “It is a man’s world, and very closed—like a family with a lot of intermarriages, and, well, you know the result of that.”

  A far more severe rupture between the First Lady and the president took place later that year in November, in the presence of Hillary Clinton. Suha gave the American First Lady a warm kiss and then claimed that Israel was causing a leap in cancer rates among Palestinian women and children through poisonous gas and toxic waste, which to most Americans sounded like gruel propaganda. Hillary, given the press reaction back home, had no choice but to blast her as an “anti-Semite,” which couldn’t have been further from the truth: Suha had inherited from her mother immunity to that particular mental disorder. As a personal favor to President Clinton, Arafat demanded that Suha retract the statement. She said no.

  No one would dare attack Suha directly. Those who wanted to silence her chose to go to what they assumed was the source of her dangerous humanism.

  They got their chance two weeks after the New York Times article appeared when an Israeli journalist, a buxom natural blond named Daphne Barak, turned up at Raymonda’s front door wearing her signature tight-fitting dress with spaghetti straps. She had made a career of interviewing A-list celebrities—Mother Teresa, Benazir Bhutto, Michael Jackson, Jane Fonda. Raymonda didn’t invite her in and explained that she had to be discreet because of the hell she got from the interview she gave to the Israelis in 1995.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I said things some people didn’t like.”

  “Like what?” Barak had a pad of paper out and began scribbling notes.

  “Well, for starters that I was against Arafat marrying my daughter.”

  With that, Raymonda, full of apologies, shut the door and Barak fabricated an entire “interview” which wound up in a mass circulation Arabic newspaper in London, and included a few lines in Raymonda’s mouth about Arafat’s regime being riddled with corruption and cronyism.

  Whatever Barak’s motives for her inventions—Uri Avnery suspected that Barak was a Mossad agent83—the damage was immense. The day after the interview appeared panicked neighbors reported seeing a long-bearded man skulking around Raymonda’s house in Ramallah. Raymonda then got a phone call, and the man on the other line warned her that she should return to France “for your own safety.” Raymonda recognized the voice: the caller was one of Arafat’s top advisors. He told her that her life was in danger.

  The heart palpitations flared up again.

  Raymonda hung up the phone. Swallowing anti-stress medication to prevent a heart attack, she grabbed her VIP pass and maneuvered past checkpoints on her way back to Israel. She headed north to a region she considered her lost home. She drove to the village of Rama to visit the grave of Father Michel De Maria. His words came back to her about hatred in the Holy Land. She spent the night in her mother’s native village of Kfar Yassif and, from a cousin’s home, rang up Arafat’s office.

  The advisors didn’t want to pass him the phone. “Do you know where I am? I’m in the Galilee. If you don’t pass me to President Arafat, I’ll give a press conference here in Israel.” She employed her L’pozez akol voice.

  Arafat asked her what she wanted. “I didn’t say those terrible lies to the press. Someone is trying to destroy me . . . us . . . you . . . us all. One of your men threatened me and said I had to leave our country. Where should I go? Do you want me to go back into exile?”

  He denied his men said any such thing.

  “Shall I give you his name? I’m sure he’s standing right next to you.”

  She heard muffled sounds on the other end. “Raymonda,” Arafat said, this time with intimacy and warmth. “I believe you. Palestine is your home. You must stay.”

  63

  The Angel

  Suha’s clinic for handicapped children, her visits to the nuns in Bethlehem, and her interventions on behalf of women threatened by honor killing, were sporadic, scatter-shot efforts at change, noble efforts but nowhere close to the ambitions of a woman reared on a steady diet of feminist rebellion. Deeper and more revolutionary changes were needed. Without success, Suha prodded her husband to toss out laws that more or less sanctioned the murder of women.

  The response she got was the predictable equivocation of a ruler keeping two sets of books. In theory there wasn’t a single feminist precept Arafat didn’t agree with—yes, women should be equals, yes, they should control their own bodies, yes, their lives are more valuable than male cod
es of honor. All the while, he kept his eyes on the street. He didn’t want the Islamists to suspect him of acting against Islam at the behest of his Christian wife. It was the same refrain Raymonda had heard a thousand times: Don’t interfere; women’s rights will have to wait.

  In January 2000, Zahwa came down with a serious enough fever for Suha to take her to Paris for urgent treatment. Mother and daughter decamped to the Neuilly quarter. It was a safe place far from the coming cataclysm.

  Months rolled by. Ruth was one of the few Israelis Raymonda still saw. Unlike most Israelis, she ignored warnings by her government that the West Bank was a lawless and dangerous enemy territory. A jungle. The specter of the widow of the great general showing up on a Hamas website with duct tape wrapped around her face kept Shin Bet people awake at night.

  With Suha gone, people who needed something from Arafat turned to Raymonda. Arafat spent most of his time in the Muqata in Ramallah, the former Israeli prison and now presidential headquarters. By this point, Raymonda knew how to deal with Arafat’s advisors—she ignored them by walking straight past the burly security men, sweeping into his office unannounced, usually at least once a day.

  Whenever people had medical problems and needed money, they came to her because Arafat never said no to her; she just had to explain the reasons people needed help. Millions flowed from the presidential coffers to poor people with cancer or mental disease, or whatever. Quietly, without drawing too much attention, the president saved lives of scores of women threatened by their families for “dishonoring” them.

  Arafat’s generosity was in the context of a failing regime. President Weizman blamed the Likud government for the stalemate in the peace process. “I have reached my red line,” the exasperated Weizman said in a 1999 television interview. “I’m not willing to help Netanyahu any longer. It is impossible that everyone is angry at us—the U.S., Europe, President Mubarak, King Hussein—and only we are right.”84 Some said that Weizman was working behind the scenes with opposition parties to force the grandstanding prime minister, a former furniture salesman, into calling for new elections. The Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, won.

  Someone probably wasn’t too happy with Weizman’s dovish ways. Leaked reports of minor financial shenanigans led to his resignation that summer.85 Barak, while donning Rabin’s peace mantle, also had to watch his back. Just as he launched land-for-peace talks with the Syrians at Shepherdstown outside Washington, DC, Uzi Dayan, on behalf of the new leader of the Likud, Arik Sharon, led top American politicians around the occupied territories to prove that Israel could never return the land to the Arabs. The occupied territory was too important for Israeli security.

  The last time Ruth saw Raymonda before the Second Intifada broke out was as Barak left for Camp David for an ill-fated encounter with Arafat. Driving her thirty-year-old jalopy across the archipelago of checkpoints, she turned up at Raymonda’s house in Ramallah, wearing a summer dress the color of cotton candy. Though for decades she had rubbed shoulders with many of the world’s most famous designers, she still preferred the old Maskit wardrobes she lovingly called her “rags.”

  If she could have gotten away with it, she probably would have shown up barefoot. Ruth’s gray hair showed her age, but her iridescent green eyes, her fast and determined walk, her sinewy personality had remained constant since her first encounter with Raymonda in St. Luke’s Hospital.

  Before Ruth even had a chance to say hello, Raymonda told her three mourners inside her house needed “your angel’s help.” The father of a large Christian family had just died, and his children wanted permission for their siblings and close relatives in Jordan to attend the funeral, which was in three hours’ time. The relatives were already at the King Hussein Bridge, but the Israeli soldiers wouldn’t let them through.

  Raymonda was speaking rapidly and, before reaching the front door of the house, she forgot to share an important detail about the supplicants—that they belonged to a prominent family whose most famous member was Georges Habash, the founder of the militant organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Arafat’s most outspoken foe on the left. Like Daoud, Habash, likening Oslo to a poker game, rejected the Accords. Habash called Oslo a legal ruse used by the Israelis to get Arafat to give up his best available cards. While Arafat was off the Mossad hit list, Habash, otherwise known as “al-Hakim” or “the doctor,” was still a marked man for the hijacking of the Air France plane in Entebbe. He was the one who, in 1970, had dispatched the gunmen who had nearly killed Assi in Munich.

  Raymonda introduced Ruth to the three mourners; only then did she come out with the name “Habash.” Ruth’s raised eyebrows signified that she knew she was standing in front of relatives of Public Enemy Number One. The guests, after politely greeting Ruth, turned back to Raymonda and asked if she could call Arafat and get him to act.

  Next to Ruth was one of the mourners, a well-heeled gentleman in a finely tailored black suit. She asked him in English what was happening. The two of them huddled together, trading whispers. Ruth was shaking her head, and then she was nodding. Her face showed a range of emotions: first sadness and then an understanding smile, and then back to sadness. Her empathetic genius was again at work.

  “Let me help!” she suddenly announced in a loud enough voice that everyone stopped, their heads cocked in her direction. “Just give me the names of your family members in Jordan. I’ll see what I can do.”

  If you go through Ruth’s address book you’ll find the telephone numbers of most of the leadership elite of Israel, and in Raymonda’s house she made use of her best contacts in the military to help out the family of a man whose group tried to kill her son. There she was, dabbing away tears while she speedily, carefully jotted down the names, one by one; then picking up the home phone, she called Uzi because he was the master gatekeeper. At the time he was on the front lines in Lebanon.

  Uzi Dayan! The mourners could hardly believe their ears.

  Ruth contacted an office within the Ministry of Defense, and within a few minutes she was connected directly to him. Ruth hung up and said, with her good-witch magic, that Moshe’s nephew promised to contact the commander of the King Hussein Bridge across the Jordan and get permission for the family to pass. It seemed to make no difference to Uzi that the Habash family was involved.

  After the family gave their effusive thanks to the “angel” and left, Ruth told Raymonda the story of Uzi. Ruth knew some of the scars Raymonda had been carrying since she was a little girl, the expulsion, the killing, and the destruction of her family. Now Ruth told her about Uzi’s scars. Just as Raymonda was a terrified little girl in a convent, not knowing if her parents were dead or alive, Uzi’s father Zorik lay rotting in a field.

  Epilogue

  Great Wall of Zion

  On the way back from Camp David, Arafat passed through Paris and instructed Suha to stay put in France. The Israelis were pushing him to betray his principles, he told her. “I do not want Zahwa’s friends in the future to say that her father abandoned the Palestinian cause.” He was going to show the Israelis he couldn’t be cowed by their power. “I might be martyred, but I shall bequeath our historical heritage to Zahwa and to the children of Palestine.”

  Arafat naturally had his contingency plans for a faceoff with the IDF, even if he knew there was no winning a military confrontation with Israel. He probably wanted a limited shootout. Ehud Barak had his contingency plans to nip armed resistance in the bud.

  The so-called Al Aqsa Intifada began with Sharon’s march up to the Haram al-Sharif and his words, quoted from an IDF commander after the war in 1967, “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” There were protests, and the following day trigger-happy soldiers shot dead seven unarmed protesters on the plaza surrounding the Dome of the Rock, and wounded more than one hundred. Violence quickly metastasized: over the following days forty-seven Palestinians died, and 1,885 were wounded; five Israelis died at the hands of the Palestinians.

  The Islam
ists were quick to organize a spate of suicide bombing and guerrilla attacks. To keep the support of the street, Arafat gave orders to his security forces to open fire at Israeli forces. His chant “Jihad, Jihad, Jihad” went well beyond theatrics.

  This militarized Intifada was all the right wing in Israel needed to recast Arafat in his old role as a moving target. The Jerusalem Post wanted him put in Adolf Eichmann’s glass cage in a grand trial for his “crimes against humanity,” as a prelude to the gallows. The spread of Palestinian terrorism into Israeli cities swept away the Labor government and brought into power Ariel Sharon. Now his national security advisor, Uzi labeled Arafat “the problem” and “the obstacle to a solution.”

  Other members of the Dayan clan did what they could to keep a bit of humanism alive. Ruth indefatigably continued her humanitarian forays into the West Bank. Assi’s latest film was about a West Bank settler-rabbi wanting to take over the Temple Mount. Yael clung to her view of Arafat as a peace partner. Aviv Geffen the rock star teamed with an Arab singer-songwriter to record the song “Innocent Criminals.” “You say the Arabs are primitive / say the Arabs are aggressive . . . The Arabs demonstrate, the police take their lives.”

  Raymonda was still in Ramallah, walking over to the Muqata every day to visit her son-in-law. In 2003, the steady stream of suicide bombers, some dispatched by Fatah leaders, triggered an Israeli campaign of targeted assassinations. Eventually, the IDF reoccupied West Bank cities and laid siege to the Muqata in Ramallah. For fun, during the invasion, soldiers in Merkava tanks flattened Raymonda’s BMW parked on the street.

  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.