An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and Their Forty-Year Peace Mission

by Anthony David

  Ben-Gurion, vowing to fight the White Paper, ordered the Haganah to set up clandestine arms factories and accelerate the pace of illegal immigration of Jews fleeing Nazism. The operation was so clandestine that all Ruth knew was that her rail-thin twenty-four-year-old prince was never around to help change the diapers.

  She was jealous of the other women her age who were rushing around in jeeps and learning how to fight. “When you are on a moshav, the birth of a new calf seems the center of the world.” Sick of all the neglect, she toyed with the idea of taking the baby and fleeing back to her parent’s home in Jerusalem. She changed her mind in October 1939, when Buggy, their boxer bitch, showed up at the shack with a note from Moshe tied to its collar: “Ruth, we have been arrested and taken to Acre . . . I hope it will end well. Kisses to you and Yael.”

  A month after the Nazi invasion of Poland, British police caught Moshe and a group of others with illegal arms. They were sentenced to ten years of hard labor in the old Ottoman fortress in Acre, a prison populated by rapists, killers, pimps, and highwaymen.

  Ruth’s indefatigable and selfless devotion was on full display. She turned over every stone to get her man out of prison, including putting on her old cotton wedding dress and trooping over to the British command headquarters at the King David Hotel and pleading his case before the commanding office, a “very nice old gentleman” fated to die in a terror attack by the Jewish group the Irgun. She went as far as writing to King George VI, inspired by childhood storybooks where the hero always has to prostrate himself before his Majesty. Nothing helped.

  Over the coming eighteen months Ruth took Yael and traveled from the farm to visit Moshe, his head shaven and wearing a chain-gang uniform without buttons. The English prison warden, a mean-spirited, one-legged man named Captain Grant, wouldn’t let them get close enough to touch. There was a long coil of barbed wire, and she held Yael over her head so Moshe could see them. A guard once threatened to shoot at Yael when she tried to crawl through the wire.

  Moshe only got to touch Yael once during his time in prison. Ruth’s old flame Zvi drove her and Yael to Acre in a 1938 Ford convertible with a heart-shaped grille and fender catwalks. A Sudanese policeman, a physical giant of a man, took pity and lifted up the daughter over to him. For the first time in Ruth’s life she noticed tears in Moshe’s eyes—he still had both.

  Ruth’s letters to Moshe are lost; his replies, smuggled out by Jewish workers, survive. “My Ruth,” one letter goes, “if only I could pass on to you one thousandth of the love I feel for you both every night . . .” In another, he mused that if freed he could be a truck driver, a security guard, a construction worker, or return to the farm so long as he could have a quiet life with her and Yael. “The day will come and, very soon, you’ll be knitting, and I’ll be reading and the darling will be crawling on the rug.”

  After four months in the fortress, Moshe and his fellow Haganah men were moved to a camp and allowed to work in the fields to grow their own food. Conditions improved, as did Ruth’s access to Moshe. She was able to bring him things from the farm, including O. Henry’s “The Cop and the Anthem” about a hobo in New York by the name of Soapy. The two even managed to see one another alone, in the middle of a field sitting on a pile of crunching and crackling eucalyptus leaves. Mosquitos swarmed where they kissed for the first time in months.

  Ruth took a first-aid course in Haifa, and was volunteering in Tel Aviv when Hitler’s ally Mussolini ordered his airforce to bomb the city’s seaport in July 1940. “Bodies were smashed to a pulp,” she wrote to Moshe in one of the letters Zvi airdropped from his Piper Cub plane. “I realized what it is to see small children like Yael without legs or hands or faces.” A bombing raid pulverized the house next door to where Ruth and Yael were staying, and Yael was missing. She turned up hours later with torn clothes and shrapnel wounds on her leg.

  Dayan’s letters to her, written on toilet paper and smuggled from the fortress, continued giving her a glimpse into his life. There is still the occasional confession of longing and love, but politics and the national struggle are dominant. One letter tells her about his wishes of becoming a leader of a determined group of fighters who, within a decade, would emerge as the underdog victors over both the British Empire and the Arabs. “You cannot imagine how much people here love and respect me. Nothing like this has ever happened to me in any company I have been in.”

  In February 1941, Rommel’s armies were threatening Egypt and Palestine, and the British gave Dayan an early release from prison. Ruth thought the family would live happily ever after; with Moshe’s days in the underground over, he could now read to little Yael on the rug.2 At first Moshe acted as if he were home for good. He ate ample helpings of Ruth’s good cooking, the two made love, they talked about spring planting, they laughed. What Ruth didn’t know was that the British released him because they badly needed manpower. Rommel’s advances in North Africa and the presence of Vichy forces across the border in Lebanon made a new separation inevitable.

  Zvi and members of the Haganah’s striking force turned up once again at the front door of the Dayan shack with a new assignment for Moshe: it was to take part in a secret operation in Vichy-held territory in Lebanon. Zvi explained to Moshe that the Jewish forces were to join a group of Australians in seizing roads and bridges. The operation began in the northern Galilee. Ruth drove with Moshe to the Lebanese border, and from there the men packed their ammo and headed into French territory. All went as planned until Moshe, in what would become his signature daredevilry, rushed a police post, tossed a hand grenade to take out a machine gunner, and went to survey the landscape for enemy troops. A bullet, fired by a Senegalese sniper, pierced the lens of his binoculars, scattered glass and metal into his right eye cavity, and tore out the side of his face.

  It took many hours to evacuate the half-dead Moshe back across the border and drive him to a hospital in Haifa. He never uttered a whimper; he clenched his teeth and endured the pain. Doctors didn’t try saving the right eye because there was no eye to save; they couldn’t even give him a glass eye due to the absence of bone. The best they could do was to scrape away the burnt tissue, shrapnel, and bone fragments, and hope he wouldn’t die of infection. What the sniper’s bullet left him with was a lifelong case of severe and recurrent pain, paralyzing headaches and insomnia. Ruth includes a personality disorder to his list of troubles.

  She dedicated herself to him and felt strangely content, because at least he was home—no more fighting, no more secret mission, half blind but otherwise intact with two strong arms; and even a man missing one eye could be a fine farmer. For Moshe, his life was over; he felt most alive leading men into battle. What good was an expert in Wingate’s counter-insurgency warfare with much of his field of vision cut off? How could such a man lead commandos into battle? He now considered himself useless, washed up.

  The shooting had a deleterious effect on his already anti-social leanings: Moshe became even more of a loner, an aloof laconic man who communicated with nods and gestures more than words. Back on the farm, when he heard Ruth was pregnant again, his reaction turned “violent” because it was too late for an abortion. How was a “cripple” supposed to support yet another mouth? The remonstrations were of no use. Their first son, Ehud or “Udi,” the “strong warrior” from the Bible, came along in January 1942.

  Oddly, Ruth regards the war years as the happiest they ever spent together. Despite the interminable hardships of the place, the small family set down roots, each year working the fields from brown to luminous green. Ruth still had just one desire, that they stay wedded to the wholesomeness of the farm, their lives enriched by the transcendent feeling of sowing and reaping.

  She relished sloshing through mud up to her ankles, planting crops, raising Yael and Udi, milking cows, and scooping up manure so that Moshe could plow it back into a garden where he was experimenting with strains of Japanese cauliflower. She loved the haystacks and goats, the boxer bitch Buggy, a new mule nicknamed
“Lord,” and trips into the hills where she and her farmer husband made love. Living in threadbare but blissful poverty, she and Moshe had their third child. A milk truck drove her to the local hospital for the delivery of their son they named Assaf or “Assi,” the leader of King David’s choir.

  5

  A Christmas Tale

  As for Raymonda, she says she was born under an evil omen. The problem began when Habib insisted on naming her after the heroine of Alexander Glazunov’s ballet with its hints of Moorish Spain, noble Crusaders, and villainous Saracen knights. He wanted his only daughter to be another Anna Pavlova, his favorite ballerina.

  Like many people among his elevated social class, Habib liked to consult the famous Polish-Jewish clairvoyant Wolf Messing: back in Europe both Einstein and Freud tested his powers. The war had just broken out in Europe, and Habib needed advice on investments. In passing, he mentioned to the soothsayer that his wife had just given birth to a girl, and her name was going to be Raymonda.

  “Oh, you mustn’t use that name!”

  “Why not! It has a delightful ring to it.” He was tapping his tasseled Italian shoes, and his hands, with diamond rings on his fingers, made a dismissive gesture. He was incredulous that the psychic should so respond to a tale that ends with a feast and dancing at a castle to celebrate the marriage of two lovers. Habib was entranced by ballet and the glittering, sumptuous life of a vanquished era of nobility.

  Wolf Messing saw something else. “If you name your daughter Raymonda, catastrophe after catastrophe will befall on you. Blood and killing, divorce, and hatred will never end.”

  “Nonsense!” said Habib.

  Raymonda was too young to have much more than dim memories of the war years or the Allied victory celebration in 1945. She naturally knew nothing about the way news of Nazi extermination camps and the world’s inability or unwillingness to stop the genocide generated a rage and frustration among Jews that would burn, and keep burning, all the way into Raymonda’s clammy cell in the Moskobiya Prison many decades later. Zionist groups ran clandestine factories churning out bombs and bullets in anticipation for the armed struggle for a Jewish state. An international arms operation, with donations to the Blue Boxes spread throughout the Jewish diaspora, smuggled in Lancaster submachine guns and bazookas.

  Her first recollections are of the family villa in Acre, where as a five-year-old she loved listening to the waves just below her window beating rhythmically against the walls of the twenty-room mansion. In the garden grew a gigantic cedar whose shadows created dappled, dancing patterns on her clothes and across her face. She wandered from room to room and stared with enchantment at the painted ceiling, the grand piano from Leipzig, the volumes of books bound in satiny Morocco leather lining shelves in her father’s library, the oil paintings, Habib’s chestnut brown box of cigars.

  Across the bay in Haifa, Raymonda could see the warships of the British Royal Navy sending up tall plumes of curling smoke. In the narrow alleys of Acre were solemn religious men with robes and beards and funny-shaped hats—Sheiks, Roman and Greek Orthodox priests, Baha’i, and rabbis. She can still describe with minute detail the iron gate to the church that was sea-blue, chipped and rusting, and decorated with two peacocks, one painted black and the other white; above the gate were interlocking iron-wrought hearts welded together to form a triangle topped with a cross. She remembers the minarets’ pencil-shaped tops, too; and the carved, latticed mashrabiya balconies jutting out from the stone walls—because of their tight-fitting wooden slats, pious women could peer out into the street but no one on the street below could catch a peek of them within.

  It was a city with the twisting, narrow, crowded aesthetic of the Levant with tall, swaying palms in gardens and church bells ringing out the Angelus.

  Her fairy-tale world was about to end.

  During the first postwar years Habib continued to travel overseas on business, to Marseille and Cairo. Closer to home he took his motorcar to Haifa and its salons and saloons, leaving Christmas to raise Raymonda and, on trips back to the castle, manage the army of servants and the farmers tending the tobacco fields and pig farm.

  Christmas with her bobbed hair gained fame throughout the Galilee for her liberated ways. She loved taking off her Coco Chanel dress, putting on riding britches, slipping a silver sword into a smooth hide sheath and, accompanied by Nubians, riding her stallion through the countryside. That said, as a liberated American woman, Christmas saw Habib’s aristocratic world as silly vestiges from the long vanquished world of knights and dueling pistols and the inherited system of privileges, titles, rank, and family name.

  The feudal pretensions became even more evident after Habib, drinking heavily at the parties in the salons of Haifa, began sinking into debt. As if the boozing, womanizing, and financial bungling were not enough, his patriarchal need to control, and his unwillingness to stomach his wife’s independence, worked like a torpedo that blasted a hole in their marriage.

  To shield her from the quarrels, Habib drove Raymonda in his shiny Oldsmobile to his sister Sylvie’s mansion on King George Street in Haifa, facing the sea near the port. Sylvie, married to one of the wealthiest tycoons in the city and a woman who considered speaking any languages other than French considerably beneath her dignity, employed two cooks, a valet, and a chauffeur for her silver-gray Daimler. On the baby grand piano in her living room, made of polished mahogany, she played the Chopin she learned at the prestigious girls school Notre Dame de Nazareth on Mount Carmel.

  Habib and Christmas divorced in 1947, just as the country plunged back into internecine conflict. It was too much for Christmas: she had come to Palestine from America, a country with civil rights and a degree of equality for women, and here she was a feminist caught in the mentality of the harem. She rebelled by packing her bags and leaving him. She got a job and rented a small apartment in Haifa.

  It was considered so scandalous that Habib ripped Raymonda from his estranged wife’s arms—she was kicking and screaming and flung her favorite doll to the floor—and whisked her off to a Nazareth convent run by French-speaking sisters from Lebanon and Malta. He instructed the nuns not to permit the mother to visit. Raymonda’s two brothers George and Yussuf were sent to a boarding school in Jerusalem. It was only on weekends that Raymonda could return to Haifa to see her divorced parents.

  Sylvie felt vindicated by her brother’s marriage with a “villager,” the half-wild American feminist. In collusion, the two siblings cooked up a story, telling Raymonda that her mother was dead but she shouldn’t mourn because Christmas died a martyr’s death: the dastardly Zionists blew her up in a terror attack. Raymonda cried and screamed and shook her little child’s fist at God for snatching away her mother. Then one day, while standing on her aunt’s terrace, she saw Christmas walking up the street from the railway station where she worked as a clerk. At that moment Raymonda believed God had heard her recriminations and, showing mercy, had raised her mother from the dead.

  Christmas saw her daughter, opened the gate and ran up the stairs to the terrace. Raymonda leapt into her arms, and through eyes filled with tears of joy she saw Aunt Sylvie scowling down at them from the upstairs balcony.

  6

  Civil War

  Throughout the war Ruth awaited word on the fate of Zvi. He had disappeared during a sea raid on the Lebanese coast. Word never came; Zvi vanished forever, swallowed into the waters off the Lebanese coast.

  In December 1946, Ruth and her younger sister Reumah were in a Paris hospital run by nuns. A French surgeon mistakenly thought he could fit Moshe with a glass eye. While in Paris, Reumah met Ezer Weizman, a pilot who looked like a Hollywood war hero with his tight golden curls and crystalline blue eyes. During the war the RAF veteran gained notoriety for loop-the-loop aerial maneuvers and the long list of kills to his name. Hard drinking and backslapping jokes fit into his fighter pilot cockiness. He had flown into Paris on a Piper Cub en route to London to plot with other members of the Irgun the assassinat
ion of the British military commander in Palestine.

  The notorious playboy in his faded RAF flight jacket wanted to take Reumah with him to London as he continued on his secret mission. She declined because Ruth, with Moshe in excruciating pain after the botched operation, talked her into heading off to a German castle to work with Jewish orphans from Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belson.

  Ruth’s hopes that Moshe would finally return to the hut on Nahalal, this time forever, never came through. The unfolding events produced a perfect pairing between his personal myopia and need for action. With the British Navy preventing hundreds of thousands of refugees in displaced persons camps from immigrating to Palestine, Ben-Gurion demanded a Jewish state. There was no more enthusiastic backer than Moshe: The British had to leave, and he believed that in the ensuing battle with the local Arabs, Jews would surely prevail. Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria threw down the wild card. Would the scrappy remnants of a people who had just been nearly exterminated find itself in a war with the wider Arab world? How could the Haganah fend off an attack by regular armies with large arsenals of planes and tanks?

  Zionist terror against the British met with fierce reprisals. The British tried everything, from sending Irgun fighters to the gallows at the Acre fortress to presenting to both sides a flurry of proposals, resolutions, and expert opinions. But in the end, the bankrupt British Empire lost its will to root out and defeat an utterly determined and ruthless Jewish underground. Fighting victims of Nazism was also a hard policy to defend.