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

by Anthony David

  The British set a date: on May 15, 1948, they would go home. Still nominally in charge until then, the British tried to separate the Jews and Arabs with barbed wire.

  The UN then voted in support of a partition plan in which Jews, with a third of the population, were to get over half the territory, including the fertile coastal strip. Arabs kept the cities of Jaffa, Tiberius, and Hebron, along with the stony Biblical heartland up in the hills of Judea and Samaria. Jerusalem, symbolically the biggest prize of all, was to remain internationalized.

  Back on the farm, Ruth and her fellow farmers danced through the night in celebration of the UN vote; Ruth baked enough cookies for the entire village. Up in the Jewish neighborhoods in Haifa, with their large numbers of refugees from Nazi Europe, people honked horns and set off fireworks.

  Habib and his friends listened anxiously to the reports on Radio Cairo. Everyone knew that the partition was a formula for civil war. How could politicians in New York, spouting the language of human rights, simply hand over large swaths of territory, including the Hawa family’s lands, to European immigrants? How could the same governments that a couple of years earlier had failed to come to the rescue of Europe’s Jews now turn around and “solve” the Jewish problem by ignoring the rights of Arabs? How could Jews who claimed to belong to the democratic West want to impose such an unjust scheme against the will of the Arab majority? But how could the Arabs of Palestine stand up to the world, not to mention the better organized, better armed, far more relentlessly driven Zionists?

  Local Arabs vowed to fight, while Arab rulers, the kings, prime ministers, and generals of Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan, promised to come to the rescue by forming the Arab Liberation Army. Leaders issued one pronouncement after the next that must have sounded to Jews like something out of a Nuremberg Party rally or from the lips of Haman the Agagite: Ruth describes the general fear of “Arab armies gathering on all fronts.” Hebrew newspapers quoted over and over the Egyptian diplomat and secretary general of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, in his gruesome prediction of “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” It would be a cakewalk, this war between Arabs, children of Muslim warriors, and a nation of greengrocers and owners of haberdasheries. The only point of dispute among Arab generals, in their starched and pressed military uniforms weighed down with honorary medals, was who would take credit for this glorious work of liberation? The Syrian president bragged to everyone about the secret weapon he had up his sleeve: a nuclear bomb fashioned by a golden-handed Damascus ironsmith.

  With such delusional allies, Palestinian Arabs had little chance against a large and trained Jewish militia, along with hospitals, ambulances, and a communications network that gave even isolated outposts the sense of belonging to a broad, intelligent movement. The more avowedly terrorist organizations like the Irgun frequently worked hand in glove with the Haganah.3

  In January 1948, a group of Haganah men blew up the luxurious Semiramis Hotel, owned by Habib’s sister and located in the Arab neighborhood of Katamon, in Jerusalem. The Haganah communiqué spoke of the hotel as an “important meeting place of Arab gangs,” making it sound like a dingy din of pirates and not the fancy hotel it was.4 The Spanish consul was among the two dozen people killed in the blast.

  With the Haganah still an illegal underground army, Moshe’s actions were a closely held secret, and Ruth had no idea whether he was fighting, and if so, against whom and where. She had three children to protect, and in the evenings she heard the constant din of bullets raining down on Nahalal from the Syrian and Druze guerillas hiding out in the forests around the Arab village of Ma’alul. Syrian fighters shot Eli Ben-Zvi, the dreamy, poetic son of Israel’s future second president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ruth had been his scout guide years earlier; his fiancé Pnina lived next door in Nahalal. The wedding cake and cookies were all ready just as the news came of his death. “Pnina sat there holding her wedding gown, alternating between tears and hysterical laughter.”

  One funeral followed the next. To revenge a massacre near Jerusalem,5 Arabs slaughtered the son of the Nahalal schoolmaster, a Tolstoyan pacifist, along with thirty-four other students at the Hebrew University. Snipers shot a poet and pianist named Itzhak, also a neighbor of Ruth’s. To the mourners at the funeral she read a poem he left behind: “I would like to be/As the echo of the field’s breathing,/As the play of light in the empty space/Winged with wings of song/ . . . like everlasting youth.”

  In March 1948 the local postman, riding a bicycle, delivered a special cable from her uncle to attend his son Yossi’s wedding in Haifa. As a little girl Ruth used to go to the Zion movie theater to listen to her uncle play violin for silent movies. At least a dozen times, tapping her bare feet to her uncle’s music, she stared up at Rudolf Valentino’s dashing smile in The Sheik, admiring his kaffiyeh, moon-shaped sword, embroidered vest, camel-hair kaftan, bullet belt, and polished riding boots. The wedding coincided with Reumah’s arrival by ship with hundreds of orphans from the German castle.

  Just as Ruth was about to leave to Haifa for the wedding, news came that nineteen-year-old cousin Yossi had been knifed to death. He had gone to buy a shirt for the wedding. He caught an Arab taxi in the city, even though he was warned that the cab drivers weren’t to be trusted. “No, that’s ridiculous. I’m from Haifa, and I know the Arabs.” His cocksureness ended him up in a public toilet, his body cut to pieces.

  A week after Yossi’s murder, Moshe’s younger brother Zorik was shot by Druze fighters. Zorik was the most vivacious of the Dayans, a big, blond, handsome man filled with life and humor and love; Ruth felt like his mother or older sister. The body lay rotting in the field for three days, unapproachable because of Druze sharpshooters.

  Moshe had to identify Zorik’s body. Ruth, driving a car with jerry-rigged armored plates from Nahalal along winding, dangerous roads, met Moshe at a kibbutz near Haifa. Through binoculars, they looked out onto the field alive with red poppies and wild chrysanthemum, and saw Zorik’s crumpled body. Zorik’s son Uzi, the future architect of the Separation Wall, was just three months old.

  Moshe drove his brother’s decomposing remains back to his and Ruth’s shack in Nahalal, where it was washed and prepared for burial. Ruth meanwhile continued on to the port of Haifa to greet Reumah and the four hundred orphans brought over from Germany. An armored bus picked up the children and distributed them to kibbutzim in the area.

  7

  Fall of Haifa

  Moshe proved to be a tireless and fearless soldier, and his injury was hardly a handicap because, he later quipped, aiming through the scope of a rifle only required one eye. Fighting renewed him, and he was grateful. He had everything to gain—meaning, purpose, power—by rushing headlong into fresh battles. This freed him up to be utterly daring, to excel in the art of improvisation—Wingating it.

  In early March 1948, two months before the British withdrew and the impossible partition was supposed to come into effect, Ben-Gurion summoned Moshe and eleven others to the Haganah’s secret headquarters in Tel Aviv, a redbrick sock factory dubbed the “Red House,” to advise him on the next phase of what the Israelis would call the War of Independence.

  Ben-Gurion and his twelve disciples, poring over detailed maps and aerial photographs, discussed improving defense positions against invading armies from the neighboring Arab states. In practice, what they came up with required capturing the cities of Tiberias, Safed, Jaffa, Acre, and Haifa.6

  A month after the Haganah meeting in the sock factory, Raymonda left the convent in Nazareth and traveled to Haifa to join Christmas. She arrived in the old city near the port just as Jewish forces surrounded the Arab quarters. Food and medicine were no longer getting in; prices skyrocketed; the poor faced starvation. Mortar shells rained down from the Jewish neighborhoods up on Mount Carmel: Where were the heroic Arab defenders? Where were modern-day Salah al-Dins?

  With fighting cutting off access to the Red Cross st
ation where Christmas lived, Raymonda had no other choice but to go to Aunt Sylvie’s mansion on King George Street. She wasn’t there more than a couple of days when the fighting shifted, and Arab irregulars perched on the balcony of the aunt’s house traded fire with the Haganah men on the other side of the street. A mortar attack destroyed the neighbor’s mansion along with half of Sylvie’s: Raymonda shudders when recalling the shock of the explosion, the sound of shattering stone and glass, the “devilish flames” licking at the white plaster, the “acrid smoke” billowing through the rooms.

  The francophone aunt who drank her afternoon tea in Meissner cups snapped out orders for her children and Raymonda to grab whatever they could carry. They jumped into the Daimler, and the driver took them to her other house in the German Colony. From the back seat, Raymonda watched crowds of panicked people, old men, women, and children racing in the direction of the port to get boats out of the city. At the port, people rested on concrete loading docks while others milled around restlessly with the blank, vacant eyes of people who hadn’t eaten in a week, stripped of will.

  The German Colony seemed safer because Sylvie’s Jewish friends in the neighborhood pleaded with her, “Don’t leave, don’t leave, the fighting is almost over.” The Jewish mayor was saying the same thing.

  But Operation Danny required an Arab-free city, in particular in the neighborhoods near the port.

  The family held out for a few more days until one morning Raymonda went outside to play with her cousin Nicolas in the garden. They looked up and saw a mountain of blue and white corpses stacked in a military truck parked in front of the house. There must have been a hundred bodies of men, women, and children piled on top of one another, eyes open, limbs stiff; swarms of giant black flies buzzed around the bodies, which gave off the sweet, sickening odor of death.

  Assaulted by the repulsive sight, Raymonda and Nicolas rushed into the house screaming as if they had seen one of the rings of hell. It was too much: Sylvie raced around the house, grabbing children, clothes, some food, and ordered her driver to take them to the port.

  Habib turned up just before the Daimler sped off to the ship. Hearing about the corpses and his sister’s decision to flee by ship, he picked Raymonda up and sent her back to the convent in Nazareth with two British officers driving a truck. Jews, he was certain, would never attack a convent. Habib then boarded a ship and left the city by sea. He was the only member of the vast Hawa clan ever to see Haifa again.

  Christmas never fled Haifa. She stayed behind as a volunteer with the Red Cross to treat the wounded. The final outbreak of fighting was the Haganah onslaught on April 21. Encircled and starving, Arabs in the city were in no position to put up a fight. The so-called Battle of Haifa lasted a single day.

  Passing by Sylvie’s mansion on King George Street, on April 22, Christmas saw a Yiddish and Hebrew-speaking mob swarm through the half-destroyed house, carting off clothes, furniture, chandeliers, paintings, boxes of wine and brandy, no doubt the Meissner tea cups—whatever they could carry.

  8

  Hotel Zion

  Several days after the mass flight of Palestinians from Haifa, Ruth sat on the terrace of Hotel Zion overlooking the city. The sun was setting and the swallows were soaring and dipping, flapping and gliding; the ships were mostly gone from the port and gone too was the polyglot hubbub of the streets. Ruth, traumatized at the deaths of Yossi and Zorik, and so many others, stared down into the abandoned city. She was astonished by the silence. The shooting had stopped. Chaos, fear, hunger, and death had driven most Christians, Muslims, and Baha’i away from Haifa. As soon as they were gone, Ben-Gurion ordered Arab properties seized. Which was the reason Ruth was on the balcony of Hotel Zion that bright sunny day.

  Moshe’s presence in the Haganah sock factory signified favor in the eyes of Ben-Gurion. With Haifa and Acre abandoned, Ben-Gurion sent him in with a clipboard to inventory the war booty.7 Since he was the one in charge, Moshe must have presided over the dispossession of the Hawa family holdings in the city, the villas and cars and bank accounts, as well as the furniture that hadn’t yet been plundered.

  Moshe asked no questions and showed no hesitation in carrying out his orders; Ruth was made of different stuff. The following day she left Hotel Zion and accompanied him in combing through the properties. In one house they found an impressive Islamic book collection, there was also a cold omelet on the stove: The family must have left suddenly, with little forewarning. Later, in a factory, she pinched half a sack of sugar. Appalled at herself, that night she couldn’t sleep a wink. Had the bag been filled with iron it wouldn’t have weighed her down more.

  Forty-five kilometers away, Nazareth fell to Israeli forces in July. The fact the Arabs remained in their city was the consequence of one man’s conscience: the Israeli officer, an honorable Jewish-Canadian named Ben Dunkelman, who had refused orders to expel the population. Because there were always less scrupulous men, Nazareth was filled with refugees from evacuated villages in the region. Driven out by gunpoint, the villagers of Ma’alul, Nahalal’s neighbors across the valley, arrived in Nazareth with their meager belongings packed on the back of donkeys.

  Raymonda’s convent school, protected under the sun yellow flag of the Vatican and the tricolor of France, became a makeshift home for hundreds of refugees. The girls in the convent lived in the dreadful uncertainty of not knowing what was happening to their families. Fingering their beads, the nuns carried out their prayers, canticles, and litanies, intoning Ave Maria and Gratia Plena. There was a smell of incense. The shadows cast by the burning candles. The rivulets from leaking pipes pooling in spots. The slow ticking of watches. The drone of planes overhead. Girls sobbing.

  The sisters of the convent, assuming both Habib and Christmas were dead, transferred Raymonda over to the orphan’s section. One of the nuns stroked her hair in a gesture of reassurance. Raymonda went to bed each night with the prayer, Please God, make the fighting stop. The tender mercies of God having resurrected Christmas once, she prayed for her and her father to appear again, arm in arm. At night she woke up clutching for a doll; panting, her heart raced because of elaborate nightmares of shrieking mobs armed with the legs of her aunt’s oak dining table hitting Christmas over and over until there was nothing left of her, not even a body.

  9

  Villa Lea

  Ruth lived off rumors and shreds of information. In a terrifying premonition after the Battle of Kastal near Jerusalem, she was certain Moshe had been killed. Panicked phone calls went all the way up to Ben-Gurion, who finally assured her that her husband had survived the battle, and was fighting on new fronts.

  Near his birthplace of Degania he and a handful of soldiers warded off a Syrian tank attack with little more than Molotov cocktails and a few bazookas. Following this success, he pieced together a group of ex-prisoners and Haganah and Irgun veterans. He and his commando unit hot-wired abandoned cars and a jeep belonging to the novelist Arthur Koestler and were in business. There were no formal uniforms, no culture of saluting and spit-polished boots, just passion, nerve, speed, and shock tactics.

  Moshe unleashed his band against the Arab cities of Lydda and Ramle. Yitzhak Rabin then showed up with the regular army and expelled the entire population of both cities.8

  Ben-Gurion was impressed enough to promote Moshe to colonel and hand him one of the most important military jobs there was, commander of the Jerusalem Brigade. This made the farmer-turned-commando, a half-blind daredevil, into one of the leading military leaders of the triumphant Jewish state.

  For Ruth this meant leaving the beloved, muddy simplicity of the moshav—forever, as it would turn out. The family of five drove in a command car, with a chicken coop in the back, to Jerusalem on a dirt and rock path carved out of the mountainside to bypass areas—it was called the Burma Road—controlled by the Jordanians. In Jerusalem they moved into the Villa Lea, a large stone mansion with seven bedrooms built by the Greek Orthodox Christian Dr. Nassib Abcarius Bey, for his Jewish
wife Lea.9 Like other Arab properties in the Israeli controlled districts of Jerusalem, the house ended up with the Custodian of Enemy Property. Efficient bureaucrats emptied out abandoned Arab homes and stored the plunder in a warehouse.

  It was up to Ruth to fill the villa’s two dozen rooms with beds and lamps and curtains. Psychologically, the only way a woman who felt guilty about pinching a bag of sugar could go from warehouse to warehouse, picking out chairs and tables belonging to people probably living in tent camps, was to assume that once the war ended, the rightful owners would return. Dr. Bey would get the mansion back, and the other Arabs would be grateful to the Israelis for protecting their things.

  Moshe knew better—there would be no return.

  10

  Married to the State

  One reason Ruth preferred the leaking shack and cowshed over the mansion was that the rambling Villa Lea was far too large for her to manage on her own; she needed a maid, and having hired help rankled her socialist sensibilities. The maid pitched in with the cooking and cleaning, a necessity because the house turned into a sort of flophouse for Moshe’s gang of commandos, crowding into the available rooms.10

  The first major social event was the wedding of her sister to the ex-fighter pilot Ezer Weizman, President Chaim Weizmann’s nephew. It was the closest thing Israel had to a royal wedding, vastly different from the rowdy singing, dancing, and firing of rifles during Ruth and Moshe’s ceremony.

  Ruth had her hands full raising children in a dangerous, divided city. In Yael’s eyes the new family home was like a palace fit for princes in glittering pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg she had heard about from Moshe’s mother or an enchanted castle in a fairy tale.