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

by Anthony David

  Yael was also in Paris because her husband the ex-general was appointed Israel’s military attaché in Paris. An eccentric viscount, considering it a matter of prestige to be seen with Ruth, and especially the general’s glamorous daughter, gave Ruth a lion cub to pass on to Moshe. What else do you give a man with an empire under his heels? The cub’s name was Gamine, French for “naughty child.” It would later be renamed Ruthie.

  The conquered Palestinians, seeing the general with his lioness he called Ruthie in the passenger seat of his jeep, nicknamed Dayan the “Emperor.” Never much of an office man, Moshe spent most of his time meeting with his generals and Palestinian notables and farmers, as well as warning the population against giving aid to a nettlesome guerrilla movement called Fatah and its leader, Yasser Arafat.

  Attacks continued. Yael, explaining the postwar situation to the world, described in a newspaper article how the “war ended and the terrorists took over.” “Daily life,” she wrote from Paris in 1968, was characterized by someone “blown up by a mine,” “a tractor is shot at, a school bus, two dead, three dead, two civilians, five soldiers, three mines, mortar fire on kibbutzim.”

  In spring 1968, Dayan finally drew up plans to hunt down and kill Arafat after a mine planted by guerrillas blew up a school bus. On the eve of the raid, Moshe heard rumors of Israelite treasures in a cave, and dashed off for a private dig. And then the cave collapsed, burying him up to his eye-patch. What he missed while encased in a body cast was the first full-fledged battle with Arafat’s Fatah movement.

  Israeli commandos backed up by tanks crossed the Jordanian border, but instead of being able to act with impunity, as they were used to, King Hussein ordered his soldiers to fight, side by side, with Arafat’s Fedayeen. The ensuing Battle of “Karameh”—karameh is Arabic for “dignity”—cost dozens of Arafat’s fighters along with a number of IDF soldiers; one of Ruth’s relatives got shot through the neck. But when Israeli units retreated back over the Jordan River, Arafat was still alive to proclaim victory. His kaffiyeh, dark wrap-around shades, handlebar mustache, and open shirt underneath crumpled military fatigues turned him into the romantic face of Palestinian resistance. Time plastered his face on the front cover of the magazine, with the headline: “The Fedayeen Leader.”

  What made Arafat even more of a legend were rumors that cropped up, shortly after the battle, that he was in the West Bank.

  Nursed back to health by faithful Ruth, the accident left Dayan with a twitch in his remaining eye, a speech impediment, a partly lame hand, and even more of an addiction to painkillers. Looking a bit like Captain Ahab, with a bandaged hand instead of a wooden leg, and surely rankled that the hitherto obscure Arafat had also made it to the cover of Time, Dayan set to work. The IDF quickly rounded up a thousand Fatah activists and nearly cornered their cunning leader.

  Disguised as a normal family man with wife and child, Arafat sauntered up to an Israeli checkpoint hand in hand with his supposed wife, and slipped away. He was now forming cells by traveling around the West Bank under different aliases: Abu Ammar (which comes from the Arabic verb “to build”), Abu Mohammed, the Doctor, Dr. Husseini, Abdul Rauf, and half a dozen more. Meanwhile, he drove a white VW Bug around the West Bank, with bombs hidden under a baby carriage.

  30

  In the Bosom of My Country

  “All I ask

  Is to remain in the bosom of my country

  As soil,

  Grass,

  A flower.”

  —Fadwa Toqan

  Daoud sat at home in Nablus because the Amman-based Ottoman Bank he had been heading up in Nablus shut its doors due to the conquest. He stayed on a nominal salary, without a bank to run.

  He was also slack-jawed at the way his wife, with five children to raise, thrived in the relative freedom of a society liberated from the Jordanian secret service, and where the Shin Bet had not yet built up its own repressive apparatus. Raymonda breathed new life into the Arab Women’s Union. She also got her reading salon up and running again, and was pouring through fiction, politics, history, whatever she got her hands on. With friends from the salon, Raymonda trooped over to Zion Cinema, in West Jerusalem, to see Assi wearing leotards in A Walk with Love and Death. The movie went over much better than Dust because not only did the general’s son Assi look like Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, not only had he preferred playing chess to fighting during the war, but in a sharp poke in his father’s one good eye he used Uri Avnery’s girlie magazine as a platform to call for a total withdrawal of every square inch of territory his father had just conquered. Knowing his father too well, Assi assumed that behind his estranged father’s nationalist grandstanding, greed and theft were surely motivating his actions in the Palestinian lands.

  The Tawil home was also the main meeting place in Nablus for nationalist writers, journalists, and intellectuals wishing to discuss openly the guerrilla attacks carried out by Arafat and his men coming across the Jordan River.

  No one knew much about the mysterious rebel able to bedevil the mighty IDF. Arafat was short with cocoa brown eyes and big, sweeping, sometimes comic gestures. Unless he had to put on a disguise to escape a deadly trap, he never smoked and was a teetotaling workaholic. A nervous man, always fidgeting with things—a cheap plastic pen, a tennis ball, a pair of jacks—for relaxation, he watched reruns of Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes on a television set up in an underground bunker. As for his lifestyle, the man with the olive-green field uniform and Smith & Wesson .38 in his holster owned next to nothing. His emerging myth was of a man wandering with his intrepid band of guerrillas through deserts and cold mountains in search of his lost homeland.

  Months after Karameh, Arafat’s Fedayeen ambushed an Israeli patrol, with deadly effectiveness. Dayan sent into Nablus large numbers of troops, beefed up security and checkpoints, and a manhunt proceeded. A squadron of tanks moved into the city and fired randomly into houses and businesses to intimidate the civilian population. Shooting continued unabated, through the night.

  Raymonda was in the kitchen pulling chicken and rice leftovers from the fridge when the explosions began. Startled, she dropped the glass dish on the floor, and little Suha scrambled under the table.

  This was just a taste of what would happen, once rumors came to Moshe’s attention that Arafat, the mastermind of the guerrilla war, was holed up somewhere in the warrens of the medieval Kasbah. The next day generalissimo Dayan, now viewing Arafat as his nemesis, arrived to direct the manhunt. Going well beyond the old Commando 101 method, Dayan threatened to raze the entire city of Nablus “to the ground” if the citizens of the city didn’t hand him over. He applied pressure by slapping on a three-day, twenty-four-hour curfew. Tanks took up position in Raymonda’s neighborhood; most evenings two or three were parked under their windows, their cannons pointing out into the valley. After thirty-six hours of curfew, the Tawil family of seven was living off water and boxes of crackers. On the final day loudspeakers, festooned to jeeps, bellowed out the following in broken Arabic:

  Attention people of Nablus, dignitaries, and his Excellency Mayor Hamdi Kenaan. Orders from General Dayan. Whoever among you offers aid or comfort, food or shelter, to a terrorist will have his house destroyed; his family will be homeless, and he will be arrested and deported across the Jordan. The General has declared that whoever does not abide with these rules will pay the consequences.

  Dayan told the mayor: “I will destroy this town stone by stone.” True to his word, his soldiers shot up the place, for a second day in a row. The shelling and gunfire came so close to the Tawil home that Raymonda was sure a shell from a tank was going to blast a hole in a wall and bring the roof down on their heads.

  Arafat scrambled off to a new hideout, and for a growing number of Palestinians the hope for liberation survived.

  As a woman who still dreamed of going home to Acre, what struck a chord with Raymonda, as she followed his various feats and learned more about “Fatah,” was his proclaimed vision for a sec
ular, democratic state encompassing Israel and the occupied territories. What she read into the slogan was that Arabs and Jews alike would live as equals. Through Arafat would she be able to fulfill the “mission” she received as a little girl, had betrayed by leaving to Jordan, but was now able to pursue as a sort of feminist redemption? The Fatah revolution could breathe a fresh, progressive spirit into the patriarchal and tribal power structure that governed Palestinian society. Raymonda took note that some of Arafat’s best commandos were women.

  With her mind and heart, Raymonda sided with Arafat, even if some of the local Fatah men, not nearly as progressive as she had hoped, bristled at her willingness to invite Israelis, and men to boot, into her home. This was more than taboo; she was trampling on Arab male honor. With her iconoclastic ways, Raymonda found herself straddling an invisible line. Fresh rumors of her being a spy cropped up, and yet another threatening letter ended up under the door. Written with crude, ungrammatical Arabic she could barely decipher, the letter blasted her for “collaboration” with the enemy. The letter was signed “Fatah.”

  Fatah’s next “operation” was a bomb in the Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem that killed two students. The heads of a Nablus terror cell sent in Miriam Shakhshir, a teenager from an elite Nablus family, the sort of girl who in the past would have been a docile bride for a local oligarch, to carry out the bombing. They must have chosen her because the seventeen-year-old had a head of thick blond hair, large turquoise eyes, and the light complexion of an Ashkenazi from Tel Aviv.

  Miriam was arrested, sentenced to life in prison (plus thirty years), and, more importantly for Raymonda, emerged as a symbol among Palestinians for a new sort of woman. Ambivalent about the act itself—killing innocent people was hard to square with the nuns’ and Father Michel’s message of “love thy enemy”—Miriam’s spirit put the fighting spirit back into the Arab Women’s Union, not least because as a female militant she was a rebel against an Arab tradition which reserved fighting, especially for matters of honor, for men.

  The Israeli response was brutal: some thirty women were arrested, most of them teenagers or women in their early twenties. The military authorities, obviously fearing Miriam copycats, arrested the head of the union. Dayan issued orders to blow up the homes of the women under arrest. Twenty homes were slated for sappers and bulldozers.

  One building marked for destruction was a villa in the center of town belonging to a notable family. The mansion was even grander than Habib’s in Acre with thirty rooms, exquisite mother-of-pearl furnishings, mosaics, and room after room furnished with Louis XIV tables and chairs.

  Before the demolition squad reached the villa, Raymonda leaped back into action by secretly planning a sit-down strike in front of the municipal town hall. And to ensure the protesters wouldn’t be clubbed and dispersed, she began phoning Israeli and international journalists and camera teams. She called Uri Avnery, and he promised to be there. He brought with him Amos Kenan, an erstwhile Irgun fighter. Another leftist who accompanied Avnery to the demonstration was Abie Nathan, the owner of California Café and the former ’48 pilot. Abie then invited one of his most regular lunchtime guests, Ruth, to join them. She wanted to, but in the end demurred because she knew what kind of reaction it would elicit from her husband.

  31

  This Is Not a Democracy!

  The protest went off as planned, and seven hundred women took part, joined by Uri, Amos, and Abie and a busload of other Israelis. As they marched, they encountered soldiers with batons and translucent riot shields and dark helmets. Awaiting Dayan’s order, the soldiers stood ready. “If you do not disperse, we shall shoot,” an officer screeched into a megaphone while giving the signal for his men to attack. Steering away from the Israelis, the soldiers flung themselves at the women, clubs swinging like scythes; some fell to the ground, and soldiers kicked them with steel-toed boots. Just as Raymonda reached down to help an elderly woman who had fainted, she felt the sharp pain of torn flesh. A bludgeon had struck her on the back of the head.

  “Bitch!” she heard a soldier snarl out in Brooklyn English, as he took another swing, and then threatened to arrest her—she was on the ground staring up at him—because she called him, in the colloquial English she picked up from her mother, a “jackass.”

  Dayan and his men probably would have considered the protest of little consequence had Avnery not returned to Israel with photographs and graphic description of the club-wielding soldiers in HaOlam HaZeh.

  The next day, Avnery was dragged from the Knesset because of his fiery speech, warning against the blowing up of Palestinian houses. “You are going to leave a scar in the heart of every person in Nablus,” he shouted while being shoved out the door.

  The violent break-up of the demonstration, Raymonda told people back in Nablus, was just like Karameh: brute force failed to break the will of those seeking their freedom. “It was Dayan who lost, not us.”34 The cycle of guerrilla “operations,” Dayan’s iron fist, and Raymonda’s activism continued.

  The Shin Bet arrested a group of five girls from bourgeois families on suspicion of terrorism. One had tried to plant a bomb in an Israeli supermarket. Once again, the collective punishment Dayan meted out was to blow up the old mansions belonging to their families.

  Raymonda rallied public opinion against the home demolition orders, this time firing a telegram off to Dayan. No answer. She got the media involved, Time magazine, no less. She organized another sit-down strike in front of the office of the military governor.

  The Israeli military governor of Nablus, General Givoli, called her into his office and asked her with alarm, “What the hell are you doing by trying to go against General Dayan?” He was speaking with uncharacteristic emotion. Givoli shifted his attention from the pin on Raymonda’s coat lapel “Self-Determination for Palestine” to her file. “Mrs. Tawil, you are playing with fire. This is really no joke.” He cleared his throat and looked up from the paperwork. Raymonda noticed a copy of Avnery’s magazine on the desk.

  The general’s mild manner encouraged her to open up to him. “But in Israel as a girl that’s what I learned: people go to the streets to protest injustice by the government. That’s what Israelis do. It’s democracy!”

  He took off his glasses and set them on her file. “My dear Raymonda, let me offer you a friendly piece of advice. You are not a little girl in Haifa, and you’re no longer an Israeli citizen. Israel is a democracy, true, but in case you haven’t noticed, what we have in the West Bank, my dear lady, what we have here is NOT a democracy! It’s a military occupation. Shall I spell it out for you? O-c-c-u-p-a-t-i-o-n. Unless you understand the difference, I foresee some big problems for you up ahead.” He ordered her to stop working with Avnery, Nathan, and Kenan.

  Nervous, she drummed her fingers on one knee. The general began tapping his fingers on the desktop as well before finally spelling out what his boss Moshe Dayan had in mind: “Next time we will take measures against you,” he said without a trace of hostility, like he was a doctor telling her to take her meds. He stood up and accompanied her to the door.

  “General Givoli, I have a question for you. You are a humanist, I believe. How can you order your men to beat a group of unarmed women?”

  He hesitated, as if unsure how to respond. “The order,” he finally said with a hint of bitterness, “came from Minister of Defense Dayan.”

  Part III

  1970–1995: Dialogue

  32

  St. Luke’s Hospital

  Raymonda’s friendship with the Israelis made her a better authority on the dark side of Israeli military history than Ruth could ever be. Long conversations with Avnery taught her about the immensity of the Palestinian disaster. How through the 1950s Blue-Box donations paid for a fleet of tractors and tons of dynamite to destroy Arab villages, over four hundred in all. She read back issues of HaOlam HaZeh and came to view Avnery as more than just a muckraking journalist; he was a gendarmerie or an entire battalion. Some people in
power didn’t take kindly to such criticism. Over the years of its existence, the magazine’s editorial offices and printing facilities were mysteriously bombed several times.

  From Amos Kenan, she learned details about the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin—because the avant-garde poet had taken part in it. He was also there for Dayan’s conquest of Ramle and Lod, and described how he slammed the butt of his Sten gun on the doors to houses, “Yalla! Get out! Go to King Abdullah!” Soldiers herded the inhabitants into fields, ringed with barbed wire.

  Kenan spoke to Raymonda the way a penitent would a priest. At first he had a hard time looking at her, because she reminded him of what he and his pals had done at Deir Yassin and Ramle: “I am worse than any name you can throw my way,” he confessed during their first conversation at her home, “worse that a filthy beast, a monster, an assassin, a killer. For twenty years now, my hands have been sticky from your people’s blood.”35

  By 1970, the Tawil family home was a constant buzz of activity, and long suffering Daoud’s patience was wearing thin, because of the stream of people in the house crowding into their home. Their living room was one of the few places in the West Bank where they could discuss the occupation—and other taboo topics, such as feminism. General Givoli dropped by every week or so. The open atmosphere there helped him understand what the Palestinians wanted and needed.

  A woman from the family whose villa Dayan had ordered dynamited visited Raymonda. She could find no one else to talk to about a terrible crime. At her job as a social worker, at an Israeli prison in Kalkilya, she worked with a teenaged girl, a victim of incest and in prison for infanticide. The girl was hysterical. She pleaded with her Israeli captors to keep her in prison; if they released her, the family would kill her to preserve its “honor.” The social worker was shivering, as she spoke with Raymonda. “I begged the prison authorities, too, but they said they had to follow the rules.”