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

by Anthony David

  Raymonda found herself in the paradoxical position of asking the Israelis to keep a Palestinian girl in prison. She talked to General Givoli, but even he couldn’t prevent prison officials from setting her free. The woman’s family murdered her shortly after her release.

  Dayan’s top general in Nablus, Givoli, at Raymonda’s encouragement, began sitting for hours with the five girls in prison, on terrorism charges, trying to find out what motivated them. Why had they turned to laying bombs? What had they hoped to accomplish? It didn’t take long for him to realize just how similar their idealism was to his own when he was a youth, a generation earlier, fighting against the British. He began to worry about the health of these bright girls. They would waste away with nothing to do.

  Givoli thought about Ruth and Maskit. Perhaps his boss’s wife could teach the girls a craft? He knew Ruth would use every opportunity to hop in her Saab and return to the landscape of her youth.

  Just as he suspected, Ruth jumped at the idea. Her plan was to deliver toys on behalf of Abie Nathan to wounded children—collateral damage during an IDF operation—at St. Luke’s hospital in Nablus, before continuing to the prison.

  The minute Ruth entered the front door of the hospital with General Givoli at her side, a huddle of police officers hovered around her like drones around the queen bee. She tried to brush them off, but couldn’t. There she was, impossible to miss, wearing a cotton-candy-colored dress and holding an armload of toys, in the company of the general, surrounded by armed men.

  Palestinians were whispering and pointing, craning their necks to see her. Raymonda, there in the hospital that afternoon, watched the way Ruth moved through the ward. She had read about her in New Face in the Mirror. In real life she made quite a different impression, stronger, quicker, an empathetic twinkle in her eyes.

  The minute Ruth got close enough for her to smell her jasmine perfume, Raymonda, in her high heels, taller than most of the soldiers and speaking in the Hebrew she had learned from her childhood friends in Haifa, let her have a piece of her mind. Since hearing radio reports of the massacres in the 1950s, Moshe Dayan had been for her an evil Cyclops. She struck back at his wife. “How dare you come in here pretending to care for children! Do you know what your husband is doing to us?”

  Ruth admired the Amazon’s spunk but waived off the charges. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she began, holding a Barbie in her hand. “But you should know”—she was shaking the doll in Raymonda’s direction, the glass eyes blinking with each movement of her arm—“I married a farmer and NOT a general. Don’t blame me for all this . . . this horror.” Raymonda watched as tears formed in Ruth’s eyes. Her jaws were clenched.

  She handed Ruth a tissue but stuck to her guns. “Well, this farmer boy of yours is making our lives hell. Your husband is giving orders to shoot children, and you bring toys! Get out of Palestine!”

  “For God’s sake, I am NOT Moshe Dayan.” The police must have thought Raymonda was going to drive her nails into Ruth. They stood between the two, their thick arms folded like bouncers outside a nightclub.

  Raymonda didn’t have to say another word. The scene in the ward was straight out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: bandaged up children moved her more than anything Raymonda could have said. At first, she stood dumbstruck. “We should have stayed on the damned moshav,” she finally muttered to herself, shaking her head.

  Ignoring her bodyguards, she turned to the families in the same ward and asked them, in broken Arabic, if there was anything she could do besides handing out toys. Ruth spent so much time listening to the women that she had no time to see the imprisoned girls.

  She headed back to Tel Aviv and, by the time she got back home, Moshe was already in his pajamas watching his favorite Egyptian soap opera. He was obsessed with these shows. At first, he barely said a word to her. Ruth headed into the kitchen to prepare dinner for him. She reemerged carrying an omelet and set it down on the table—his single eye watched her every move. “Moshe,” she said, “I’m off to the theater in Jaffa. There’s a play by some Palestinians . . .”

  Moshe had been telling the world that Palestine was “finished” and here was Ruth talking about “Palestinians.” He snapped, “WHAT IN HELL WERE YOU DOING SEEING THOSE TERRORISTS IN NABLUS!”

  Moshe touched his nose with his trigger finger, and she turned to face him. “Listen to me,” and now he aimed the finger at her, as he launched into his tirade, “You should know I put them in prison where they belong.” His eye twitched. “You must stop undermining my authority!” He was shaking his hands, as he might around a throat. “I forbid you to continue. DO YOU HEAR ME?” Even in his pajamas, Moshe had all the qualities of a Biblical leader: in turns visionary and despotic, wise and foolhardy, charismatic and cynical, generous and miserly.

  But his powers had long ago ceased to intimidate Ruth. Though she hadn’t even gone to the prison to visit the girls, the verbal assault over what seemed like a trifle was what stunned her. For three years, she had been meeting Arabs all over the West Bank and Gaza. Why should this be different? He had always encouraged her efforts at helping Palestinians. So what was so awful about handing out toys to children his men had wounded, or setting up a training course for girls in prison?

  His sneering, barking demands were too much; blood rising to a boil, she couldn’t hold her feelings back. She went into the kitchen to get the general a glass of scotch. Coming out with the drink, she said, as cool as a cucumber, “Moshe, I want a divorce.”

  Moshe was taken aback. “Do you mean what you’re saying? Are you sure?” Yes, she assured him.

  “You must be kidding.” The man who took on the entire Arab world had for years been afraid to end a marriage he had betrayed a thousand times.

  “No, Moshe, I’ve never been more serious.” She had thought about divorce often but because she still loved him, and because Yael expected her to keep up the façade, she endured. The daughter expected her mother to put up with what Yael would call his “avarice, indiscriminate womanizing, loss of idealism and megalomania.” Besides, what woman walks out on the hero at the height of his fame?

  “I’m finished with you, Moshe.” With those words, she left for the play.

  During her absence, Moshe phoned up Yael, his chief ally in the family, in Paris. The next phone call was to his lawyer and asked him to draw up the paperwork.

  Ruth left the house with a suitcase of clothes, some books, and an eggshell with the entire Book of Ruth inscribed on it by a former convict of the Russian gulag. She would eventually get half the value of the house, but in the meantime she moved in with Assi in an apartment in the old city of Jaffa, overlooking the Mediterranean. Moshe owned the apartment and charged market rates. To him.

  The divorce was finalized in December 1971, and Dayan quickly married his mistress Rachel. Scandal-mongering journalists were after Ruth for a scoop, and she finally unbuttoned her soul. “It just wasn’t worth it anymore,” she told a Time reporter. “It was like living in chains. If I were still his wife, there would be six guards here. Now I can drive my car to the Gaza Strip or wherever I want.”

  Ruth cut off all contact with Moshe, though she would never stop loving him. One night she had a dream in which his antiquities collection came to life like Isaiah’s fields of bones. Stele, goddesses, and heaps of shards, swirling in the air as if in a whirlwind, formed a city with turreted walls and towers—and no people. It looked like a depopulated Jerusalem, and was called the City of Moshe.

  33

  Honor Killing

  In February 1970 Assi was enough of an international star to be invited to London to audition for the role of the communist Perchik in the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof. During a stopover at the Munich airport, while walking to the El Al 707 with the pilot and an actress heading for the same audition, he saw Arabs running toward them. “What are they doing?” he turned and asked the pilot. “Assi, not all Arabs are terrorists,” the pilot jested, which was his way of telling Assi
not to be so paranoid. But the men, Marxist rivals to Arafat’s Fatah movement, kept racing pell-mell toward them and began shooting and tossing bombs. A bullet hit the leg of the actress. One passenger was killed, eleven wounded. Assi got off unscathed, but his international acting career took a fatal hit because American newspapers spun the attack as an assassination attempt against him. Signing on the son of Moshe Dayan during the high-water point of international Palestinian terror was too much an insurance risk for the producers. Paul Michael Glaser ended up landing the role of Perchik.

  Months after the attempted hijacking, Ruth got a call from her sister Reumah. She had to rush to a military hospital in Tel Aviv. She and Ezer’s only child, Saul, was in critical condition. While serving on the front line in the Israeli-occupied Sinai, an Egyptian sniper shot him in the head. Doctors weren’t sure he would survive. At the hospital Ezer, the cocky, hard-drinking, always joking architect of the Six Day War, sat in the corridor with his face in his hands. From the movements of his shoulders, Ruth knew he was crying. Was the conquest of the Sinai and West Bank worth Saul’s life? Ezer was asking himself the same question that night.

  On the way back to Assi’s apartment in Jaffa, Ruth stared up at the sky. It was a clear evening and the star Sirius twinkled bright. Her mind turned to her first love Zvi and the torpedo that probably sent him and his men to the bottom of the sea. All the territory in the world couldn’t compensate Ruth for the lives she’d seen ruined or destroyed because of war.

  Ruth, to keep her mind off Moshe and now Saul, turned much of her attention to the Palestinians. Abie Nathan asked her to deliver toys to the death-defying nuns at the “La Crèche” convent who were operating an “underground railroad.” The sisters furtively searched garbage dumps for babies abandoned by their unmarried mothers; families saw in them “seeds of the devil.” Often, pregnant woman fled to the convent from fathers and brothers who, as in some dark fetish, felt they had to butcher them to redeem family honor. The women gave birth behind the safety of convent walls. Working with Israeli and European women’s groups, the nuns helped some of the women escape with their children across the Green Line into Israel.

  Having been raised by nuns, Raymonda was well acquainted with the brave “La Crèche” sisters’ dangerous rescue work. She never delivered armloads of toys on behalf of Abie Nathan; instead she set her hopes on a social revolution to rid Arab society of honor killing, the way any plague is dealt with—by isolating and eradicating it. Society’s structures had to change; women had to be freed from the tyranny of male honor.

  In 1970, everything seemed possible. In the West, the anti-war movement was at its height. The colonial powers were leaving Africa and Asia. Why shouldn’t people of good will, Arabs and Jews, be able to join forces for the sake of freedom? Arafat’s guerrillas, never strong enough to drive the IDF back over the 1967 border, at least reminded the Israeli people of the high price of oppression.

  Raymonda underestimated Dayan’s determination to annihilate Arafat and his men. He threatened Jordanian King Hussein with massive retribution unless he reined in Fedayeen groups.36 In September 1971, the king and his generals moved to expel Arafat and his militants from the country. The Palestinians fought back and very nearly pushed the country into a civil war. Arafat had to be smuggled across the border to Lebanon, while in Jordan the king’s loyal soldiers massacred thousands of Palestinians. The center of resistance shifted from Jordan to Lebanon.

  34

  Umm al-Mu’in

  Whenever Ruth drove through Nablus, on her peripatetic travels for Maskit in the West Bank, she dropped by Raymonda’s, where more often than not she found Daoud scowling at a household full of hungry and thirsty longhaired activists, foreign reporters, and mothers carrying pictures of sons, and sometimes daughters, who had been swallowed up into Israeli prisons.

  Feminists, too, found safe refuge in the Tawil home. In patriarchal Nablus, there was no more avid reader of Ms. magazine or of the ideas of Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, its two cofounders, than Raymonda. The way she brandished Steinem’s call for revolution against oppressive systems of race and sex—against dividing “human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends”—attracted the attention of Palestinian and Israeli feminists, new mouths to feed for Daoud and fresh material for scandal in Nablus.

  At one point, in a jammed Nablus public hall, and with a purple face, he shrieked threats of divorce if she didn’t stop her dangerous activism. That she drove this otherwise stolid, even-keeled banker to blow his top in public was yet another cause for his brooding resentment mixed with awe. To Ruth, who developed a deep fondness for Daoud, he confided that he put up with her “dangerous theatrics” because she was his life’s “greatest fortune.”

  Daoud tried to seduce his beautiful wife into a more bourgeois lifestyle by taking her on regular vacations to Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East because of its grand shopping avenues, its cafes and beaches.

  It was during these holidays that Raymonda became acquainted with some of the revolutionaries she hoped would liberate Palestine while freeing Palestinians from hidebound traditions. She met Bassam Abu Sharif, a young journalist and recent graduate of the American University living in Beirut, who was a member of the Marxist group PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). While unaware of Sharif’s involvement in hijacking airliners, she knew he was a militant, sworn to the armed struggle. Raymonda gave him his first lesson on Israeli leftists—that working with them was the best way to battle the Israeli army. She was thinking about her “mission.” If Israelis were allies, you obviously weren’t going to kick them out of the country. Jews and Palestinians had to live together.

  Back home foreign journalists were so impressed with Raymonda’s shrewd political analysis, and news she brought back from Beirut, that they hired her to provide copy for news organizations, including Agence France Presse. The Israeli left-wing journal New Outlook was another of her venues.37 At gatherings of the New Outlook crowd, she met people such as the German-Jewish Marxist Herbert Marcuse, author of Eros and Civilization. She brought her children in on a conversation of “polymorphous sexuality.”

  Far more potentially perilous, with Uri Avnery and his band of journalists Raymonda was driving around the West Bank in a car with Israeli plates, brandishing a tape recorder she nicknamed her “Kalashnikov,” and hunting for stories of atrocities. She realized she was treading on thin ice with the IDF; her disguises included multiple wigs she picked up at Anton’s, an expensive wig shop in Beirut, and an assortment of designer Italian sunglasses to match.

  The changes she saw all around her reminded Raymonda of the Galilee in the 1950s: seizure of land, mass settlement, and breaking up Palestinian society into cantons. Reaching out to Israelis and internationals became an imperative. In her journalism, she wrote about Dayan’s policy of seducing Palestinians with used washing machines and construction jobs on Jewish settlements around Jerusalem.

  Her budding career in journalism and feminist firebrand earned her the nom de guerre Al-Muminun, Mother of Believers, the name of the Prophet’s wife.

  35

  “Wrath of God”

  Bassam Abu Sharif, the young journalist Raymonda had met in Beirut, would eventually come around to her cosmopolitan humanism. In the meantime, he was a full-time terrorist, specializing in hijacking planes. A different cell of terrorists carried out a massacre against eleven Israeli athletes during summer Olympics in Munich in 1972.

  In the wake of the Munich killings, Dayan and Prime Minister Golda Meir launched “Operation Wrath of God” to cripple the international command structure of Palestinian nationalist groups, chiefly, Fatah. Most of those targeted weren’t hijackers or guerrillas; they were writers who fought with words.

  Wael Zwaiter, a friend Raymonda knew well from her days in Nablus, was a poet and translator living in Rome. Zwaiter was opposed to political violence, which didn’t prevent two Mos
sad agents from firing their .22 caliber Beretta pistols eleven times into his head and chest, each bullet in memory of the victims of the Munich Massacre he had had nothing to do with.

  Fatah’s representative in Paris, Mahmoud Al Hamshari, likewise a literary and peaceful man, died when his booby-trapped telephone exploded in his face. (In Munich Steven Spielberg casts him as Saddam.) The man Raymonda’s oldest daughter Diana would marry, Ibrahim Souss, took over the post of PLO representative from him.38

  Raymonda was in Beirut in 1972, when the Mossad targeted the playwright and secretary of the General Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists, Ghassan Kanafani, “the commando who never fired a gun.” In early July, he sat on his balcony, sipping cup after cup of Arabic coffee. That morning he and his sister were reminiscing about their childhood in Acre before their expulsion in 1948. With a caffeine buzz, he got dressed for work and headed out of the house to drive to his office at the Writer’s Union. The Israeli car bomb was so powerful that it blew his body into a valley close to the house. Rushing downstairs, Anni stood paralyzed. In front of her was her husband’s left leg. Their daughter Laila cried again and again: “Baba, Baba . . .”

  Raymonda attended the funeral, and two weeks later she was at the bedside of Bassam Abu Sharif. On July 25, 1972, when he opened Che Guevara’s Memoirs the bomb hidden inside mutilated his hands and Omar Shariff good looks.

  Raymonda was also in Beirut the following April when Ehud Barak, the future Israeli prime minister, masquerading as a woman in a summer dress, sauntering along, arm in arm with what looked like her lover, broke into a PLO man’s apartment, and in front of his wife and children, shot him. It was Kamal Nasser, a Christian poet Raymonda knew, read, and adored—he’d had ink rather than blood on his hands.39