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

by Anthony David

House Arrest

  On August 12, 1976, an Israeli officer showed up at Raymonda’s front door with the diktat from the military governor, barring her from leaving her house—the Tawil family had by this point moved to Ramallah. A policeman, furtively taking in the sight of her shapely figure, stood outside the door, and the military ordered her phone disconnected, cutting her off from the outside world. Her “Kalashnikov” was silenced.

  As they isolated her, the Israeli government propaganda services leaked stories about her undefined “illegal activities,” how she was stirring up tension between Christians and Muslims, and how, in a further twist of the knife, she was carrying on a series of romantic liaisons. The Iraqi-born Binyamin Fuad Ben-Eliezer, military governor of the West Bank at the time, taking a surprisingly sophisticated tack that would become part of the Israeli repertoire, played off Arab male prejudices and feelings of “honor.” He told village elders that a woman cavorting with Israeli men was a threat to sacred Arab tradition, a despiser of the Almighty Himself.

  Daoud had little choice but to put on a brave face. What the authorities didn’t factor into their plans was Raymonda’s network of Israeli friends. Together with Uri, Ruth came by often, and the churlish soldier outside the door, jaw dropping, didn’t dare block her. Like chastened schoolboys, they looked down at their boots when she said they were being “absolutely silly.”

  Amos turned up, always ready to share a bottle of spirits. Abie was tireless in his efforts to get the word out on Raymonda’s house arrest, by broadcasting reports over his pirate radio station; Abie Nathan was the one Israeli the Tawil children couldn’t wait to see. Each visit, they slipped him scraps of paper with titles of pop songs they wanted to hear: Suha’s favorite was “Hotel California.”

  The New York Times ran a story on the case, accompanied by a flattering caricature of her as a lioness in a cage. Barred from going through the front door, an Italian television crew crawled over a wall and interviewed her through the bathroom window in the back of the house.

  House arrest had lasted for two months before the authorities summoned her to the military governor’s office. It was October, and the entire country was a dusty brown after half a year of no rain. The air was dry and smelled of smoke. The military policeman led her into the building, up a flight of stairs and to a spacious, bright room, lingering a moment before swiveling around and shutting the door behind him. Yigal Carmon sat in a chair with his legs crossed and his hands laced behind his head.

  Carmon, the Ministry of Defense expert on Arab affairs, was an intellectual and a historian, and part of his job was to monitor what was written about Israel in the Arab press. He might have been her persecutor, but he was also a sharp-minded professional, eager to understand her.

  His office chair squealed as he swiveled it around to face her. Raymonda noticed on his furrowed temple a thick blue vein beating. “It seems,” Carmon said without further ado, gesturing to her to take a seat, “that house arrest is not enough for you, Mrs. Tawil.” He cleared his throat. “You are still opening your mouth too much!” He delivered the line smoothly. His unblinking face was made almost anemic by the sunlight pouring through the windows of his office. He sat with his hands clasped on one knee. At first, she thought he was nodding off: trained interrogators can look both asleep and watchful, cunning like a rattler.

  With a racing heart, she knew she had to stand up to him: showing weakness would only make matters worse. If she wanted Israeli men to respect her, she needed to strike back. In the toughest voice she could muster, she said: “You’d better listen to me and people like me! If not, you’ll have another Yom Kippur fiasco on your hands. Your son could be killed in it! And then, when you’re staring down into a hole in the ground, you’ll remember me and my warnings.”

  Carmon, sucking on the end of a ballpoint pen, tried to say something, but stopped. Pointing in the direction of the door, he said with an almost pleading whisper, “Please get out.” It must have been one of the shortest interrogations in the history of the occupation. The impression he made was of a man forced to repress someone he admired.

  More draconian orders arrived a few days later, barring her from welcoming visitors, sealing her off from the outside world. There were now two soldiers stationed out front, preventing anyone from entering while another kept watch over the backyard. General Ben-Eliezer, who was slandering Raymonda as a “loose woman,” passed by to check in with the soldiers and warn them not to be “seduced” by her “smiles and hospitality”—Raymonda kept them stocked with coffee and cake.

  The next time the military permitted her to leave the house was for a trip back to the military governor’s building, to hear the official charges against her, which included the usual crimes against the state: organizing strikes, transmitting information illegally, taking part in demonstrations, and wearing a PLO badge on her lapel. It took the judge half an hour to run through the entire list.

  42

  The Comedians

  Isolation made Raymonda want to shriek at her children and Daoud; it slowly began to entomb her, day by day, like a chrysalis. Journalist friends kept writing about her case in the press. The only good thing to come out of forced isolation was the time she had to jot down notes for what her co-writer turned into My Home, My Prison.

  At one point in late December 1976, someone must have decided that the price of keeping her under hermetic isolation was doing more harm than good, and she was released with a variety of warnings of future arrests and expulsion if she returned to her troublemaking.

  Ruth, sitting in the Tawil living room the next day, asked Daoud whether he would marry Raymonda if he had to do it all over again. He chuckled, shook his head, and in a soft voice replied, “No. Way too much drama for a conservative banker,” he said, a lie belied by his eyes shimmering with affection and by the way he held Raymonda’s hand.

  One of Raymonda’s first trips back to Jerusalem was to see Assi’s darkly comic Feast for the Eyes, a film about a failed poet who kills himself. Critics read into the film a metaphor for the collective suicide the youngest of the Dayan children believed his country was mindlessly committing.

  In Ramallah, activists from all over the world and the West Bank, along with Ruth, Uri, Amos, and Abie, and a gaggle of other left-wingers resumed their regular pilgrimages to the Tawil’s house. The Israelis were brimming with excitement at the new political organization they were creating. They believed their group would break the power monopoly of the labor and right-wing parties. It was the first Zionist group to call openly for two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian, and Ruth’s support was considered a coup for the group. Then as now, Ruth wasn’t sure it made much sense to carve out a separate Palestinian state when it seemed easier, and better, for everyone to live together as equals. But she was happy to support the leftists. At least they were doing something.

  The two-staters gathering at one-state Raymonda’s house, with their noble but wishful thinking over stuffed grape leaves and wine, badly misread the political map in Israel. Their group was never more than a boutique party with a voter base more or less equal to the bohemian theater and cafe population of Tel Aviv. In 1977 Ezer Weizman forged the Likud Party by cobbling together various right-wing groups; and, with the hardboiled Greater-Israel nationalist, Menachem Begin, at its helm, the Likud came to power. To Ruth’s dismay her ex-husband joined the government as foreign minister. Yitzhak Shamir, an erstwhile Irgun fighter with strangely reptilian eyes, also joined the cabinet. Sharon picked up the Ministry of Agriculture. Ruth’s dear Ezer, as chief architect of the most right-wing government in the history of the country, was the new minister of defense. Ruth wanted to march over to the Ministry of Defense and shake some sense into Ezer. Seeing him and Moshe smugly next to Begin felt like a betrayal far worse than cavorting with other women. “Cheating on me, that’s one thing, but cheating on the country!”

  Israelis on the left called Begin every libelous name in the book: fascist, demagogue, dictator,
and so on; many quoted Ben-Gurion when he compared Begin to Hitler.54

  The California Café crowd, with their boundless vilification of the Begin-Dayan-Weizman-Sharon-Shamir government, became even more marginalized when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat announced his imminent arrival in Jerusalem. He was to appear before the Israeli Knesset. Word of the unimaginable act reached Raymonda in the middle of a conference, organized by the New Outlook magazine at the Tel Aviv Hilton. She and the manager of the hotel, a former governor-general in the West Bank, were at one another’s throats because she wrote “Palestine” on her plastic nametag. He barked into her face that there was no such entity.

  “If you . . . you . . . you keep the name . . . name Palestine on that badge,” stuttered the general-turned-hotel-manager, reaching over and yanking it off her neck, “I . . . I will b-b-b-blow up this hotel.”

  “OK, go ahead and blow it up,” she shot back. “Then the dead of Jaffa will rise to fight you.” The five-star hotel was built on top of the Muslim cemetery of Jaffa, expropriated after 1948.55

  She and the stuttering manager were going back and forth, just as the announcement was read over the hotel loudspeaker that Anwar Sadat was going to visit Jerusalem. The manager lost his stutter. “You win, Raymonda.” He handed the badge back to her. “Write Yasser Arafat, if you want.”

  Sadat made his visit, and Moshe spearheaded the subsequent peace talks with the Egyptians. Over the coming months of intense negotiations, he had the final adventure of his life that included one secret meeting with Sadat’s men that required him to travel undercover with a mustache, wig, and sunglasses, and to move between cars and far-flung Middle-Eastern airports.

  With her ex-husband now racing around the world in his unlikely career shift as peacemaker, Ruth wanted to go on a long journey, much the way she went to the Congo in 1960. The Ogowe River was out of the question because Albert Schweitzer was dead, so she took up an offer from the Inter-American Development Bank to create handicraft projects in Latin America, extending her know-how accumulated at Maskit to a dozen poverty-mired countries. She resigned as head of Maskit, and was off.

  Ruth’s eight years at the bank were the longest stretch of time away from home since she was in London as a child. She got the job when she was already over sixty, closing in on what most people look forward to as their golden retirement years. In and out of luxury hotels and palaces so often over the years, she felt most at home in squalid, outlying villages with cackling chickens where she communicated with her hands and feet, and where no one had ever heard the Dayan name, though her ex’s legacy managed to shadow her in the most unexpected places. Manuel Noriega, dictator of Panama, gave her a big kiss because her husband was one of his greatest heroes.

  Letters she keeps in a shoebox and composed in neat Hebrew handwriting follow Ruth’s movements throughout her years at the bank. There are a hundred pages from the Andes, Tierra del Fuego, or Port-au-Prince, letters that read like something out of Bruce Chatwin.

  At one point she was drinking a cocktail in an Argentine hotel bar, with a picture of Jesus on the wall, when over the radio came the news that a Turk tried to assassinate the pope. There was such a commotion—she didn’t understand a thing until a man in a business suit said to her, “Pray for the pope, señora, pray for the pope,” as if her Jewish prayers would fly through the Pearly Gates quicker than their Catholic ones.

  One letter has her riding on a mule for a week, in the barren mountains of Bolivia in pursuit of a small indigenous tribe, and encountering, on a perilous rocky trail, a group of handsome Spanish priests devoting their lives to the damnés de la terre. Their mysterious self-sacrificing charisma, their “reverence for life,” brought to mind Schweitzer. The main difference between Ruth and the priests was motivation. The secular Ruth wasn’t on the prowl for isolated tribes to save souls, not hers and not theirs. “I’m a solitary ship lost at sea, floating from port to port,” goes one letter. “I have no close friends and I am dependent on the whims of revolutions and dictators.”

  Ruth blossomed in the anonymity. She didn’t need to have an identity, not as wife-of, not as an Israeli. Her most emotional missives are from Haiti, a country ruled in those days by Jean-Claude Duvalier a.k.a. “Baby Doc” and his cronies known as the “dinosaurs.” Ruth felt at home in the country the instant she stepped out of the twin-engine plane into the fly-filled, sweltering airport in Port-au-Prince crowded with half-starving beggars, their hands groping after her.

  From the airport, she rented a Citroën and headed off to a hotel operated by Abie Nathan’s ex-wife Rosie, a lesbian and disciple of the celebrated African-American dancer and mambo priestess in the voodoo religion, Katherine Dunham. Rosie had gone native, except for the tattoos and butch look of closely cropped hair.

  Every morning, Ruth set out from the hotel into the slums navigating steaming streams of sewage, holding her Maskit shawl over her nose and taking in the dazzling colors of the homes and the people. “I’m on my way to a madhouse,” one of her letters begins. “Every day, my mind is captivated by the colors and the way of life—the natural goodness here. It is as if the heavens have opened and produced life, coconuts falling from the sky.” Haiti mesmerized her with its colors, singing, dancing, voodoo and art.

  In the evenings, Ruth headed over to the legendary gingerbread-style Hotel Oloffson, the watering hole for the Haitian elite. Graham Greene set much of his novel The Comedians in the bar, to get support for her work in the slums. Greene writes of “nights with the discord of violence instead of jazz.” Ruth’s visits coincided with a spate of political murders.

  At the Oloffson Hotel, Ruth hobnobbed with the elite mulattos and intrepid expatriates who continued to live in the country. She followed all the gossip on the island because one of her friends, a Palestinian from Nazareth, was Baby Doc’s sister-in-law.

  43

  Crossing Boundaries

  Ruth often returned to Israel, and when she did, Raymonda gave her plenty of hugs along with a long list of requests for favors. With the Likud in power, settlement construction shot up; there were harsher crackdowns, and more and more Palestinian nationalists ended up placed under house arrest or in prison, or were simply tossed across the frontiers, to Jordan or Lebanon.

  With Weizman as her brother-in-law, Ruth could pull strings, and she normally did whatever Raymonda asked. Sometimes without knowing it, Ruth facilitated the work of the PLO.

  In January 1978, the World Council of Churches invited Raymonda to the United States for three months. Daoud didn’t even try stopping her this time. On her way, she attended a symposium in Rome on human rights in the occupied territories. Following the symposium, she added a new role model to her list that included Fadwa Touqan and Ms. Magazine founders, Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. She met Oriana Fallaci, the former Second World War partisan. Fallaci was one of the most brazen, outspoken journalists in the business.

  From Rome, she flew to Paris. Avnery had a surprise for her. Her cab driver pulled up in front of a home, in the suburbs, belonging to the Palestinian heart surgeon, Dr. Issam Sartawi. Uri was waiting for her inside, and with him was Matti Peled, the IDF general who had once described the “bullets and missiles” coming out from Raymonda’s “rosy lips.”

  Sartawi’s and Raymonda’s lives overlapped at a number of points: born within months of one another in Acre, he had fled the city with his family, in 1948. He ended up in Baghdad and, later, in Cleveland in medical school. Radicalized by the Six Day War, with the PFLP leader George Habash and Bassam Abu Sharif, he was involved in the operation that nearly killed Assi at the Munich airport. Eventually, recognizing that terrorism was no way to further the Palestinian cause, he began reaching out to Israelis and Jews. One of his biggest backers was the Austrian-Jewish Chancellor Bruno Kreisky.

  Raymonda, Avnery, Sartawi, and General Peled ended up at a restaurant where they conferred on how best to achieve a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while doing justice to t
he Palestinian refugees of 1948. They also discussed the growing plague of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. At one point in the conversation, Sartawi excused himself and headed to the restroom, leaving his attaché case under the table. It was full of PLO secrets, which he later told Avnery, with a broad smile, “If I revealed to any of my friends that I left a briefcase full of PLO secrets in the care of a Zionist, they wouldn’t believe me.”

  “If I told any of my friends that a PLO terrorist put an attaché case under my table and went away, and I remained there without grabbing it, they’d think that I was crazy,” retorted Avnery.56

  In New York, Raymonda stayed at a luxury hotel, on the Upper East Side, across the street from the Guggenheim. The clandestine talks she had had in Paris must have whetted her appetite for high-stakes diplomacy. She arranged an illegal tête-à-tête between Arafat’s top representative at the UN, Zuhdi Labib Al-Tarazi, and Ruth. Raymonda thought Ruth, flying up from South America, might be the perfect courier to deliver a message from the PLO to prominent Israelis in the government.

  Working amid the squalor of third-world slums, and being far from Israel, made Ruth more empathetic to the Palestinian cause, and more indifferent to opinions of grandstanding politicians, as well as Israeli law. She had no qualms about sitting down with Arafat’s UN man.

  Al-Tarazi, a Greek Orthodox Christian, was a well-known figure in diplomatic circles. The Patriarch of Jerusalem made him a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. But when Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, ran into him at a luncheon and had the temerity to talk to him, the New York Daily Post ran the headline, “Jews Demand Firing Young.” Carter dumped him.

  Like so many of Arafat’s men, threats came from all sides, not just from the Mossad and Abu Nidal. Though no militant, the Jewish Defense League threatened Al-Tarazi’s life often enough for American authorities to station a guard with a submachine gun in front of his apartment building in New York City, and the windows of the apartment were bullet-proof because people had already tried to assassinate him.