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

by Anthony David

  Moshe was clearly in no position to slap his children around any more, so Assi spilled out decades of resentment:

  “Listen, I want to tell you a few things.” His voice climbed into a high, reedy, inquisitional register. “I want to tell you that you were OK, you were quite a father till the age of sixteen. Since then just one thing I remember, that you are a SOB, you are the worst person, full of yourself, full of shit. You are the one who invented screwing as a national item; who sends his bodyguard to give my kids chocolate on their birthdays. They don’t know much about you. But I’ll tell them. You are the generation that lost sight . . . of what we were . . . Because at a certain point you thought you were King David.”

  Assi, as emotionally crippled by his father as his father was by the Senegalese sniper, kept firing:

  “Anyhow I want you to know that I simply hate your guts . . . You were interviewed in the paper, and you said that if you could live again you’d never have a family. I hope you understand what that means to me. That I was your mistake. Things have changed. Now you are my mistake.”

  Ruth knew Moshe was ill, but made no arrangements to return to Israel. Yael assured her there was no hurry. Even when he fell into a coma, Yael said nothing. Ruth therefore wasn’t in the country in October 1981 when the farmer she still loved, the “firstborn son of redemption,” died a millionaire, despised by his sons Assi and Udi; only Yael clung to her stubborn, ambivalent love. Her memoir My Father, His Daughter opens with the image of his corpse in an intensive-care unit with the EKG machine displaying a straight green line, emitting a high, piercing whine. His heart is no longer beating; the trigger finger stiff and bluish; tubes and electrodes feed into the emaciated body of the Homeric hero, whose “maimed face,” scarred by a sniper’s bullet, “is turning yellow.” His left eye, scrolled open, is a cloudy gray marble. “I have seen many dead faces, tranquil or accepting, amazed or tortured, childish or wrinkled. Father’s conveyed angry frustration, as if he didn’t mean it to happen quite then, and for the first time was caught unaware, deprived of the last word. Those things unsaid and unaccomplished hovered there, almost palpable. This furious aura has haunted me ever since.”

  Ruth caught the first plane back in time to attend the funeral on the hill just above Nahalal.

  The general’s death began to ease the rivalry that pitted daughter against mother. Yael could still not discard her caricature of Ruth as weak and plagued by a “martyr’s complex,” an absurdity given her mother’s globe-spanning efforts at improving the lives of women, from the women threatened with “honor killing” in the West Bank to weavers in Haiti. But Yael grudgingly admitted that her mother, “poor and too generous,” was the only parent with the indefinable quality called love. “Mother flooded us with gifts from the nothing she had, and father had charged us for everything. I was amazed at this remarkable woman.”64

  49

  Borderline Case

  “Even victors are by victories undone.”

  —John Dryden

  The day after the funeral, Raymonda told the AP and UPI newswires: “Nobody rejoices at a man’s death, even if he is an enemy. But Dayan was a conqueror and an enemy, and nobody will forget his severe hand, the collective punishments.”

  Meanwhile, Begin and Sharon were still in power. Raymonda would later need a box of Kleenex to sit through Steven Spielberg’s Munich because many of the Palestinians killed by the Mossad were friends. If the Munich massacre was the catalyst for the killings, why did the Israelis wait ten years after Munich to blow up or gun down so many moderate Palestinian intellectuals, writers, poets, translators, and journalists, many who had nothing to do with terrorism?

  Her first death threat on European soil—she had accumulated a raft of them in the Holy Land—came in 1981. Along with imprisoned Nelson Mandela and Simha Flapan, the Israeli behind the New Outlook, she won a peace prize named after Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky.65 Pro-Israel groups all over Europe went to work slandering her as an anti-Semite. In Vienna, anonymous bomb threats forced her to switch hotels three times.

  As a sign of just how ecumenical the threats against her were, Abu Nidal, after having just dispatched an Austrian socialist politician and head of the Israel-Austria Friendship League, sent a pair of hit-men, a Libyan and a Tunisian, to kill her for “collaborating with the Zionists.”

  She was in a Viennese restaurant with her daughter Suha when she noticed two dark men nursing a tea, their eyes fixed on her. She had seen enough spy movies to know the meaning behind the hard stares. Their badly fitting polyester suits were incongruent in the upscale restaurant.

  The idea that Suha could get caught in the line of fire made her heart race. As soon as she was able to think clearly, she asked Suha to go to the ladies’ room. “You need to get to a phone. Call this number”—it was the number of the PLO representative in Vienna. “Tell him we have a big problem. They have to come.”

  The Abu Nidal men missed their chance when a carload of armed men showed up in the nick of time.

  Raymonda was still in Europe when the Mossad targeted Majed Abu Sharar, her mentor in politics who was among the first Palestinians to extend his hand to the Israeli left. She knew him well, having stayed with him in Beirut; she introduced him to his wife. The iconoclastic Marxist, a man immune to nationalist jargon and sloganeering, believed in engaging the Israeli left. He used to say, “In these days, death is present in every action we take, in movement, and in halting, but I would rather die moving.” In October, he went to Rome to attend a writers’ conference with progressive writers and politicians from all over the world, including Uri and Amos. The bomb that killed him was hidden under his bed in a hotel on the Via Veneto.66

  In July the following year in Paris the Mossad struck again, this time targeting Ibrahim Souss’s assistant Fadl Danni. It was early in the morning. Kissing his young French wife and five-month-old son as he did every morning, he got in his Peugeot and edged away from the curb. A bomb planted in the chassis of the car detonated.67

  Back in Ramallah, late-night visitations by IDF soldiers, pounding on the door with the butt of their rifles, turned into such a regular occurrence that Raymonda stopped locking the front door. “Just come on in.” The most memorable interrogation session she had was with military governor Fuad Ben-Eliezer. He tried to blackmail her with “photos” he assured her would “scandalize” her family. “Oh, I hope they are lovely.” Raymonda was taunting him in a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. “They must be nudes. Are they nice? They turn you on, right? You can’t fool me, General Fuad. The trouble with you,” she said briskly, “is that you’re an Arab. And you Arab men have rather embroidered sexual fantasies, if you know what I mean. Go ahead and make them public,” she added with a wink. “Be my guest. Oh, I can even help. Take Uri Avnery’s telephone number. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to put them on the back cover of his magazine. Or centerfold, even better.” For this little bit of cheek, Prime Minister Begin slapped yet another travel ban against her.

  On Raymonda’s birthday in June 1982, with Dayan’s grave still fresh amid the poppies in bucolic Nahalal Cemetery, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on a flimsy excuse, ordered the invasion of Lebanon.68 Sharon, despite a truce that had held for a year, was determined to shoot his way through West Beirut and “put Arafat in a cage.” Begin likened the assault on Arafat’s headquarters to the siege on Hitler’s bunker. In fact, Begin and Sharon wanted Arafat dead, and the man on the ground in Beirut charged with the task of tracking him down was Uzi Dayan, the son of Moshe’s brother, Zorik, and now a commander of a commando force specializing in intelligence, espionage, and reconnaissance behind enemy lines.

  The Lebanon War coincided with the original Hebrew version of Raymonda’s My Home, My Prison, and it was a bestseller in the Israeli army despite the propaganda smearing her as the Palestinian Tokyo Rose. Conscripts at checkpoints asked for her autograph.69

  The following year, 1983, the Israeli playwright Ruth Hazan, inspired by
My Home, My Prison, wrote Mikreh Gvul or “Borderline Case,” as an imaginary debate between Golda Meir and Raymonda. In the play Golda, with her stringy hair the texture of a Brillo pad piled into a bun, looked like the owner of a cheap diner.

  At one point the former prime minister (dead for five years by now) stamps her feet and exclaims, “You don’t exist,” playing off her famous refrain that there is no Palestinian people. The Raymonda character unbuttons her blouse to show a bit of cleavage. “I don’t exist?” you say, pointing at her ample breasts. “My dear Golda, let me assure you I do, as did my parents, my grandparents, and their parents’ parents’ parents’ parents all existed in Palestine, long before you showed up from Milwaukee.” She next grabs her by the throat and snarls: “Maybe I should just strangle you!”

  Golda squirms, but in the end Raymonda decides to release the gasping prime minister from her clutches. With Golda on the ground rubbing her sore neck, the Raymonda character announces a more effective weapon than either terror or the slavish acquiescence to power. “I take a third way, the way of dialogue.”

  “Borderline Case” was a smash hit, and the theater troupe performed all over Israel, mostly at left-wing kibbutzim. In Tel Aviv, eight hundred IDF officers turned up for a performance, many of the officers having just returned from the fighting in Lebanon. Adding to the drama of the evening, earlier that day a terrorist detonated a bomb in the open-air Jerusalem vegetable market, and the carnage provoked calls of “Mavet le-Aravim,” Death to the Arabs.

  Backstage a young soldier was in the restroom with Raymonda because security was so tight they wouldn’t leave her alone. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked.

  “Afraid of what? Why should I be afraid?” With a flick of her wrist Raymonda pulled a shot of cognac.

  The soldier seemed incredulous. “Because . . . because . . . Do you know who is there? The chief of staff, the leaders of the IDF.” From her tone of voice, you’d think she was talking about Jehovah and his heavenly hosts.

  “So what! I’m not afraid of them!”

  Minutes later Raymonda was on the stage for the performance of a lifetime. At that moment she was the most recognizable, most celebrated Palestinian woman in Israel. She was both admired and feared—and her name was high up on someone’s list to be eliminated.

  She introduced the play by reading out some prepared thoughts, but mid-sentence the notes fluttered to the floor. She still had the sweet taste of cognac on her tongue, and out came fire as from a blast furnace. She faced the officers. “One of your soldiers just asked me if I am afraid of you.” She was pacing the stage. “O, I know what you can do,” she pointed out into the audience. “You are all so manly, so handsome, so strong, aren’t you? O, you officers of a mighty army! Under your control, you have tanks and guns and missiles. You have the power to impose your laws; our destiny is in your hands. I look at your uniforms, your medals, badges, the stars on your shoulders—but when I close my eyes, I strip you down and see you as men; and now I address you in the name of humanity. Before you look at me through a riflescope, stare into my eyes. Do you feel, do your hands tremble, do you sense the palpitation? If you do, don’t pull the trigger.”

  There was a storm of applause.

  So far, so good, Raymonda was thinking. Now I should tell them what I really think. When will I ever have eight hundred officers in one room, eating out of my hands? Let the fireworks begin! L’pozez akol!

  “You may haul me off to jail for what I am about to tell you. Yes, I know that your law makes it a crime to associate with the PLO. You know something? Before your invasion, I went to Beirut to meet with Arafat. I wanted to see the brave Palestinians who are fighting officers like you. I wanted to find out who they were. You know what else? I just came from Tunis, and I sat with Arafat and the Fatah leadership, with the people you just expelled from Beirut.”

  She could still hardly believe her eyes. The officers were sitting upright in the cushioned seats of the theater waiting for her to speak.

  At that moment five generals, the top brass in the hall, shot up from their seats and marched out. A handful of others followed.

  “What did I say?” she called after them. “You brag about your democracy but you don’t want to hear the truth. You don’t want to know that peace is only possible by sitting down with Yasser Arafat.” She raised her voice. “OK, you don’t want to LISTEN to me.”

  The generals slammed the door of the auditorium with a resounding boom.

  She turned her attention back on the rest of the officers. “Do you want the war to continue? If you do, then let war be the answer. I’ll stop now.” She was about to say something else when an officer with the distorted beet-red expression of a man stubbing his toe sprung from his seat and informed her matter-of-factly that Arafat was a terrorist, and “so are you.” The man surely wanted to continue along this vein when his seven-hundred-and-ninety-something fellow officers told him to shut up, and the chastened little man with the red face sat back down.

  From all parts of the audience Raymonda heard, “Go on! We want to hear you out, Raymonda!” This was when she told them not to be like the “Nazis who just take orders.”

  Raymonda’s words were so forceful and yet so emotional and so visceral that there was no doubt in the mind of the officers that she was telling the truth.

  Following the last word about taking orders, there was a protracted silence, as though the officers were either stunned, speechless or were about to rush onto the stage and drag her off to prison. Then the applause broke and rolled over her in a wave, long and sustained, giving her for a brief instant a feeling of total control over the occupiers.

  50

  Beyond the Walls

  With Moshe safely interred in Nahalal Cemetery, Ruth returned home to Tel Aviv. She was there for the premier of Assi’s latest film, Beyond the Walls (1984), which was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign picture, and can be seen as an allegory of a land forcibly divided into Jewish and Arab halves, by leaders playing on people’s fears and prejudices. The setting is Israel’s Central Prison. Mohammed Bakri, Israel’s leading Arab actor, plays the lead role of Issan, a PLO leader serving a life sentence for terrorism; Assaf, Assi’s character, is a leftist in jail for meeting the PLO in Europe. Behind bars, Assaf witnesses suicide and corruption, and finally, an unlikely coalition between radical Arab nationalists and Jewish criminals. A murder engineered by the prison director leads the Arabs and Jews to join ranks to oppose the real criminals sitting upstairs in the prison administration building.

  Raymonda saw the movie right after it opened and phoned up Ruth choking with emotion at the film, “a masterpiece,” an assessment Ruth shared.

  Meanwhile, other members of the Dayan clan were rising to prominence. Assi’s cousin, Yonathan Geffin, a poet, songwriter, and playwright, came out with a book on the Yom Kippur War titled simply, The Failure. On his Peace Ship Abie Nathan played Geffin’s song “Ihyeh Tov,” “It’ll Get Better,” over and over until it became the Israeli anthem of peace and one of the most famous songs in the country:

  We will yet learn to live together

  between the groves of olive trees

  children will live without fear

  without borders, without bomb-shelters

  on graves grass will grow.

  Jonathan raised his son Aviv, a future international rock star and a member of what he terms the “screwed up generation,” in an atmosphere of orgies and cocaine. In 1984, Aviv made his public debut on Israeli television when he sang a song written by his sister.

  51

  The Bomb

  The warning signs were unmistakable. Back in 1983, Raymonda’s friend Dr. Issam Sartawi attended the same congress of the Socialist International in Portugal as Shimon Peres. Men dispatched by Abu Nidal followed him to the lobby of the Montechoro Hotel and murdered him. Two years later, unidentified assailants knifed to death Sartawi’s fellow believer in dialogue, Aziz Shehadeh, in his home in Ramallah.
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br />   Raymonda was more of a provocation than both men because she didn’t just attend conferences with Israelis but was also frequently seen tooling around with Ruth Dayan. Just as bad in the eyes of conservative men was her feminism and how she considered securing women’s rights part and parcel of Palestinian national liberation. What good would it do to get an independent state if women remained in the harem?

  Raymonda’s reputation as feminist troublemaker attracted the attention of Dial Torgerson, the Los Angeles Times Middle East correspondent, who was doing a story about a European women’s rights organization and the “underground railroad” run by the nuns of the La Crèche convent, a dangerous operation smuggling women threatened by their families out of the West Bank to Europe. Raymonda, with a long history of following stories of women murdered by their families, helped Torgerson in his research.

  In her Salah al-Din press office, she was seething with rage about what she called the “scourge” of Arab society. As an example of this “epidemic of killing,” she told Torgerson about a man arrested in Nablus with his sister’s head in a bag.

  Torgerson’s article attracted media attention, and soon foreign and Israeli journalists crowded into Raymonda’s office. Honor killing became a red-hot issue, and Raymonda was one of the few Arab women willing to speak openly about it. A Hollywood producer even showed up and asked her to write a movie script.

  There were many Palestinian nationalists rankled by her message that a woman’s right to life towers over a man’s need for honor. Reproaches against her became even more vitriolic once Zionist organizations began using honor killing as proof of Palestinian backwardness, cruelty, and inability to manage their own affairs. Echoing what colonial regimes have always said about the “natives,” some Israelis began touting the occupation as morally necessary. Fatah leaders demanded that she stop with her feminism until after they sloughed off the occupation.