Prologue
A Secret Story

Sometimes it can seem that the only thing Israelis and Palestinians share is a common skepticism that there can ever be a solution to the conflict. As an American writer living and working in Jerusalem, this pervasive pessimism is what compelled me to write about Ruth Dayan and Raymonda Tawil. These two women, from the most prominent families of their respective nations, turned a chance encounter after the Six Day War into an improbable lifelong friendship that shows how, with empathy and common sense, the seemingly insolvable Middle-Eastern conflict can have an end.

Ruth and Raymonda did more than defy national taboos. At great risk and, on occasion, attracting dangerous attention to themselves, both women worked together for decades to address the underlying sources of the conflict. The more time I spent with these extraordinary women, the more I realized their story had to be told.

“How dare Ruth!” Raymonda said at the start of our Skype video conversation. She had just woken me up at 3 a.m. I was in my apartment in Jerusalem; she was at her home in Malta, where she lives with her daughter, Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat’s widow. After four years, I knew Raymonda well enough to distinguish between her emotions of anger, frustration, and hurt. She was clearly angry. I could see it in the way she kept slipping off her glasses and putting them back on again.

“I don’t want to have a book now,” she continued. “How can I put my name next to Ruth’s? Do you know what she said to me?”

“Raymonda, calm down. Tell me what happened.” Despite the early hour, the idea that my book on Raymonda and her best friend, Ruth Dayan, would suffer yet another setback made me break out in a sweat. I’d already abandoned a ghostwritten version of the story in favor of a straight dual-biography. Would I have to start over again from scratch?

“Anthony, I know how much time you’ve put in this book. But I just can’t go on. Make it into a novel if you want. Turn it into an Agatha Christie murder mystery because I think I’m going to kill her. . . .”

“What happened?” I poured myself a cup of coffee.

“What happened? As usual, Ruth defended Moshe. Can you believe it, after all these years?”

From my experience, the two women’s forty years of friendship and their basic agreement on the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and on almost everything else, never prevented the occasional flare-up. Which was only to be expected because Raymonda Tawil was Yasser Arafat’s mother-in-law, and Ruth is the widow of Moshe Dayan, the most celebrated Jewish general since Joshua and a man who spent much of his military career doing everything in his power to hunt down Arafat.

“Raymonda,” I said to her, sipping my coffee. “Ruth was married to Moshe for decades, she had three children with him, she loved him—and still does. Okay, you think he was a psycho. But . . .”

She cut me off and insisted, with sniffles, that I call Ruth and tell her “finito! I’m pulling the plug on the book.”

Ruth was awaiting my call. The woman nearly at the century mark has more energy than most college students. She, too, had the voice of someone who had just stopped crying.

“Hi, Ruth.”

“Hi.”

“I just got off the phone with Raymonda, and she tells me you’ve been quarreling.”

“Quarreling? She screamed at me.” Her voice was quivering.

“She says you yelled at her first.”

“And what do you expect me to do when she sends me such an email?” This was the first mention of an email. “And it’s all your fault.” When I inquired why I was to blame, she explained that my interviews with Raymonda had dislodged memories, reopening old wounds. “She wrote terrible things. Just awful. I will NEVER speak with her again.”

“Ruth, I’ve heard you say that a dozen times, and you two always reconcile. You love one another.”

“This time I mean it. Just read the email.”

“What does it say?”

Ruth got up and went to her office to read the email from the computer. Raymonda’s message began with “My dear Ruthy, you are a great woman, you are compassionate, full of humanity, a woman I can call my best friend because you are your own army of love. While your husband was hunting down our best men, you were racing around Palestine looking for women to help. You are a feminist hero.”

“C’mon Ruth, it’s not such a bad letter.”

“Why does she have to say that about Moshe?”

“My God, do you expect Raymonda to like Moshe?” Ruth, who downplays her own latent case of PTSD, doesn’t fully appreciate how scarred the woman she calls her “soul mate” is after a life of exile and loss.

“Well, that’s not the reason I’m finished with her,” she snapped with the gravelly voice of a longtime smoker. “Anyway, what can I do about Moshe and his wars? He’s long gone, and Arafat too is already in the ground. And I’ll be keeping them company soon enough. I’m not suited for this world any longer, what it’s become. I want to go . . . to nowhere.” Ruth, usually alive with the exuberance and vitality of a teenager, suddenly sounded weary.

“So Ruth, why are you angry if it’s not because of Moshe? What else did Raymonda say?” When Ruth first contacted me to be her ghostwriter, never did I imagine I’d also need to be a psychologist and Middle East peace negotiator.

“She said I was a colonialist. Can you imagine? Me? She was up in arms because she said there was a ‘Made in Israel’ tag on some embroidery we made in Bethlehem thirty years ago.” For decades Ruth ran a project for women in the occupied territories. “Those women had NO jobs.” She raised her voice. “Would Raymonda have preferred that we let them STARVE?”

“Are you telling me that the two of you fought over a tag?”

“Sometimes you really are stupid. It’s not just a tag. I spent the best years of my life working with Palestinian woman and here comes Mrs. Jane Fonda telling me I was an exploiter. I’ve never been more insulted.”

I skyped Raymonda back to see if she had really called Ruth a colonialist, and she gave me a long lecture on how Palestinian embroidery was like handspun cloth for Gandhi in India. As she spoke I noticed the way she set her teaspoon down on a saucer and uncrossed her legs, like she was heading into a bruising fight.

After a few more minutes of explaining to me the symbolism of a “Made in Israel” tag, she grabbed a book Ruth wrote in the 1970s, And Perhaps, flipped it open, and read aloud a passage that made Ruth sound like the smug wife of the colonial administrator: “Palestinians are called the Jews of the Arabs. Villagers would work in an Israeli supermarket. I was so thrilled that ordinary people meet on an everyday level.” With anger flaring up again in her voice, Raymonda then asked me to pass on the message to Ruth that she’d rather go hungry in her own country than work at the checkout aisle in an Israeli grocery store.

For the next two hours, I was on the phone now with Ruth, now with Raymonda, until a three-way Skype conversation left us all laughing. The tag was forgotten, the friends loved one another again, and the book about their friendship survived another crisis. Raymonda said goodnight by admonishing her dear friend to stay healthy. “We need you, Ruth. We love you. We still have so many things to do together.”

“Okay, Raymonda. I’ll keep going a bit longer.” Ruth pressed the palm of her hand onto the computer screen: she was wearing a ring made from a Roman coin given to her by the iconic former mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek.

I first met Ruth at the end of 2008 after she rang me up and said I might be the right person to be her ghostwriter in recounting a “secret story” she had been lugging around for decades, and invited me to Tel Aviv. It was a bit like Barbara Bush contacting a historian with news of a “confession” she needed to get off her chest.

I had just moved from New York to Jerusalem to take up a job teaching literature and media at a program run by Bard College inside a hard-bitten Palestinian university in the West Bank village of Abu Dis, right next to the Israeli Separation Wall. All I knew about the Dayans was that General Moshe was probably the most iconic figure in the Israeli pantheon, a military genius people placed in the company of Hannibal and Admiral Horatio Nelson. For my students, he was the dark, villainous crusader who in 1967 had conquered their country in six fateful days.

Of course, like all my Israeli friends, I kept up on the scandals regarding Ruth and Moshe’s son Assi, the most famous scion of the Dayan dynasty. I was an avid fan of his darkly existentialist films, and of his hit sitcom Be-Tipul and its HBO version, In Treatment. A mass-market tabloid had recently featured Assi, the master of the nihilistic-surrealist vision of Israeli life, naked and sitting like an anchorite on a pillar with his false teeth clutched in one hand.

The other fearless child, the daughter Yael, whose well-deserved fame comes from her championing of human rights—gays, illegal immigrants, and of course Palestinians—is also the high priestess of the family legacy, defender of the brand, and the Dayan child most like her father. Moshe’s missing eye, so to speak—Moshe lost one eye during the Second World War. Another Dayan, Moshe’s nephew Uzi, built the Separation Wall snaking through the West Bank. I crossed it every morning on the way to work. Other than that, the Dayan name was to me something like the Kennedys, a glittering dynasty generating boundless materials for historians, mythographers, gossip columnists, and urban planners looking for new street names.

I took the bus down. Ruth lives across the street from a power plant, the Dov Hoz Municipal Airport, and a construction site fueled by a building boom. Her apartment building is one in a line of nearly identical blocks. There is nothing in the middle-class and shrub-lined look of the place to suggest that the first wife of a Homeric legend lives upstairs.

She buzzed me in and I took the stairs to her third-floor apartment. The door, with a ceramic, turquoise-colored nameplate in Hebrew and Arabic next to it, was already open, and someone from inside said, “Come in.” I stepped across the threshold, and there she was standing in front of me, with thick gray hair and a few strands drooping around her beautiful face. Set deep on the bridge of her nose were horn-rimmed reading glasses. She had on bubble-gum pink lip-gloss, a necklace made of smooth peach pits—Moshe, as I would later learn, made it for her while serving time in a British prison in 1939—and a flowing dress that could have been worn on the ballroom floor of the Titanic. The ring with a Roman coin was on her finger.

“Hi, I’m Ruth,” she said holding out her hand and staring at me with pale green eyes. She spoke in perfect English with a slight British accent. When I shook her hand, she stepped forward and I realized she was barefoot.

I stepped inside Ruth’s world, utterly dumbfounded. Festooned to the wall next to the door—too large to miss—was a painting of General Dayan in what looked like the pose of a Prussian officer, with the iconic eye-patch replacing the Teutonic monocle. “Oh, Assi did that,” Ruth explained with a chuckle. That the son of the chief architect of what most Israelis consider history’s most ethical army could create such a caricature was the first sign I was entering a weird and remarkable place.

I wandered around the apartment, which was like a shrine. There were talismans in every nook and cranny. “Excuse the junk,” she said to me, gesturing with one arm. Dead for over thirty years, Moshe seemed to cast his long shadow into every corner of the living room. Hanging over a mother-of-pearl cabinet was a bronze and stainless steel replica of his head with an eye-patch. Her other son Udi, a sculptor who wields a blowtorch the way a poet does a pen, made it out of metal from a scrapyard. My eye caught sight of a black-and-white photo above the sofa, a framed photo of two young lovers sitting in grass reading a book of poetry. I had a mental image of the two teenagers rolling around in fields of daisies.

“That’s Moshe and me in 1936,” Ruth told me. My eye drifted to an oil painting, next to the eye-patch, of mesmerizing sensuality. It was a portrait of Yael, done just after the Six Day War in 1967 when her father conquered the old city of Jerusalem and the West Bank. “She’s stunning,” I said.

“Well, back then she sure was. A bit wild, too.”

Gently leading me by the arm, she took me around the apartment, pointing out framed photographs. One was of her parents in the 1920s looking like anthropologists crouched with Bedouins. She then showed me a photo, the perfect image of harmony, of her three children taken when they were young. “Moshe and I were so happy back then,” Ruth said pointing especially at Assi. “It was just after the war in Europe. The kids drove us around the bend, and we were poor farmers, but happy.” I still had no idea why she asked me to drop by. “So Mrs. Dayan . . .”

“Call me Ruth. Everyone does.”

“Ruth, you said something about a secret.”

“Yes, well you cannot tell that story,” she said raising her voice slightly and smacking her lips, “if you don’t have some Levantine spice inside you. A chili pepper or two. You just can’t. I’ve given other writers a crack at it and they failed.”

Which seemed like a challenge. “Hmmm. What’s the nature of the story?” But before saying any more, Ruth assured me she’d already “checked me out. You’re a ghostwriter, right?”

I knew a thing or two about haunting other people’s lives, I replied. “Does this secret of yours have something to do with General Dayan?” Was she going to tell me he was still alive, living under a pseudonym in the jungles of South America?

“Oh, him,” she uttered under her breath and raised her eyes to the photograph of her poetry-reading lover on the wall. “No, no, no. Everyone already knows his story. I have . . . let’s say, a different yarn for you.” At this point Ruth came out with one of her phrases that tend to pop up innumerable times in the course of any conversation with her. It was “To cut a long story short,” a sure sign that an elaborate tale was to follow.

Ruth pulled out a pack of discount Israeli cigarettes, tapped it until one emerged, and offered me the pack. No thanks, I told her. She lit up and inhaled deeply. “The book I want you to write has been cooking on the back burner for years. With the clock ticking. . . . Do you have any idea how old I am? Ha, talk about living on borrowed time!

“Here, I want to show you something.” In front of her, next to a knitting basket, was a large square object covered by a camel hair rug similar to ones Muslims kneel on during the call to prayer. Reaching down, she pulled away the rug: Abracadabra, this is my life! It was a box brimming over with cassette tapes. She went on to explain how for years she had been recording story after story, hundreds of hours worth. If there was a secret buried somewhere in those tapes, I thought to myself as she picked them out of the box one by one and piled them on her lap, it would take an eternity to find.

While she was fishing through the box, the phone rang and I heard Ruth pipe up, “Oh Raymonda, yes. He’s here. Let’s talk after he leaves.”

The only Raymonda I’d ever heard of was Raymonda Tawil, a militant journalist famous in the 1970s and ’80s for using a tape recorder she dubbed her “Kalashnikov” to interview ex-prisoners, grieving mothers, and dissident Israeli officers. (One can imagine Vanessa Redgrave or Jane Fonda playing her part in a movie.) In her glory days she was the most prominent—and hands down sexiest—feminist among the militants, a woman whose intellectual, erotic, rebellious sparks not only attracted people but got others building bombs—she was eventually run out of the West Bank when someone, either an Israeli or a Palestinian, attached a bomb under her Opel sedan. This was before her daughter Suha married the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a man well over twice her age and considered by most Israelis to be a bloodthirsty killer, the Palestinian version of Hitler. But why in hell would the first wife of Dayan be talking to dead Arafat’s mother-in-law?

Ruth wanted to inventory the tapes but I was more interested in talking about Raymonda, if indeed we were talking about the same woman. “Raymonda Tawil, was that SHE?”

One of Ruth’s quirks is the way she screws open her eyes when she’s about to come out with a bombshell. Yes, she nodded, adding that their friendship was the best “secret” in the box, a “dangerous one,” too. She turned her attention back to the box and, without looking up, said, “You have to promise not to breathe a word about this to anyone. She tells me she’s on some sort of mission.” Ruth hesitated, looked up, swiveled her head in my direction, and swept her eyes around the living room, as if she was afraid of snooping ears. “Just don’t ask me what it is.” She made it sound as if Tawil was on a search for the Holy Grail.

“A mission?”

“Yes, that’s right. A mission. She’s always on some sort of crusade. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool feminist. I have an email.”

Ruth read it out loud: “Whatever writer you choose will have to have the patience to go deep in the complicated, perplexing Middle East conflict . . . no, even more. We need someone to dig into the souls of two enemies.”

“That’s from Raymonda? What does she mean by ‘we need’?”

“We’ve been friends for forty years. She’s a very special lady.”

“The email says you’re enemies.”

“We are. We love each other. Enemies can be friends and friends can be enemies in this country.”

I was still trying to wrap my mind around her relationship with a “dyed-in-the-wool feminist” and mother-in-law of the Palestinian answer to the one-eyed Moshe, with rumpled combat fatigues and a keffiyeh instead of an eye-patch, when Ruth began talking about the book she wanted me to write. She wanted me, preferably as her ghostwriter “but that’s up to you,” to dig through her tapes and come up with a book, a book that somehow also featured Raymonda’s “mission,” whatever it was, and their shared belief that Jews and Arabs can live together without borders and walls and suicide belts and “all that nonsense.” Which was the last thing I expected to hear from the widow of the great warrior. “My story . . . our story has plenty of drama, and if you look hard enough,” she said kicking the box, “you’ll find a murder mystery or two.” With that, she crushed her cigarette into an ashtray and looked me over from head to toe as if sizing me up.

“Why?” I asked, meaning “why me?” For half an hour Ruth sang the praises of the various characters she has known in her life, from Ben-Gurion to Leonard Bernstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. According to her, she simply stumbled by chance into the lives of the most extraordinary characters of the twentieth century. The thought never occurred to her that she, too, was a member of this special club.

“And Raymonda?”

You’d think she was talking about Joan of Arc or Gloria Steinem. “You know the magician . . . what the hell’s his name . . . David Copperfield? That’s what she’s like. My God, with her tongue she can go through walls and cut through stone. The New York Times . . . or the Washington Post, one of the two once printed up a caricature of her as a tigress. ‘The lioness came out of the cage.’ She was the first Palestinian to talk to us Israelis, to understand us and not let her pain get in the way. Raymonda’s the real star of our friendship. I’m just her sidekick, her Sancho Panza,” she said with a smile.

Sancho Panza? This would turn Raymonda into a Don Quixote. Now that’s a story, I mused: Yasser’s mother-in-law on her noble steed swooping down on windmills with the general’s widow, on her mule, struggling to keep up.

“Oh, here comes lunch.”

Ethel arrived from the kitchen carrying a platter of food. “I hope you’re hungry,” Ruth said, lighting up another cigarette and blowing out a perfect blue halo of a smoke ring. As she would every time I visited her over the coming years, she wanted to feed me. With each successive trip Ethel piled the dining table with typical Ashkenazi fare with a heretical twist. There was chicken soup with matzo balls, a small plate of chopped liver, some boiled potatoes, and a pork chop smothered in crushed black pepper.

We ate on TV trays so Ruth could continue pawing through the box of tapes while regaling me with highlights of her friendship with Raymonda—how they met in Nablus after the Six Day War; the time Raymonda and Yael, who already knew Arafat, introduced her to the Palestinian leader, and he kissed her three times, right cheek, left cheek, right cheek. “Yasser was so excited, you just can’t imagine.” What I gleaned from her other stories was that she and Raymonda have a lot in common. “Like two peas in a pod,” despite the more than twenty years age difference and that Raymonda wrote about being enemies in the email even though they love one another.

“Time is of the essence. And with these bastards”—I assumed she was talking about right-wing Israeli settlers and Hamas thugs—“driving our two peoples into this killing frenzy, we don’t have a moment to lose.” She stamped her bare foot on the prayer rug. Ruth, a live wire of energy, was effervescent.

Ruth spent much of her childhood in Imperial London and still prefers reading English to Hebrew. In her library in the back of the apartment, she started rooting through the shelves looking for materials that might help me understand the sort of writing project she had in mind, all the while pointing at books as if they were people standing before us in flesh and blood: she came out with personal anecdotes about Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jackie Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin, and Albert Schweitzer. “Oh, look at this one.” She held up to the light of the lamp the novella Return to Haifa by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. “I never met him because . . . well, we blew him up.”1

“You have to try to think of things from their perspective,” she was saying, her hands grasping for books. “It wasn’t easy for Arabs like Raymonda. To lose everything.”

Her eyes were suddenly red. I approached her to give her a peck on the cheek when she set the books on a desk and asked me to follow her to her bedroom. She sat on her bed with stacks of materials and newspaper clippings spread out like tarot cards. “Come here,” she commanded, patting the quilt with her hand. “Don’t worry—I won’t vamp you.” To write her book I would have to go through her letters, extracting the gems, she explained. “Who knows? Maybe my kids will chuck the stuff out when I’m dead.” I took a deep breath: a dedicated team of researchers would need a year to plow through those letters, mostly in Hebrew, and cherry pick materials from the mountain of cassette tapes.

Ruth held up a fistful of love letters from nineteen-year-old Moshe to her as a love-struck teenager of seventeen. Suddenly she was beaming as she read out some of the letters. “Just listen to this one. I think I know what you think about Moshe. Some sort of John Wayne character, a cowboy with his six-shooter gunning down the natives.” Well, think again. “Moshe was a farmer at heart. How else could he have written this?” It was a letter about grafting new shoots in an orchard: “‘I remember every one,’” she read from the letter, “‘when it was done and when it will blossom, and I feel toward each like a father to a son.’”

“Now isn’t that lovely?”

I headed back to Jerusalem and spent most of the night and the next two days reading and taking notes and doing some online research: I learned, for instance, that the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used to get visitations from God, each time at 3 a.m. sharp, prompting him to fire off telegrams to both Arafat and Dayan. And the Italian journalist and iconoclastic feminist Oriana Fallaci once depicted Arafat’s dark sunglasses as a counterpoint to “his archenemy Moshe Dayan’s eye-patch.”

I ended up making innumerable trips down to Tel Aviv, and Ruth took me on frequent forays back to Nahalal where she and Moshe lived for the first years of marriage. She and I spent so much time together that my snickering friends likened my relationship with this extraordinary woman born the same year as my grandmother to something out of Harold and Maude.

I never became her ghostwriter; I was more of a shadow following the lives and friendship of two women who defy everything usually said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ruth and I carried on a separate line of communication, over email and Skype, with Raymonda. The first time the three of us spoke, they at once began discussing people I had never heard of. “Raymonda,” I finally said, interrupting the flow of their stories. “Tell me about your mission. Ruth tells me . . .” I found myself groping for words. “She mentioned something about a mission.”

Raymonda threw back her head and burst out in a cackle, blowing a kiss in Ruth’s direction. “She’s my mission.”

“Ruth?”

“Somehow, yes. I’m hers, too, I suppose.”