Civil War
Throughout the war Ruth awaited word on the fate of Zvi. He had disappeared during a sea raid on the Lebanese coast. Word never came; Zvi vanished forever, swallowed into the waters off the Lebanese coast.
In December 1946, Ruth and her younger sister Reumah were in a Paris hospital run by nuns. A French surgeon mistakenly thought he could fit Moshe with a glass eye. While in Paris, Reumah met Ezer Weizman, a pilot who looked like a Hollywood war hero with his tight golden curls and crystalline blue eyes. During the war the RAF veteran gained notoriety for loop-the-loop aerial maneuvers and the long list of kills to his name. Hard drinking and backslapping jokes fit into his fighter pilot cockiness. He had flown into Paris on a Piper Cub en route to London to plot with other members of the Irgun the assassination of the British military commander in Palestine.
The notorious playboy in his faded RAF flight jacket wanted to take Reumah with him to London as he continued on his secret mission. She declined because Ruth, with Moshe in excruciating pain after the botched operation, talked her into heading off to a German castle to work with Jewish orphans from Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belson.
Ruth’s hopes that Moshe would finally return to the hut on Nahalal, this time forever, never came through. The unfolding events produced a perfect pairing between his personal myopia and need for action. With the British Navy preventing hundreds of thousands of refugees in displaced persons camps from immigrating to Palestine, Ben-Gurion demanded a Jewish state. There was no more enthusiastic backer than Moshe: The British had to leave, and he believed that in the ensuing battle with the local Arabs, Jews would surely prevail. Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria threw down the wild card. Would the scrappy remnants of a people who had just been nearly exterminated find itself in a war with the wider Arab world? How could the Haganah fend off an attack by regular armies with large arsenals of planes and tanks?
Zionist terror against the British met with fierce reprisals. The British tried everything, from sending Irgun fighters to the gallows at the Acre fortress to presenting to both sides a flurry of proposals, resolutions, and expert opinions. But in the end, the bankrupt British Empire lost its will to root out and defeat an utterly determined and ruthless Jewish underground. Fighting victims of Nazism was also a hard policy to defend.
The British set a date: on May 15, 1948, they would go home. Still nominally in charge until then, the British tried to separate the Jews and Arabs with barbed wire.
The UN then voted in support of a partition plan in which Jews, with a third of the population, were to get over half the territory, including the fertile coastal strip. Arabs kept the cities of Jaffa, Tiberius, and Hebron, along with the stony Biblical heartland up in the hills of Judea and Samaria. Jerusalem, symbolically the biggest prize of all, was to remain internationalized.
Back on the farm, Ruth and her fellow farmers danced through the night in celebration of the UN vote; Ruth baked enough cookies for the entire village. Up in the Jewish neighborhoods in Haifa, with their large numbers of refugees from Nazi Europe, people honked horns and set off fireworks.
Habib and his friends listened anxiously to the reports on Radio Cairo. Everyone knew that the partition was a formula for civil war. How could politicians in New York, spouting the language of human rights, simply hand over large swaths of territory, including the Hawa family’s lands, to European immigrants? How could the same governments that a couple of years earlier had failed to come to the rescue of Europe’s Jews now turn around and “solve” the Jewish problem by ignoring the rights of Arabs? How could Jews who claimed to belong to the democratic West want to impose such an unjust scheme against the will of the Arab majority? But how could the Arabs of Palestine stand up to the world, not to mention the better organized, better armed, far more relentlessly driven Zionists?
Local Arabs vowed to fight, while Arab rulers, the kings, prime ministers, and generals of Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan, promised to come to the rescue by forming the Arab Liberation Army. Leaders issued one pronouncement after the next that must have sounded to Jews like something out of a Nuremberg Party rally or from the lips of Haman the Agagite: Ruth describes the general fear of “Arab armies gathering on all fronts.” Hebrew newspapers quoted over and over the Egyptian diplomat and secretary general of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, in his gruesome prediction of “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” It would be a cakewalk, this war between Arabs, children of Muslim warriors, and a nation of greengrocers and owners of haberdasheries. The only point of dispute among Arab generals, in their starched and pressed military uniforms weighed down with honorary medals, was who would take credit for this glorious work of liberation? The Syrian president bragged to everyone about the secret weapon he had up his sleeve: a nuclear bomb fashioned by a golden-handed Damascus ironsmith.
With such delusional allies, Palestinian Arabs had little chance against a large and trained Jewish militia, along with hospitals, ambulances, and a communications network that gave even isolated outposts the sense of belonging to a broad, intelligent movement. The more avowedly terrorist organizations like the Irgun frequently worked hand in glove with the Haganah.3
In January 1948, a group of Haganah men blew up the luxurious Semiramis Hotel, owned by Habib’s sister and located in the Arab neighborhood of Katamon, in Jerusalem. The Haganah communiqué spoke of the hotel as an “important meeting place of Arab gangs,” making it sound like a dingy din of pirates and not the fancy hotel it was.4 The Spanish consul was among the two dozen people killed in the blast.
With the Haganah still an illegal underground army, Moshe’s actions were a closely held secret, and Ruth had no idea whether he was fighting, and if so, against whom and where. She had three children to protect, and in the evenings she heard the constant din of bullets raining down on Nahalal from the Syrian and Druze guerillas hiding out in the forests around the Arab village of Ma’alul. Syrian fighters shot Eli Ben-Zvi, the dreamy, poetic son of Israel’s future second president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ruth had been his scout guide years earlier; his fiancé Pnina lived next door in Nahalal. The wedding cake and cookies were all ready just as the news came of his death. “Pnina sat there holding her wedding gown, alternating between tears and hysterical laughter.”
One funeral followed the next. To revenge a massacre near Jerusalem,5 Arabs slaughtered the son of the Nahalal schoolmaster, a Tolstoyan pacifist, along with thirty-four other students at the Hebrew University. Snipers shot a poet and pianist named Itzhak, also a neighbor of Ruth’s. To the mourners at the funeral she read a poem he left behind: “I would like to be/As the echo of the field’s breathing,/As the play of light in the empty space/Winged with wings of song/ . . . like everlasting youth.”
In March 1948 the local postman, riding a bicycle, delivered a special cable from her uncle to attend his son Yossi’s wedding in Haifa. As a little girl Ruth used to go to the Zion movie theater to listen to her uncle play violin for silent movies. At least a dozen times, tapping her bare feet to her uncle’s music, she stared up at Rudolf Valentino’s dashing smile in The Sheik, admiring his kaffiyeh, moon-shaped sword, embroidered vest, camel-hair kaftan, bullet belt, and polished riding boots. The wedding coincided with Reumah’s arrival by ship with hundreds of orphans from the German castle.
Just as Ruth was about to leave to Haifa for the wedding, news came that nineteen-year-old cousin Yossi had been knifed to death. He had gone to buy a shirt for the wedding. He caught an Arab taxi in the city, even though he was warned that the cab drivers weren’t to be trusted. “No, that’s ridiculous. I’m from Haifa, and I know the Arabs.” His cocksureness ended him up in a public toilet, his body cut to pieces.
A week after Yossi’s murder, Moshe’s younger brother Zorik was shot by Druze fighters. Zorik was the most vivacious of the Dayans, a big, blond, handsome man filled with life and humor and love; Ruth felt like his mother or older sister. The body lay rotting in the field for three days, unapproachable because of Druze sharpshooters.
Moshe had to identify Zorik’s body. Ruth, driving a car with jerry-rigged armored plates from Nahalal along winding, dangerous roads, met Moshe at a kibbutz near Haifa. Through binoculars, they looked out onto the field alive with red poppies and wild chrysanthemum, and saw Zorik’s crumpled body. Zorik’s son Uzi, the future architect of the Separation Wall, was just three months old.
Moshe drove his brother’s decomposing remains back to his and Ruth’s shack in Nahalal, where it was washed and prepared for burial. Ruth meanwhile continued on to the port of Haifa to greet Reumah and the four hundred orphans brought over from Germany. An armored bus picked up the children and distributed them to kibbutzim in the area.