Hotel Zion
Several days after the mass flight of Palestinians from Haifa, Ruth sat on the terrace of Hotel Zion overlooking the city. The sun was setting and the swallows were soaring and dipping, flapping and gliding; the ships were mostly gone from the port and gone too was the polyglot hubbub of the streets. Ruth, traumatized at the deaths of Yossi and Zorik, and so many others, stared down into the abandoned city. She was astonished by the silence. The shooting had stopped. Chaos, fear, hunger, and death had driven most Christians, Muslims, and Baha’i away from Haifa. As soon as they were gone, Ben-Gurion ordered Arab properties seized. Which was the reason Ruth was on the balcony of Hotel Zion that bright sunny day.
Moshe’s presence in the Haganah sock factory signified favor in the eyes of Ben-Gurion. With Haifa and Acre abandoned, Ben-Gurion sent him in with a clipboard to inventory the war booty.7 Since he was the one in charge, Moshe must have presided over the dispossession of the Hawa family holdings in the city, the villas and cars and bank accounts, as well as the furniture that hadn’t yet been plundered.
Moshe asked no questions and showed no hesitation in carrying out his orders; Ruth was made of different stuff. The following day she left Hotel Zion and accompanied him in combing through the properties. In one house they found an impressive Islamic book collection, there was also a cold omelet on the stove: The family must have left suddenly, with little forewarning. Later, in a factory, she pinched half a sack of sugar. Appalled at herself, that night she couldn’t sleep a wink. Had the bag been filled with iron it wouldn’t have weighed her down more.
Forty-five kilometers away, Nazareth fell to Israeli forces in July. The fact the Arabs remained in their city was the consequence of one man’s conscience: the Israeli officer, an honorable Jewish-Canadian named Ben Dunkelman, who had refused orders to expel the population. Because there were always less scrupulous men, Nazareth was filled with refugees from evacuated villages in the region. Driven out by gunpoint, the villagers of Ma’alul, Nahalal’s neighbors across the valley, arrived in Nazareth with their meager belongings packed on the back of donkeys.
Raymonda’s convent school, protected under the sun yellow flag of the Vatican and the tricolor of France, became a makeshift home for hundreds of refugees. The girls in the convent lived in the dreadful uncertainty of not knowing what was happening to their families. Fingering their beads, the nuns carried out their prayers, canticles, and litanies, intoning Ave Maria and Gratia Plena. There was a smell of incense. The shadows cast by the burning candles. The rivulets from leaking pipes pooling in spots. The slow ticking of watches. The drone of planes overhead. Girls sobbing.
The sisters of the convent, assuming both Habib and Christmas were dead, transferred Raymonda over to the orphan’s section. One of the nuns stroked her hair in a gesture of reassurance. Raymonda went to bed each night with the prayer, Please God, make the fighting stop. The tender mercies of God having resurrected Christmas once, she prayed for her and her father to appear again, arm in arm. At night she woke up clutching for a doll; panting, her heart raced because of elaborate nightmares of shrieking mobs armed with the legs of her aunt’s oak dining table hitting Christmas over and over until there was nothing left of her, not even a body.