“Maskiteers”
Ruth was wrenchingly carving out her independence. She had little choice, being married to a man nearing the pinnacle of the military pyramid. In 1953 Ben-Gurion appointed him chief of staff. With his headquarters in Tel Aviv, Ruth’s parents put up the money for him to buy a house in a new neighborhood for top officers named “Zahala.” The street was fittingly named after Joab, the commander of King David’s army. Moshe put a 500-year-old Turkish cannon in the family’s front yard. Ironically, the cannon pointed to the house across the street, which belonged to his young protégé Ariel Sharon.
Ruth insisted on buying her own furniture, while the three children loved playing hide and seek in the backyard filled with Roman sarcophagi, millennia-old gravestones, and Byzantine church pillars Moshe spirited away at night from archeological sites. The country’s archeological treasures became their playground.
Ruth and Moshe made a strange couple, and with their three children, they were already the most colorful, and most eccentric, dynasty in Israel. During the day, the generalissimo was building a crack fighting force. He was home every night, for the first time in years, and reading to little Assi lullabies by Nathan Altermann:
This land. Trodden, just like this, by a wandering sadness,
Trailing in her thunders, calling her: ‘Where art thou?’
Speak to her, tell her of things that are other,
Tell her of fields that are learning to smile.
The dutiful father who tucked little Assi into bed at night was one of the most brilliant, uncompromising military chiefs of staff in the history of the business.16 Dayan didn’t care for army protocol or for the pressed trousers of the parade ground. He showed up to meetings with dusty sleeves rolled up to his elbows; his boots were caked with mud—even his eye-patch was dirty. To one soldier raising his arm in a salute, Dayan tossed him a grapefruit: “Catch!”17
The biggest military threat he faced was the Fedayeen guerrillas who “bore in their hearts the memory of the defeat of the War of Independence and hoped for a second round,” as Moshe Dayan lectured his soldiers. “Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers,” he told mourners at a funeral after a fatal Fedayeen attack. For years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homesteads the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we cannot plant a tree and build a home.”18
In March 1953, a group of Fedayeen crossed over the Jordanian frontier and ambushed an Israeli Egged bus in the northern Negev. The guerrillas shot the driver before turning their guns on the passengers, one by one. All eleven, murdered.
For these guerillas, former farmers surviving off UN rations, they had nothing to lose. For them, losing their lands was a fate worse than death. Fighting was the only way to restore their shattered honor. These “men of sacrifice” or “suicide fighters,” so called, were the first foot soldiers of a guerrilla army Arafat, Raymonda’s future son-in-law, would eventually lead.
To put an end to the killing, the IDF formed a special commando strike force headed by Ariel “Arik” Sharon. The Unit 101 was a clandestine club of fighters trained in the art of revenge and what in a spirit of extreme generosity might be called deterrence. The 101 was less of a military unit than an ad hoc strike force. In a grandfatherly nod of approval, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion dubbed the unit a “hothouse for heroes,” and lauded Dayan’s “almost insane daring balanced by profound tactical and strategic judgment.”
On a typical Friday Moshe and Ruth, along with Reumah and dashing Ezer Weizman and a couple of friends, headed over to a Tel Aviv movie house, and from there it was on to Greek food at the Acropolis and the dance floor at the Dan Hotel. Her preferred spot was Café Kasit, the popular venue for free-spirited actors, poets, swingers, and a colorful menagerie of other avant-garde types. There was Nathan Alterman and his girlfriend, in front of bottles of whiskey. Or, the drink-sodden poet Amos Kenan once was about to punch Moshe in the nose when Ezer wrestled him to the ground. Ruth took up smoking while in the company of Israel’s Beatniks.
Several of the people Ruth met in Tel Aviv cafes would later become Raymonda’s friends, too. Whenever Ruth wanted to meet the leftist journalist Uri Avnery or Amos Kenan, it was in a parked car, outside of the former 1948 fighter pilot Abie Nathan’s hip California Café, next to the Cameri, the best theater in the country. She felt the need to arrange such clandestine tête-à-têtes because Avnery, Kenan, and Nathan were notorious leftists, despised by the Zionist establishment. But they were also the only ones who understood Ruth, her dreams, her efforts at living out her old socialist dreams. They understood she needed to escape a lonely marriage with a relentlessly driven and very damaged man, with shrapnel still lodged in his skull.
In 1953, Golda Meir, then minister of labor, called Ruth into her office. She had heard about all her good work with immigrants and asked her to head up a department for women’s work. Ruth agreed at once. A perfect name was given for the new venture: Maskit, which means “picture” from the Psalms. Her coworkers were the “Maskiteers.”
Over the coming months, she became the general, leading her troops of Maskiteers, scouring the countryside for craftspeople barely out of the Middle Ages, giving them training, and connecting them with the best avant-garde designers. Ruth was offering these immigrants a future.
One group of craftspeople Ruth and her Maskiteers discovered during their hunt for crafts was a clan of a hundred families from the deserts of Libya that had, up to then, lived in their own man-made caves of Tripolitania, dug twenty-five feet into the sand, as a defense against wild animals and desert marauders.
Perhaps their best find was in an abandoned Arab village near Lydda, settled by an ancient Yemenite-Jewish tribe of master silversmiths from Wadi Bayhan, on the ancient Perfume Road on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. In Arabia, they had been the King of Yemen’s personal makers of daggers and swords. In Israel, they lived in squalid tent camps, living off handouts from the Jewish Agency. Even their adobe houses in Yemen were better than their dingy army-surplus tents they shared with chickens and goats. What’s more, they had lost what was essential to their lives: their dignity.
Ruth promised to help them develop their craft and market what they made. Some of their jewelry and embroidery ended up in high-end shops on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Maskit came to be one of the largest employers in the country, by far the largest run by a woman. But in Moshe’s blinkered view, Ruth remained the weak, dependent woman who was too often on the verge of tears, a caricature that rubbed off all too easily onto fourteen-year-old Yael. Plainspoken and churlish, Yael had an aristocratic grace, unconquerable true grit, and was as strong as a stallion; she was clearly the leader of the Dayan brood and the repository of Moshe’s nationalist dreams. Swelling with pride at being the daughter of a hero, she felt vastly superior to her peers—and to most grown-ups, too.
Everyone tolerated what Ben-Gurion dubbed Yael’s “flamboyance” until rumors cropped up that she was spending too much time with Uri Avnery.
One day during one of Moshe’s frequent trips abroad an officer from military intelligence called and revealed to Ruth that Yael might have passed on top military secrets to Avnery, secrets on a Commando 101 raid which ended up in Avnery’s political tabloid HaOlam HaZeh.19 The journal was a national sensation because along with the investigative reports attacking Israel’s most cherished national myths and illusions, it featured bare-breasted beauties on the back cover.
Ruth naturally defended Yael by informing the man on the telephone that Moshe’s daughter, a girl raised on the present prime minister’s lap—Ruth’s “uncle,” Moshe Sharett who had succeeded Ben-Gurion in 1953—would never betray the State of Israel. Never! She slammed down the receiver.
Had Yael, in fact, done such a thing? Instead of confronting Yael directly, Ruth had Ezer do it. Yael was defiant: no, she hadn’t passed on secrets. Keep your suspicions to yourselves! she thought. Moshe was also suspicious, and the minute he returned from his trip he sent two goons to jump Avnery and break his hands. As for his daughter, he returned home, strode into her room, gave her a warm kiss, and then slapped her so hard she nearly flew across the room, followed by a second flat-handed whack. “I love you very much, but don’t take advantage of it.”20
In ways only psychoanalysis could unravel, these hard and swift slaps drew Yael closer to her father, and further away from Ruth. “No blames,” recalls Yael, “no psychology, no question marks as to how we ever reached this gap or rift, and above all, no moralizing. Two slaps . . . and a renewed facade of happiness and unity which supplied a good alibi for both of us,” Yael continued. “We both wanted, with different degrees of legitimacy, not to be slaves to the confining dictates of family routine.”
Against the background of this father-daughter alliance, Ruth pressed on with her work. Maskit’s first public exhibit, at the main Tel Aviv museum in 1954, was a resounding success.