Moshe’s War
Ruth was always on the prowl for immigrants with skills she could employ in Maskit’s growing operation. She heard about George Kashi, a businessman from Baghdad, who had owned a large weaving factory and exported to England cloth for use in Harris tweeds. Arab nationalists, quoting the Arabic edition of Mein Kampf, had expelled him and the rest of the ancient Jewish community. Ruth looked high and low for Kashi, tenaciously tracking him down in the most unlikely of places: George, his badly crippled wife, and their twenty-two-year-old son Albert, were living in the dilapidated hut she and Moshe had occupied in the defunct kibbutz of Shimron. This former factory owner and friend to people in high places in Baghdad was a defeated man who drank too much.
She perked up the demoralized man’s mood with the idea of reestablishing the factory. The only hitch was he couldn’t do it on his own. He wasn’t a healthy man. To get the factory off the ground, he needed his son’s help. Albert was a master in the weaving business and all the machinery that went along with it. But Albert dreamed of joining the air force, and was doing everything he could to be accepted into the service. He had already done his army service in a tank unit, and George was terrified at the idea of his son going back into harm’s way. The idea of reestablishing the family business was the perfect tool to keep him close to home. If he just gave up the ambition of becoming a pilot.
Ruth had been around the military long enough not to be taken in by the legend of its superiority over civilian life. “Albert,” she began, “your father needs your help. Just put this talk of the air force to the side for a year or so. Let’s get the factory up and running first.” He agreed. The family moved out of the hut and into a real apartment in the development town of Migdal Haemek, the Israeli town built on the ruins of the Arab village of Al-Mujdal.
In late October 1956, with war with Egypt imminent, Albert, the master weaver, was called up for duty in the tank unit. Just before he left for the army base Albert met Ruth at the Café California to talk. His father, he explained, was in the hospital, for an operation. Albert pleaded with her not to breathe a word of his army duty, for fear it might cause his father to have a heart attack. “But if I’m not back within four days you’ll have to tell him, because he’ll have to decide what new work to put in the loom.” Albert had come up with an ingenious new fabric, and there was just enough of the cloth in the looms for a few days of work.
That night Ruth steered a US Army jeep in the night, without headlights, to a blackened military airport to pick up Yael, on the final commercial flight before the Israeli-French-English sneak attack began. Seventeen-year-old Yael lived in England working for the Jewish Observer and living with H. G. Wells’s daughter-in-law.
Once again, Ruth was clueless about her husband’s machinations. Her information came from the state-controlled radio. Society ladies gave their gold rings and necklaces to support the war effort. Volunteers dug trenches in public parks; there were blackouts and drills, and people lined up around blocks to give blood.
Moshe executed his plans with the knowledge that his IDF was an unconquerable juggernaut. The slogan “We are invincible” was no hollow boast. What he envisioned was a victory as decisive as Prussia’s humiliation of France in 1870.
The Franco-Anglo-Israeli attack began on the warm, clear morning of October 29. The IDF under his command was in fact “invincible.” Moshe raced into action. His jeep was hit, and bullets punctured the outer skin of his plane, but nothing slowed down his hopscotching from front to front. He behaved like the Apaches who believed certain war paint protected them from the US Army’s Winchesters. Brother-in-law Ezer, the commander of a major air base, coordinated air attacks.
Moshe poetically dubbed his war Operation Kadesh after the spot in the northern Sinai, where legend says the rankled Moses smacked the boulder with his magical rod that brought forth water. The more secular French and British designation for the campaign was “Operation Musketeer.” Whatever it was called, it was a masterstroke of total surprise and effectiveness. After dust had settled, Israel’s flag flew over vast swaths of Egyptian territory, including a narrow sliver of land known as the Gaza Strip.
To celebrate victory, Dayan took the family to Sarabit al-Khadim, a mountaintop, the site of the Egyptian sanctuary of the XII Dynasty, dedicated to the Goddess Hathor. Moshe commandeered his army helicopters to loot antiquities, including three half-ton 3,500-year-old stelae covered with hieroglyphs. A statue of a bird ended up in the family garden on Joab Street.
In the wake of a brilliant campaign, Ruth’s life seemed more glamorous than ever. She was the wife of the conquering hero, deferred to everywhere she went. Even among the newly conquered Arabs in Gaza.
Israeli newspapers almost never mentioned the two hundred thousand Palestinian refugees in Gaza. Politicians avoided the subject, as well. But Ruth knew they were there. The day after returning to Tel Aviv from the family outing to Sinai, she hopped into a US surplus WWII-era army jeep and, with her secretary named Esther, dashed off to Gaza, across the old fortified Israeli-Egyptian border, maneuvering through blasted out tanks.
She drove directly to the mayor’s office in Gaza City and, after introducing herself as Mrs. Dayan, asked if he could help her find jewelry makers whose work she thought she could use in Maskit, along with supplies of amber. Gaza had no amber and no jewelry industry, he informed her, just rugs and carpets. The mayor took Ruth to a factory, owned by six brothers, with over a thousand medieval looms and baths filled with deep indigo blue dyes. She was treated with rounds of black sweetened coffee.
Back home in Tel Aviv, she was soon in touch again with the six brothers, asking that they begin working together. They were easy to convince. Within the brief period of Israeli occupation—by March 1957, President Eisenhower forced the Israelis to give Gaza back to the Egyptians—Ruth put some new life in the Gazans’ ancient craft by sending modern designs, better dyes, and new materials to the brothers’ factory.