Mandelbaum Gate
Days following the end of the 1956 war, word reached Raymonda that her cousin, the daughter of Christmas’s sister, died in a playground in front of a church in Gaza, killed by a stray IDF bullet. Far more chilling rumors circulated among the girls at the convent about a massacre in the village of Kafr Qasim, inside Israeli territory, near the border with the Jordanian West Bank. The victims were like Raymonda: though citizens, they were considered a danger to state security.
The first time Raymonda thought of crossing through Mandelbaum Gate on the one-way journey to King Hussein’s Trans-Jordan, irrevocably surrendering her right to return home, was just before the holiday break in December 1956. Christmas got a pass and paid a visit to Jerusalem. They stood on the roof of the Pontifical Notre Dame Hotel, looking out toward the Old City and at the seam of barbed wire that was cutting her off from her brothers. Christmas talked to Raymonda about the natural freedom she had as a woman growing up in New York—“and then I came to this country, still in the Middle Ages.” Her words were reinforced by the barbed wire down below, as if the shackles she was expected to wear as an Arab woman, and the geopolitical scars below, were of the same order of magnitude, driven by the same male will for power and domination.
Christmas’s face darkened: it was wrenching to be so close to her sons George and Yussuf and yet hermetically cut off. She offered a prayer, asking the Virgin to tear down the walls and blast open Mandelbaum Gate.
Raymonda, too, looking down at the slithering seam dividing Jerusalem, felt the ghastly injustice of separating people. The Jewish friends she had made in Haifa were not responsible, nor were the adults protesting against the government, nor the average Israelis she met on the streets of Haifa or Acre every day. Female soldiers chewing gum and talking about bathing suits hadn’t committed the crime. But someone had.
State Security strictly forbade Arabs to have contact with anyone on the other side. The Jordanians were just as draconian. But since she lived in Israel, the leaders whose names she knew from the radio—Dayan, Sharon, and their ilk—came to personify the chilling logic behind separation. In her inner court of law, she tried and convicted Sharon and Dayan for innumerable crimes, including severing her ties to her Jewish friends.
She would also come to blame these leaders a month later at the Interior Ministry office in Haifa, when she witnessed a soldier, spittle from chewing tobacco running into the black stubble on his chin, savagely kick an Arab man on the ground, over and over, in his side.
The main reason she chose to leave to Jordan was Habib. She was his only daughter and, with George and Yussuf for so many years on the other side of the border, the only child he felt he knew. This penniless aristocrat, the prince who lived in a rented room and hustled as an unlicensed lawyer, carried with him the pride of his heritage, along with old-world snobbery and class prejudices. Raymonda, tall and beautiful, attracted whistles from men, Arabs and Jews. He had no doubt that soon she would yield to someone’s amorous attention. He just wanted to make sure it wasn’t someone beneath him. A commoner. If the Hawa family was to claw its way back from catastrophic loss and penury, she had to find the right match. Impeccably dressed—he had enough money to do that, at least—his hair gray, walking with a walking stick because of the bum leg, he asked her to join her brothers.
“What we have here,” he exclaimed, referring to the Arabs who remained in Israel, “is not your society.” The families he considered socially acceptable, and still rich, were in East Jerusalem, Amman, Beirut, or somewhere else. “I will not permit you to marry a villager!” He was like the legendary Kingfisher whose kingdom, the family’s aristocratic honor and wealth, could be healed by Raymonda crossing over to the other side. She had to leave her mother and her friends behind, and join George and Yussuf in Amman.
By agreeing to be an instrument in Hawa family honor, would she be abandoning her mother? Was her father trying to separate her, once again, from Christmas and her influence? What about the “mission” Father Michel De Maria spoke about? How could she fight against the hatred poisoning the Holy Land by leaving it?
She vacillated. Her “mission” was clearly to stay. She contemplated asking Father Michel but was afraid he would counsel her to defy her father, something she couldn’t do. By crossing the border she would never again wander the valleys of the Galilee with her mother, never again would she see her Jewish friends in Haifa. She might as well have stepped into a rocket ship with no way back to earth. The Jewish mayor of Acre, a friend of her mother’s, urged her to stay. “Raymonda, leaving your imma, your mamma, is wrong. You mustn’t leave.”
Habib’s influence was stronger.
In March 1957, Christmas drove her to Mandelbaum Gate. The Israeli officer who led her across the border permitted them one last tearful hug, and he took her to his Jordanian colleague on the other side. It was a hot spring day when she left the Jordanian border station, shaped like an oversized doghouse, and stepped into the heat. Her brother George was standing a few meters away. She hadn’t seen him since she was eight years old: he was tall and had a dashing pencil mustache, along with Habib’s noble pose, with a straightened back and fixed, direct gaze. She paused for a moment before rushing into his arms. It was as if she were at the edge of a cliff, bending over to see the bottom and seeing nothing. Her heart was racing, unsure whether she should continue. Was the mayor right? Would she ever see her mother again? But it was too late. The Israeli border authorities held her passport, and they wouldn’t give it back, even if she begged and implored.
George too was crying because, craning his head, he was unable to see Christmas, who had already been ordered away from the border. As he tried to catch sight of her, the Jordanian soldier pointed to a woman in the distance. “You see that shadow? That is your mother.”