The Women’s Strike
In 1966 Yael was finishing up Dust, her latest novel about an immigrant town situated in what she portrays as barren wilderness and built by young, starry-eyed pioneers under the thrall of Zionist “dreams that are thousands of years old.”
Though she never made it back to the shores of the Ogowe River—Schweitzer died in 1965—Ruth followed Clara’s clandestine work for the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.24 She also kept up her frenetic schedule with Maskit, working mainly with Arab women and flying back and forth to Europe and America for fashion shows. On one longer trip to Asia on behalf of Maskit, she flew into Saigon on a last-ditch effort to breathe life into her marriage. Moshe’s book on the 1956 war was so good that an Israeli newspaper commissioned him to trudge off to the jungles to report on the American war in Vietnam. One of the iconic images from the trip comes from Time. The spread it did describes Moshe as “knee-deep in mud” and “pushing doggedly ahead into Vietcong territory . . . moving like a worm in hot ashes.”
Without telling him, Ruth packed a small gun, the kind that the saloon owners carry in the Westerns, threw her things in a bag, and headed out to find him.
Saigon was in the middle of war. Already in the airport Ruth saw only soldiers, and she could hear the sound of bombs from the incessant Vietcong attacks. The driver who took her to a run-down hotel on the outskirts of town, where the electricity had been cut off by a recent guerrilla attack, told her to keep the window of the car open in case someone tossed in a grenade. Just pick it up, he instructed her, and lob it back. “Be quickie, quickie, or we deadie, deadie!” The same driver told her she wouldn’t be able to visit the villages where much of the best handicraft came from because they were under Vietcong control. The rebels would kill him if he drove her there, and take her hostage.
From the hotel, Ruth sent a message to the American top man General Westmoreland’s office asking them to pass on the news to Moshe that she was in town. Within a couple hours, Moshe turned up in an armored jeep.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to see you,” she replied. “Why else would I be here? Are you happy?”
“A little. Well, yes.” And he was. The two had the last romantic evening of their marriage. They went to a Chinese restaurant, where they laughed and drank, and then at the club they danced the fox trot, all the while bombs were exploding outside, the rattle of gunfire rose above the wailing sounds of horns and trumpets of the orchestra.
The next day he returned to the jungle, and Ruth spent two days in Saigon listening to the tragic tales of Vietnamese prostitutes in the bars, serving the American boys.
In early 1967, Raymonda was reading Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit about a crippling, profound ennui. She had a lot of time on her hands for contraband books because the king had imposed a strict curfew on Nablus, with orders to open fire on anyone moving around at night without permission. She had to mothball her literary salon.
Brute suppression was the palace’s response to a popular protest movement against the government for its weak-kneed response to an Israeli raid on a West Bank village. Operating from Jordanian refugee camps, Arafat’s guerrillas snuck into Israeli territory and killed three soldiers with a bomb. The Jordanian government, fearful of Israeli reprisals, offered to use bloodhounds to hunt down the men responsible. The king sent a neighborly letter of condolence to the Israeli government.
Chief of Staff Rabin ignored Jordanian entreaties and unleashed six hundred soldiers, backed by tanks, across the Jordanian border. They targeted the village of Samua. While the villagers had had nothing to do with Fatah, meting out justice was not the purpose of “Operation Shredder.” The scores of civilians killed or wounded and the homes blown up by sappers delivered the message that Israel was invincible.
As soon as word reached Nablus, people poured into the streets chanting, “Yesterday it was Samua, tomorrow it could be Jenin or Nablus.” The monarchy’s loyal herdsmen, Bedouin nomads resentful of better-educated and wealthier Palestinians, beat demonstrators with rifle butts, flayed them with their camel whips and fired live rounds into crowds. Hundreds of demonstrators ended up in El Jafar, the dreaded desert concentration camp. The regime slapped a strict curfew on everyone else.
On one occasion Raymonda was at home in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, and she looked up to find a soldier outside the window. He kept the rifle raised and drew a bead on her chest. She let out a scream, and the soldier scurried off.
With her neighbor Sahar Khalifeh, a friend and novelist from the Women’s Union, Raymonda sped into action.25 In one of her contraband feminist books she read about the women in ancient Greece who had called a sex strike to put an end to war. In a variation on the theme, and with politically active men sitting in prison or otherwise muzzled, she and partners in the Women’s Union sent word to hundreds of women, and the following day they marched to the governor’s mansion with their demands. To the soldiers, too dumbfounded to open fire, the women chanted at the top of their lungs, “Arms for self-defense! An end to the brutality of the army! An end to the curfew! Release the imprisoned intellectuals and political leaders!”
A few days later the government suspended the curfew, while keeping the regime’s repressive apparatus in place. The king, fearful of overthrow by restless Palestinians who made up half the population of his kingdom, learned one fatal lesson: next time the Israelis start shooting, he had to respond with at least a symbolic show of resistance.