The Dayan-asty
“Dayan is wearing Jerusalem like a new pair of shoes.”
—Halim Isber Barakat, Days of Dust
The closest Ruth got to the fighting was when an Iraqi Russian-supplied Tupolev bombed a neighborhood close to Nahalal, wounding twenty-one and killing a distant member of the Dayan clan. Ezer phoned her to assure her that Zorik’s son Uzi, serving in the paratroopers, was safe and sound in the freshly conquered Sinai.
In a matter of a few short weeks Dayan catapulted from being a washed-up retired general gluing together Iron Age pottery shards to being featured on the front cover of the June 16 edition of Time with the banner headline “How Israel Won The War.” An English tabloid voted him the fifth sexiest man on earth, and fashion models in London, Paris, and Tokyo took to sporting eye-patches.
Most people associated him as the leader of the daring Jewish underdogs, a modern David that knocked out the villain in as few days as God conjured up the cosmos. The iconic picture of Moshe marching to the liberated Western Wall in the Old City reinforced the message that the Jewish people were finally in control of their own past, present, and future. The listless years of retirement made him receptive to myth-mongering, and standing in the narrow passageway between a wall built by King Herod, the Wailing Wall, and the Maghrebi Muslim quarter, the oldest in the city—Arafat had spent four years there as a child—he surveyed the scene. Some of his soldiers wept openly just by touching the legendary stones that once belonged to the Second Temple. Moshe waxed poetic on Jewish history: “How many times did the Jewish people have such a victory? Not since King David and Alexander Yannai.” From between the Herodian stones he plucked a flower for his mistress Rachel.
Assi, a soldier in the paratroopers, sat out the war in the north close to the Lebanese border, playing chess. Udi, a six-year veteran of the Navy Frogs, landed in the stockade because he commandeered an army jeep and roamed around the freshly conquered Golan Heights. Lieutenant Yael, the most Alpha among the lot, was a correspondent in the Negev and Sinai deserts, the main theaters of war. At one point she found herself in a ruined enemy outpost, and despite the fact that Daddy was far off, she sensed his ubiquitous presence, more powerful than ever. “His face was with me, his strong, stable gaze, his calm, composed confidence, brain ticking away like a radar searching for options in a circular movement.”
Yael shared a helicopter ride with General Sharon, then a husky, manly, handsome warrior she addressed as Arik instead of “sir” because she had grown up across the street from him. Staring down at the West Bank, Sharon turned and exclaimed gleefully with a little boy’s wide-eyed enthusiasm and his “diabolically brilliant military brain: This is all ours now.” In a different chopper ride over the conquered Sinai, with her father and Uncle Ezer this time, she looked down at corpses floating in the Suez Canal. “It must be unbearable,” she heard her father say, “to be part of a defeated army.”
Not even on the film set of Zorba the Greek did Yael feel so alive, so exhilarated, so transformed, as if she belonged to a nation of righteous heroes.
She loved the thrill of danger and the “wonderful sense of comradeship.” During the fighting, she wished it “would never end. I never again wanted to return to my old life and face the glamor of a writer’s world.”29
And it was an easy mood to fall into when you consider that a mere twenty-two years had passed since the Nazis had killed most of European Jewry: now she was in a helicopter hovering over the mythic Judea and Samaria, the land of David and Solomon and the Maccabees, and her father was the new Joshua blowing his horn and causing the walls—the barbed wire—to tumble that had separated Jews from their ancient past.
Ruth shared the euphoria of victory, though for different reasons. Her hometown of Jerusalem was unified again, and everyone was celebrating, Arabs and Jews. On her first trip back to the city, the same day Moshe opened up Mandelbaum Gate, she noticed the way Arabs greeted Jews with the tomatoes they wanted to sell, or the way they hurried off to Jaffa Street in West Jerusalem to find a job or buy a radio at half the Jordanian price. Peddlers offered to sell her “Friendship” pencils made in Communist China. It was like a miracle. The ethnic hatred that had torn the city apart in 1947 and ’48 was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t notice a single act of violence, barely even a harsh word.
She obviously wasn’t looking hard enough.
Unshackled and overjoyed at living again in a land dimly similar to what she knew in her youth, Ruth was soon tooling around the Palestinian lands freely in her Saab coupe. In Bethlehem she wandered around the streets alone looking for friends from before 1948.
Another of her first trips was to Gaza to reestablish contact with the six brothers she met in 1956. While there, she visited a school in a refugee camp to deliver toys donated by Abie Nathan, the owner of the California Café. Nathan had always felt guilty about the role he played in driving peasants from the Hawa family village in 1948. The teacher, originally from Jaffa and missing a leg due to the fighting in 1948, had festooned a banner from the cracked wall of the classroom: “We Shall Return!”