The Emperor
Yael settled into a quiet life with an older military man; soon enough, she was pregnant and spent the coming months writing a book about her father’s victory, a victory made inevitable, she fervently believed, because defeat would have meant extermination by Arabs who refused to accept the Jewish people’s historical right to Eretz Yisrael. In the series of newspaper articles she wrote in the world press, she continued in her role as her father’s unofficial press agent.
The mantle of international stardom started shifting over to Assi, who was now on a film set in Europe working on John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death, about two young lovers adrift in medieval Europe during the Hundred Years War. The film set out to deliver the peacenik message of “make love, not war.”
Huston invited Ruth to his castle in Ireland, and from there, she headed to Paris, because the American director Jules Dassin, son of a Russian-Jewish barber and victim of the anti-communist purges in Hollywood, had chosen Assi to be his lead actor, alongside Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s wife, for the film Promise at Dawn.33
Yael was also in Paris because her husband the ex-general was appointed Israel’s military attaché in Paris. An eccentric viscount, considering it a matter of prestige to be seen with Ruth, and especially the general’s glamorous daughter, gave Ruth a lion cub to pass on to Moshe. What else do you give a man with an empire under his heels? The cub’s name was Gamine, French for “naughty child.” It would later be renamed Ruthie.
The conquered Palestinians, seeing the general with his lioness he called Ruthie in the passenger seat of his jeep, nicknamed Dayan the “Emperor.” Never much of an office man, Moshe spent most of his time meeting with his generals and Palestinian notables and farmers, as well as warning the population against giving aid to a nettlesome guerrilla movement called Fatah and its leader, Yasser Arafat.
Attacks continued. Yael, explaining the postwar situation to the world, described in a newspaper article how the “war ended and the terrorists took over.” “Daily life,” she wrote from Paris in 1968, was characterized by someone “blown up by a mine,” “a tractor is shot at, a school bus, two dead, three dead, two civilians, five soldiers, three mines, mortar fire on kibbutzim.”
In spring 1968, Dayan finally drew up plans to hunt down and kill Arafat after a mine planted by guerrillas blew up a school bus. On the eve of the raid, Moshe heard rumors of Israelite treasures in a cave, and dashed off for a private dig. And then the cave collapsed, burying him up to his eye-patch. What he missed while encased in a body cast was the first full-fledged battle with Arafat’s Fatah movement.
Israeli commandos backed up by tanks crossed the Jordanian border, but instead of being able to act with impunity, as they were used to, King Hussein ordered his soldiers to fight, side by side, with Arafat’s Fedayeen. The ensuing Battle of “Karameh”—karameh is Arabic for “dignity”—cost dozens of Arafat’s fighters along with a number of IDF soldiers; one of Ruth’s relatives got shot through the neck. But when Israeli units retreated back over the Jordan River, Arafat was still alive to proclaim victory. His kaffiyeh, dark wrap-around shades, handlebar mustache, and open shirt underneath crumpled military fatigues turned him into the romantic face of Palestinian resistance. Time plastered his face on the front cover of the magazine, with the headline: “The Fedayeen Leader.”
What made Arafat even more of a legend were rumors that cropped up, shortly after the battle, that he was in the West Bank.
Nursed back to health by faithful Ruth, the accident left Dayan with a twitch in his remaining eye, a speech impediment, a partly lame hand, and even more of an addiction to painkillers. Looking a bit like Captain Ahab, with a bandaged hand instead of a wooden leg, and surely rankled that the hitherto obscure Arafat had also made it to the cover of Time, Dayan set to work. The IDF quickly rounded up a thousand Fatah activists and nearly cornered their cunning leader.
Disguised as a normal family man with wife and child, Arafat sauntered up to an Israeli checkpoint hand in hand with his supposed wife, and slipped away. He was now forming cells by traveling around the West Bank under different aliases: Abu Ammar (which comes from the Arabic verb “to build”), Abu Mohammed, the Doctor, Dr. Husseini, Abdul Rauf, and half a dozen more. Meanwhile, he drove a white VW Bug around the West Bank, with bombs hidden under a baby carriage.