In the Bosom of My Country
“All I ask
Is to remain in the bosom of my country
As soil,
Grass,
A flower.”
—Fadwa Toqan
Daoud sat at home in Nablus because the Amman-based Ottoman Bank he had been heading up in Nablus shut its doors due to the conquest. He stayed on a nominal salary, without a bank to run.
He was also slack-jawed at the way his wife, with five children to raise, thrived in the relative freedom of a society liberated from the Jordanian secret service, and where the Shin Bet had not yet built up its own repressive apparatus. Raymonda breathed new life into the Arab Women’s Union. She also got her reading salon up and running again, and was pouring through fiction, politics, history, whatever she got her hands on. With friends from the salon, Raymonda trooped over to Zion Cinema, in West Jerusalem, to see Assi wearing leotards in A Walk with Love and Death. The movie went over much better than Dust because not only did the general’s son Assi look like Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, not only had he preferred playing chess to fighting during the war, but in a sharp poke in his father’s one good eye he used Uri Avnery’s girlie magazine as a platform to call for a total withdrawal of every square inch of territory his father had just conquered. Knowing his father too well, Assi assumed that behind his estranged father’s nationalist grandstanding, greed and theft were surely motivating his actions in the Palestinian lands.
The Tawil home was also the main meeting place in Nablus for nationalist writers, journalists, and intellectuals wishing to discuss openly the guerrilla attacks carried out by Arafat and his men coming across the Jordan River.
No one knew much about the mysterious rebel able to bedevil the mighty IDF. Arafat was short with cocoa brown eyes and big, sweeping, sometimes comic gestures. Unless he had to put on a disguise to escape a deadly trap, he never smoked and was a teetotaling workaholic. A nervous man, always fidgeting with things—a cheap plastic pen, a tennis ball, a pair of jacks—for relaxation, he watched reruns of Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes on a television set up in an underground bunker. As for his lifestyle, the man with the olive-green field uniform and Smith & Wesson .38 in his holster owned next to nothing. His emerging myth was of a man wandering with his intrepid band of guerrillas through deserts and cold mountains in search of his lost homeland.
Months after Karameh, Arafat’s Fedayeen ambushed an Israeli patrol, with deadly effectiveness. Dayan sent into Nablus large numbers of troops, beefed up security and checkpoints, and a manhunt proceeded. A squadron of tanks moved into the city and fired randomly into houses and businesses to intimidate the civilian population. Shooting continued unabated, through the night.
Raymonda was in the kitchen pulling chicken and rice leftovers from the fridge when the explosions began. Startled, she dropped the glass dish on the floor, and little Suha scrambled under the table.
This was just a taste of what would happen, once rumors came to Moshe’s attention that Arafat, the mastermind of the guerrilla war, was holed up somewhere in the warrens of the medieval Kasbah. The next day generalissimo Dayan, now viewing Arafat as his nemesis, arrived to direct the manhunt. Going well beyond the old Commando 101 method, Dayan threatened to raze the entire city of Nablus “to the ground” if the citizens of the city didn’t hand him over. He applied pressure by slapping on a three-day, twenty-four-hour curfew. Tanks took up position in Raymonda’s neighborhood; most evenings two or three were parked under their windows, their cannons pointing out into the valley. After thirty-six hours of curfew, the Tawil family of seven was living off water and boxes of crackers. On the final day loudspeakers, festooned to jeeps, bellowed out the following in broken Arabic:
Attention people of Nablus, dignitaries, and his Excellency Mayor Hamdi Kenaan. Orders from General Dayan. Whoever among you offers aid or comfort, food or shelter, to a terrorist will have his house destroyed; his family will be homeless, and he will be arrested and deported across the Jordan. The General has declared that whoever does not abide with these rules will pay the consequences.
Dayan told the mayor: “I will destroy this town stone by stone.” True to his word, his soldiers shot up the place, for a second day in a row. The shelling and gunfire came so close to the Tawil home that Raymonda was sure a shell from a tank was going to blast a hole in a wall and bring the roof down on their heads.
Arafat scrambled off to a new hideout, and for a growing number of Palestinians the hope for liberation survived.
As a woman who still dreamed of going home to Acre, what struck a chord with Raymonda, as she followed his various feats and learned more about “Fatah,” was his proclaimed vision for a secular, democratic state encompassing Israel and the occupied territories. What she read into the slogan was that Arabs and Jews alike would live as equals. Through Arafat would she be able to fulfill the “mission” she received as a little girl, had betrayed by leaving to Jordan, but was now able to pursue as a sort of feminist redemption? The Fatah revolution could breathe a fresh, progressive spirit into the patriarchal and tribal power structure that governed Palestinian society. Raymonda took note that some of Arafat’s best commandos were women.
With her mind and heart, Raymonda sided with Arafat, even if some of the local Fatah men, not nearly as progressive as she had hoped, bristled at her willingness to invite Israelis, and men to boot, into her home. This was more than taboo; she was trampling on Arab male honor. With her iconoclastic ways, Raymonda found herself straddling an invisible line. Fresh rumors of her being a spy cropped up, and yet another threatening letter ended up under the door. Written with crude, ungrammatical Arabic she could barely decipher, the letter blasted her for “collaboration” with the enemy. The letter was signed “Fatah.”
Fatah’s next “operation” was a bomb in the Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem that killed two students. The heads of a Nablus terror cell sent in Miriam Shakhshir, a teenager from an elite Nablus family, the sort of girl who in the past would have been a docile bride for a local oligarch, to carry out the bombing. They must have chosen her because the seventeen-year-old had a head of thick blond hair, large turquoise eyes, and the light complexion of an Ashkenazi from Tel Aviv.
Miriam was arrested, sentenced to life in prison (plus thirty years), and, more importantly for Raymonda, emerged as a symbol among Palestinians for a new sort of woman. Ambivalent about the act itself—killing innocent people was hard to square with the nuns’ and Father Michel’s message of “love thy enemy”—Miriam’s spirit put the fighting spirit back into the Arab Women’s Union, not least because as a female militant she was a rebel against an Arab tradition which reserved fighting, especially for matters of honor, for men.
The Israeli response was brutal: some thirty women were arrested, most of them teenagers or women in their early twenties. The military authorities, obviously fearing Miriam copycats, arrested the head of the union. Dayan issued orders to blow up the homes of the women under arrest. Twenty homes were slated for sappers and bulldozers.
One building marked for destruction was a villa in the center of town belonging to a notable family. The mansion was even grander than Habib’s in Acre with thirty rooms, exquisite mother-of-pearl furnishings, mosaics, and room after room furnished with Louis XIV tables and chairs.
Before the demolition squad reached the villa, Raymonda leaped back into action by secretly planning a sit-down strike in front of the municipal town hall. And to ensure the protesters wouldn’t be clubbed and dispersed, she began phoning Israeli and international journalists and camera teams. She called Uri Avnery, and he promised to be there. He brought with him Amos Kenan, an erstwhile Irgun fighter. Another leftist who accompanied Avnery to the demonstration was Abie Nathan, the owner of California Café and the former ’48 pilot. Abie then invited one of his most regular lunchtime guests, Ruth, to join them. She wanted to, but in the end demurred because she knew what kind of reaction it would elicit from her husband.