St. Luke’s Hospital
Raymonda’s friendship with the Israelis made her a better authority on the dark side of Israeli military history than Ruth could ever be. Long conversations with Avnery taught her about the immensity of the Palestinian disaster. How through the 1950s Blue-Box donations paid for a fleet of tractors and tons of dynamite to destroy Arab villages, over four hundred in all. She read back issues of HaOlam HaZeh and came to view Avnery as more than just a muckraking journalist; he was a gendarmerie or an entire battalion. Some people in power didn’t take kindly to such criticism. Over the years of its existence, the magazine’s editorial offices and printing facilities were mysteriously bombed several times.
From Amos Kenan, she learned details about the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin—because the avant-garde poet had taken part in it. He was also there for Dayan’s conquest of Ramle and Lod, and described how he slammed the butt of his Sten gun on the doors to houses, “Yalla! Get out! Go to King Abdullah!” Soldiers herded the inhabitants into fields, ringed with barbed wire.
Kenan spoke to Raymonda the way a penitent would a priest. At first he had a hard time looking at her, because she reminded him of what he and his pals had done at Deir Yassin and Ramle: “I am worse than any name you can throw my way,” he confessed during their first conversation at her home, “worse that a filthy beast, a monster, an assassin, a killer. For twenty years now, my hands have been sticky from your people’s blood.”35
By 1970, the Tawil family home was a constant buzz of activity, and long suffering Daoud’s patience was wearing thin, because of the stream of people in the house crowding into their home. Their living room was one of the few places in the West Bank where they could discuss the occupation—and other taboo topics, such as feminism. General Givoli dropped by every week or so. The open atmosphere there helped him understand what the Palestinians wanted and needed.
A woman from the family whose villa Dayan had ordered dynamited visited Raymonda. She could find no one else to talk to about a terrible crime. At her job as a social worker, at an Israeli prison in Kalkilya, she worked with a teenaged girl, a victim of incest and in prison for infanticide. The girl was hysterical. She pleaded with her Israeli captors to keep her in prison; if they released her, the family would kill her to preserve its “honor.” The social worker was shivering, as she spoke with Raymonda. “I begged the prison authorities, too, but they said they had to follow the rules.”
Raymonda found herself in the paradoxical position of asking the Israelis to keep a Palestinian girl in prison. She talked to General Givoli, but even he couldn’t prevent prison officials from setting her free. The woman’s family murdered her shortly after her release.
Dayan’s top general in Nablus, Givoli, at Raymonda’s encouragement, began sitting for hours with the five girls in prison, on terrorism charges, trying to find out what motivated them. Why had they turned to laying bombs? What had they hoped to accomplish? It didn’t take long for him to realize just how similar their idealism was to his own when he was a youth, a generation earlier, fighting against the British. He began to worry about the health of these bright girls. They would waste away with nothing to do.
Givoli thought about Ruth and Maskit. Perhaps his boss’s wife could teach the girls a craft? He knew Ruth would use every opportunity to hop in her Saab and return to the landscape of her youth.
Just as he suspected, Ruth jumped at the idea. Her plan was to deliver toys on behalf of Abie Nathan to wounded children—collateral damage during an IDF operation—at St. Luke’s hospital in Nablus, before continuing to the prison.
The minute Ruth entered the front door of the hospital with General Givoli at her side, a huddle of police officers hovered around her like drones around the queen bee. She tried to brush them off, but couldn’t. There she was, impossible to miss, wearing a cotton-candy-colored dress and holding an armload of toys, in the company of the general, surrounded by armed men.
Palestinians were whispering and pointing, craning their necks to see her. Raymonda, there in the hospital that afternoon, watched the way Ruth moved through the ward. She had read about her in New Face in the Mirror. In real life she made quite a different impression, stronger, quicker, an empathetic twinkle in her eyes.
The minute Ruth got close enough for her to smell her jasmine perfume, Raymonda, in her high heels, taller than most of the soldiers and speaking in the Hebrew she had learned from her childhood friends in Haifa, let her have a piece of her mind. Since hearing radio reports of the massacres in the 1950s, Moshe Dayan had been for her an evil Cyclops. She struck back at his wife. “How dare you come in here pretending to care for children! Do you know what your husband is doing to us?”
Ruth admired the Amazon’s spunk but waived off the charges. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she began, holding a Barbie in her hand. “But you should know”—she was shaking the doll in Raymonda’s direction, the glass eyes blinking with each movement of her arm—“I married a farmer and NOT a general. Don’t blame me for all this . . . this horror.” Raymonda watched as tears formed in Ruth’s eyes. Her jaws were clenched.
She handed Ruth a tissue but stuck to her guns. “Well, this farmer boy of yours is making our lives hell. Your husband is giving orders to shoot children, and you bring toys! Get out of Palestine!”
“For God’s sake, I am NOT Moshe Dayan.” The police must have thought Raymonda was going to drive her nails into Ruth. They stood between the two, their thick arms folded like bouncers outside a nightclub.
Raymonda didn’t have to say another word. The scene in the ward was straight out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: bandaged up children moved her more than anything Raymonda could have said. At first, she stood dumbstruck. “We should have stayed on the damned moshav,” she finally muttered to herself, shaking her head.
Ignoring her bodyguards, she turned to the families in the same ward and asked them, in broken Arabic, if there was anything she could do besides handing out toys. Ruth spent so much time listening to the women that she had no time to see the imprisoned girls.
She headed back to Tel Aviv and, by the time she got back home, Moshe was already in his pajamas watching his favorite Egyptian soap opera. He was obsessed with these shows. At first, he barely said a word to her. Ruth headed into the kitchen to prepare dinner for him. She reemerged carrying an omelet and set it down on the table—his single eye watched her every move. “Moshe,” she said, “I’m off to the theater in Jaffa. There’s a play by some Palestinians . . .”
Moshe had been telling the world that Palestine was “finished” and here was Ruth talking about “Palestinians.” He snapped, “WHAT IN HELL WERE YOU DOING SEEING THOSE TERRORISTS IN NABLUS!”
Moshe touched his nose with his trigger finger, and she turned to face him. “Listen to me,” and now he aimed the finger at her, as he launched into his tirade, “You should know I put them in prison where they belong.” His eye twitched. “You must stop undermining my authority!” He was shaking his hands, as he might around a throat. “I forbid you to continue. DO YOU HEAR ME?” Even in his pajamas, Moshe had all the qualities of a Biblical leader: in turns visionary and despotic, wise and foolhardy, charismatic and cynical, generous and miserly.
But his powers had long ago ceased to intimidate Ruth. Though she hadn’t even gone to the prison to visit the girls, the verbal assault over what seemed like a trifle was what stunned her. For three years, she had been meeting Arabs all over the West Bank and Gaza. Why should this be different? He had always encouraged her efforts at helping Palestinians. So what was so awful about handing out toys to children his men had wounded, or setting up a training course for girls in prison?
His sneering, barking demands were too much; blood rising to a boil, she couldn’t hold her feelings back. She went into the kitchen to get the general a glass of scotch. Coming out with the drink, she said, as cool as a cucumber, “Moshe, I want a divorce.”
Moshe was taken aback. “Do you mean what you’re saying? Are you sure?” Yes, she assured him.
“You must be kidding.” The man who took on the entire Arab world had for years been afraid to end a marriage he had betrayed a thousand times.
“No, Moshe, I’ve never been more serious.” She had thought about divorce often but because she still loved him, and because Yael expected her to keep up the façade, she endured. The daughter expected her mother to put up with what Yael would call his “avarice, indiscriminate womanizing, loss of idealism and megalomania.” Besides, what woman walks out on the hero at the height of his fame?
“I’m finished with you, Moshe.” With those words, she left for the play.
During her absence, Moshe phoned up Yael, his chief ally in the family, in Paris. The next phone call was to his lawyer and asked him to draw up the paperwork.
Ruth left the house with a suitcase of clothes, some books, and an eggshell with the entire Book of Ruth inscribed on it by a former convict of the Russian gulag. She would eventually get half the value of the house, but in the meantime she moved in with Assi in an apartment in the old city of Jaffa, overlooking the Mediterranean. Moshe owned the apartment and charged market rates. To him.
The divorce was finalized in December 1971, and Dayan quickly married his mistress Rachel. Scandal-mongering journalists were after Ruth for a scoop, and she finally unbuttoned her soul. “It just wasn’t worth it anymore,” she told a Time reporter. “It was like living in chains. If I were still his wife, there would be six guards here. Now I can drive my car to the Gaza Strip or wherever I want.”
Ruth cut off all contact with Moshe, though she would never stop loving him. One night she had a dream in which his antiquities collection came to life like Isaiah’s fields of bones. Stele, goddesses, and heaps of shards, swirling in the air as if in a whirlwind, formed a city with turreted walls and towers—and no people. It looked like a depopulated Jerusalem, and was called the City of Moshe.