Umm al-Mu’in
Whenever Ruth drove through Nablus, on her peripatetic travels for Maskit in the West Bank, she dropped by Raymonda’s, where more often than not she found Daoud scowling at a household full of hungry and thirsty longhaired activists, foreign reporters, and mothers carrying pictures of sons, and sometimes daughters, who had been swallowed up into Israeli prisons.
Feminists, too, found safe refuge in the Tawil home. In patriarchal Nablus, there was no more avid reader of Ms. magazine or of the ideas of Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin, its two cofounders, than Raymonda. The way she brandished Steinem’s call for revolution against oppressive systems of race and sex—against dividing “human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends”—attracted the attention of Palestinian and Israeli feminists, new mouths to feed for Daoud and fresh material for scandal in Nablus.
At one point, in a jammed Nablus public hall, and with a purple face, he shrieked threats of divorce if she didn’t stop her dangerous activism. That she drove this otherwise stolid, even-keeled banker to blow his top in public was yet another cause for his brooding resentment mixed with awe. To Ruth, who developed a deep fondness for Daoud, he confided that he put up with her “dangerous theatrics” because she was his life’s “greatest fortune.”
Daoud tried to seduce his beautiful wife into a more bourgeois lifestyle by taking her on regular vacations to Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East because of its grand shopping avenues, its cafes and beaches.
It was during these holidays that Raymonda became acquainted with some of the revolutionaries she hoped would liberate Palestine while freeing Palestinians from hidebound traditions. She met Bassam Abu Sharif, a young journalist and recent graduate of the American University living in Beirut, who was a member of the Marxist group PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). While unaware of Sharif’s involvement in hijacking airliners, she knew he was a militant, sworn to the armed struggle. Raymonda gave him his first lesson on Israeli leftists—that working with them was the best way to battle the Israeli army. She was thinking about her “mission.” If Israelis were allies, you obviously weren’t going to kick them out of the country. Jews and Palestinians had to live together.
Back home foreign journalists were so impressed with Raymonda’s shrewd political analysis, and news she brought back from Beirut, that they hired her to provide copy for news organizations, including Agence France Presse. The Israeli left-wing journal New Outlook was another of her venues.37 At gatherings of the New Outlook crowd, she met people such as the German-Jewish Marxist Herbert Marcuse, author of Eros and Civilization. She brought her children in on a conversation of “polymorphous sexuality.”
Far more potentially perilous, with Uri Avnery and his band of journalists Raymonda was driving around the West Bank in a car with Israeli plates, brandishing a tape recorder she nicknamed her “Kalashnikov,” and hunting for stories of atrocities. She realized she was treading on thin ice with the IDF; her disguises included multiple wigs she picked up at Anton’s, an expensive wig shop in Beirut, and an assortment of designer Italian sunglasses to match.
The changes she saw all around her reminded Raymonda of the Galilee in the 1950s: seizure of land, mass settlement, and breaking up Palestinian society into cantons. Reaching out to Israelis and internationals became an imperative. In her journalism, she wrote about Dayan’s policy of seducing Palestinians with used washing machines and construction jobs on Jewish settlements around Jerusalem.
Her budding career in journalism and feminist firebrand earned her the nom de guerre Al-Muminun, Mother of Believers, the name of the Prophet’s wife.