L’pozez Akol (Blow Up Everything)
“I will tell you a story
A story that lived in the dreams of people
A story that comes out of the world of tents . . .
It is a story of people who were misled
Who were thrown in the mazes of years
But they defied and stood
Disrobed and united
And went to light, from the tents
The revolution of return
in the world of darkness.”
—Kamal Nasser
In spring 1973, following Kamal Nasser’s funeral, Ruth sat in the front row, as Raymonda told a roomful of Israelis, at a New Outlook conference in Tel Aviv, that so long as people in the West Bank and Gaza lived under the jackboots of a military oppression, and security forces continued arresting, expelling, or otherwise silencing the best and brightest Palestinian writers, Tel Aviv’s freewheeling ways couldn’t last. Raymonda, all smiles, surveyed the audience. “One day,” she said, “we’ll come out of the sky with rockets and guns, we’ll fall from the clouds like bombs.”
“Like bombs,” she repeated. She was wearing a long, tight-fitting satin dress with a slit up the side; her hair dyed raven black. From the stage, Raymonda hammed it up, showing the swell of her breast. “We will destroy Tel Aviv! If you don’t listen to us, let’s just blow up everything. L’pozez akol.”
Her words flowed uncontrolled, uncontrollable, like lava, spilling, spewing, bubbling out.
Ruth applauded. She knew Raymonda was telling Israelis a bitter truth; a woman a few rows back, however, bawled out, “Get out of Israel, you terrorist, and never come back.” Matti Peled, one of the more humane generals serving in the West Bank, went up to the stage, took the microphone, and said about Raymonda: “She is coming to us with beautiful eyes but then all of a sudden bullets and missiles are firing out from her rosy lips. We Israelis can only ignore her at our own peril.” Ruth applauded again.
Raymonda more or less repeated her warning in early 1973 on CBS television when she told the Israeli journalist, Amos Elon, that to snap Israelis out of the inebriation of the Six Day War, they had to be “hit over the head.”
With Olympian delusion, Dayan persisted in his multi-prong strategy of eliminating militants, buying off local Palestinians with jobs while settling the territories he had conquered with Jews. His cocksureness reached such a height that in early 1973, he gave secret instructions to Sharon to chase away three thousand Bedouin families from a part of the Sinai Moshe wanted for Israeli settlement.42 He and his next-door neighbor Arik cooked up an ambitious program to introduce two million settlers into the West Bank. Who could stop him? The Arabs? A joke going around has a general saying to Dayan. A fellow general pipes up, “How about invading another Arab country?” “Not a bad idea,” Dayan slaps his thigh in merriment. “But what would we do in the afternoon?”
With Ruth no longer around to act as the emotional bridge, the relationship between the general and his children grew more and more distant; months would often go by without his children having any contact with him. Even Yael found it hard to reconnect with her father. Now that she had her own children, what bothered her most was his cavalier indifference to his family. “Father . . . would rather not have had children.”43 Now left to his own devices, without Ruth, he fell victim to “shallow, expensive personal grooming.” In his new look he sported cashmere sweaters and Dunhill suits, a favorite of Agent 007 in the James Bond movies. Moshe, the first born of redemption, was also the first of a now common Israeli type: the millionaire ex-general.
The egocentric father put Ruth’s role as mother in a fresh light. Though Yael still couldn’t resist taking a jab at Ruth’s “martyr complex,” she was coming to realize how Ruth, “poor and too generous,” was the only person who kept the family together. “Mother flooded us with gifts from the nothing she had, and Father charged us for everything.”
In October 1973, Ruth was with Yael’s former boyfriend Michael Cacoyannis exploring the Sinai for his film The Story of Jacob and Joseph. It was a lackluster production, but for Ruth the filming brought her back to the happy days of Zorba the Greek, drinking ouzo with Anthony Quinn on the Island of Crete. Maskit’s artisans did all the costumes and jewelry for the movie.
Ruth was back in Jaffa when she got a phone call from someone from the Ministry of Defense. Egyptian and Syrian forces had opened hostilities. Israel was under attack!
The Arab onslaught on Yom Kippur left the IDF flatfooted. Once the Egyptians broke through heavily fortified Israeli lines, Dayan cracked up and feared that the “Third Temple”—the State of Israel—was in mortal danger. Golda wasn’t quite so panicked, though she asked for pills from a doctor friend “to kill myself so I won’t fall into the hands of the Arabs.”44
The Soviets and Americans stepped in to stop the fighting, but for the Israelis something had snapped. It was the national id—Raymonda heard the sound all the way in Nablus. Moshe’s patina of superman rubbed off. One Israeli government official, referring to his failures, said, “In another army, this man should have gone into another room, found a pistol, and we should have heard a shot.”
Yael blamed the “treacherous” Arabs for the debacle, while Assi let the world know what he thought about his father, and the army, with the cult film he directed, Halfon Hill Doesn’t Answer. The Israeli equivalent to M*A*S*H, it was the first satire on Israel’s sacred cow, the IDF, and is widely considered the best Israeli comedy ever made. The film features a conman, a fat cook, and a horny commander of a base in the Sinai.45 Assi’s other 1973 film, Invitation to Murder, is about a serial killer on the loose in Tel Aviv.
Ruth refused to come out in public against her ex. But she did bring a bottle of cognac to support an IDF reserve officer who pitched his tent outside Golda’s office on a vigil to get Dayan to resign for mistakes that had cost three thousand Israeli lives.46
Dayan continued his fight against Palestinian nationalists as a way for him and Golda to win back some of their tarnished credibility. “There will be no safe haven for you any longer,” Golda was now threatening Fatah leaders. “Our long hands, extended in vengeance, will find you and kill you.”
Raymonda was testing Israeli patience with her war dispatches that ended up in the international press, in particular her claim that in the West Bank during the fighting, IDF soldiers had abandoned their weapons and fled helter-skelter back to Israel across the old Green Line.47