Mission Renewed
Abie Nathan became a pacifist during the 1948 war out of a sense of shame: from the cockpit window of a Dakota plane, he dropped bombs on villages where members of Raymonda’s family lived and owned vast properties. Two days after the bombings he took a truck to see the damage. Wandering through the ruins, he saw burned bodies scattered everywhere, acts of “destruction, wreckage and death” caused by him and those who sent him. Now, twenty years later, no Israeli was more critical of his country’s occupation of Palestine. To liberate Israelis from themselves, with support from the Jesuits and John Lennon, he bought and equipped a ship he turned into the pirate station “Peace Radio.”
Ruth was one of his first guests. The leaking barge was steered just beyond Israeli territorial waters and from there beamed out a message of peace to Beirut, Cairo, Amman, and to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Young Israelis, reeling from the war debacle, wanted angry anti-war protest songs—“21st Century Schizoid Man,” “The Grave,” and “People, Let’s Stop the War.”
It was probably the first time the Arab masses heard “Rocky Raccoon,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” When they weren’t dancing to The Beatles and The Doors, the Tawil children were regular contributors to Nathan’s call-in talk ham radio shows. The show Ma La’asot (What to do?) was the only uncensored forum for Jews and Arabs to debate the past and present, and dream about a better future.
In early 1974 Ruth began traveling the world on behalf of Maskit and the World Craft Council, a UNESCO-backed organization.48 The long missives she wrote to her children describe a state of mind, shifting between loneliness and excitement, and sometimes a sardonic humor such as her depiction of a visit to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, the self-proclaimed “Might of the Trinity” and “direct-descendent-of-King-Solomon-and-the-Queen-of-Sheba.” Not long afterward, he was toppled in a military coup, executed, and buried beneath a latrine in the Imperial Palace.
Whenever she returned to Israel, Ruth always visited the West Bank to check in on her Palestinian “Maskiteers” making rugs and embroidery. The orphans in Bethlehem couldn’t wait to see her pull up in her Saab. It meant more toys. Her and Raymonda’s friendship grew through regular conversations over tea in Nablus, Ramallah, or East Jerusalem. The two women had a lot to talk about—women’s issues, children, jobs, various permits from the military authorities, and occasionally politics: Raymonda would bring up a list of atrocities she claimed were committed by the IDF.
Raymonda accused Moshe of complicity in the disappearance of the young American-educated journalist, Joe Nasser. The two women had yet another of their standard quarrels in which Raymonda hurled her hurt and vitriol against Dayan, by way of his ex-wife, who stamped her foot exclaiming, I AM NOT MOSHE DAYAN.
Nasser, from a prominent Christian family, was the editor of the Fatah-aligned newspaper Al Fajr (“The Dawn”). In a series of articles, he insinuated that Dayan was the ultimate dark force behind the assassination of Fatah leaders in Beirut. He got himself into much deeper trouble by pointing an accusing finger at a prominent Hebron sheik for helping General Dayan get the land for the Jewish settlement Kiryat Arba. A biting caricature in Al Fajr showed the sheik with a dusty shoe on his turban, a bruising insult.49
After Nasser vanished, rumors made the rounds that the sheik’s goons had abducted him.
It was then that Father Michel De Maria came to Raymonda’s mind. Twenty years had passed since her first meeting with him, where he had told her the importance of her life’s mission. Now, with a picture of Joe in her purse, she set off back to the village of Rama.
The village church jolted her back in time. She felt the same sensation she had as a child, that sense of holiness in the small chapel illuminated by candles that lit up the altar and made the icons glow. The old man, buckled over, his noble face shot through with wrinkles, grabbed her hands with a firm grip and prevented her from dropping to her knees in a sign of respect.
Raymonda didn’t need to tell him about the death of her parents, about her life in Jordan and the West Bank; he seemed to know everything. He caught her off guard when he asked about her “activities”—what was she doing with her life? He didn’t have to use the word “mission.” She knew what he was asking. The old priest followed her account of her activism, her disguises, her “Kalashnikov” with a mildly disapproving expression, as if to say No, Raymonda, your mission is elsewhere. “Raymonda, what is poisoning this land is not a lack of news; it is a lack of love.”
Nothing had changed. The message was the same.
Without betraying how much his words gave her a tight pain in the chest, and without mentioning Nasser, Raymonda pulled the photograph of Joe from her purse and handed it to Father Michel. “I’d like to know if this man is alive.” He took the picture and disappeared into a room on the second floor of the stone building. Returning half an hour later, he told her that Nasser was still alive. He was being held in a cave in the mountains outside of Hebron.
Raymonda returned to Father Michel the following week hoping for more details, but someone had in the meantime discussed the matter with him, and he was clearly nervous. He only agreed to see her after long pleading. “Raymonda, you need to be careful,” he said.
“Father, just tell me how we can find my friend.”
He turned his back and faced the wall. He lifted his chin, a quick gesture, to free his neck from his clerical collar. “They moved him. He’s at the Moskobiya,” the former Russian monastery-turned-Israeli prison in Jerusalem.
Proof of Father Michel’s vision came the next day in the form of a threatening telephone call from the police chief at the Moskobiya warning her that by getting involved in the investigation into Nasser’s disappearance, she was “endangering the security of Israel,” a “very dangerous” mistake. VERY DANGEROUS, he repeated with a raised voice to make sure it sank in. The final word Raymonda heard from Father Michel about Nasser was that he no longer “saw” him. Nasser had been “hit on the head.” His body was never found.
Raymonda’s name was now being widely mentioned in the Israeli press as a nettlesome troublemaker. This was when Colonel Yigal Carmon, a Shin Bet agent, began tracking her movements. Her activism, and the uncomfortable facts she kept dredging up, kept the well-mannered, industrious Carmon busy.
In spring 1974, the French-Jewish writer Marek Halter and his wife Clare rang Raymonda up with an intriguing suggestion they believed was more disruptive to the Israeli occupation than hijackers. As a child, Marek had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and, before becoming a novelist in Paris, he studied pantomime under Marcel Marceau. Clare ran a leftist Parisian literary review. The two convinced Raymonda to jump on a plane and head for the United States, which for Palestinian activists seemed like one continent-sized lobby of support for Israel. They wanted her to stand before audiences, Jewish and non-Jewish, and present the Palestinian case; and, with some luck, she might manage to loosen the stranglehold that Israeli propaganda had on the American mind.50
Daoud hit the roof. He was resigned to the life surrounded by scandal and rumors—how many times had he heard that his young wife was a CIA agent? But going on her own to America went too far. No! No! No! He would NEVER allow it. In the end, of course, he acquiesced—and he went with her.
In the air over New York Harbor in May, Raymonda felt the familiar sense of anticipation visitors have the first time they crane their necks to see the Statue of Liberty. It was a stirring experience to see the big, brawny police with silver badges in JFK airport—and to feel no fear of arrest.
She and Daoud ended up staying in a hotel on a derelict street in Manhattan. Choked with yellow smog most of the time, those were the days of New York City’s collapse. It barely registered: she felt like flying through avenues filled with muggers and perverts and panhandling drunks—but no soldiers. She was free.
She gave a dozen speeches from the East Coast to the West. Inevitably, someone in the audience would ask her to renounce terrorism. She skirted the issue: no Palestinian nationalist could afford to come out against the “operations,” even if in private she knew violence almost always boomeranged. In a related line of questions, she was asked what she thought about Arafat; pro-Israeli Americans considered him a scruffy desperado, no different from Fidel Castro and other Enemies of Freedom. IDF soldiers were the noble cowboys with Winchesters; Palestinians little more than bloodthirsty savages.
She wasn’t a member of the Fatah, she told audiences, but where she agreed with Arafat was his call for a “secular, democratic state for Muslims, Christians, and Jews.” She would add: “Don’t believe what you hear about us, that we are anti-Semitic killers. We are like the Jews. We Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world.”
And for this she got smeared with every name in the book: anti-Semite, Nazi, the pretty face of a bloodthirsty cabal. One woman with bluish hair and kidney-red lipstick rose from her chair and was a lot more hyperbolic even than the Israeli at the New Outlook conference: “You come here with your smooth voice and your refined manner, pretending to be humane—but we know who you are! Your people are terrorists, hijackers, murderers! I HATE YOU.”
Instead of dishing out hatred in return, Raymonda turned to her, asked for her name—it was Debby. “Debby,” she began with a soft voice, speaking into a microphone, “I was raised by nuns from Europe who taught me to love the Jewish girls in my school in Israel. The nuns’ love and serenity, their great silence before birth and death, their devotion to humanity and to its great prophets, to the suffering Mother and Child on the Via Dolorosa: this remains for me a source of power and hope, a mystical hope one can almost say, which is accessible only to those who have lost everything.”
Most American Jews were more willing to set aside shopworn prejudices and listen. On the West Coast, in San Francisco, an anarchist anti-war radio station invited her to talk about a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, and her dream of a return to her childhood home of Acre.
The next day, a Friday evening, she visited a synagogue in Los Angeles, with a pipe organ and a pervasive atmosphere of affluence and security. She soaked up the spirit of the place and was mesmerized by the singing and the liturgy and a prayer from the Baal Shem Tov, a prayer that took her back to the nuns in Haifa, and to the primacy of love: “When senseless hatred reigns on earth, and men hide their faces from one another, then heaven is forced to hide its face; but when love comes to rule the earth and men reveal their faces to one another, then the splendor of God will be revealed.”
Back on the East Coast, in Washington, DC, on May 15, she was met with a very different atmosphere. She was in a cab when she first heard a radio report of the slaughter of Israeli schoolchildren in Ma’alot, in northern Israel. Fedayeen fighters had taken over a school. Dayan ordered his soldiers to storm the school, and in the ensuing firefight two dozen children died, mostly by Palestinian fire. This put Raymonda physically in danger; members of the Jewish Defense League threatened to kill her “in reprisal for Ma’alot.” And in the first speech she gave after the killing, at a Quaker building in Philadelphia, she didn’t explicitly condemn the terrorists. Instead, she quoted Sartre’s bon mot, that terrorism is a “terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others,” which predictably spawned catcalls from the audience, “Terrorists . . . maniacs.” Midway through the evening the head of the center walked onstage with his arms up. “We just got a call from the police. They have received a warning that if Raymonda Tawil appears at the public meeting tonight, she will be executed.” The Quakers, famous pacifists, canceled the event.