The Quest
Dayan left the Ministry of Defense in 1975, never to return. Over cheeseburgers, at California Café, Raymonda joined Abie, Amos, and Uri in uncorking champagne for the occasion. Amos, his wavy hair starting halfway back on his head, shared stories of war crimes, his and Moshe’s. One of the last things he said before he nodded off in his chair, drunk, was that he and the general deserved a firing squad. “But Dayan has to go first.”
The new top man in the Ministry of Defense was Shimon Peres, at the time deemed a civilian security hawk little better than Dayan, and in some ways worse because he lacked Dayan’s virtue of candor. Of the two, poetry-loving Dayan was by far the more natural fighter—Peres never said, as Moshe did, “I know nothing more exciting or dramatic than war.” Dayan’s military ethos wasn’t a product of arrogance; unlike Peres, a francophone who never bothered to learn Arabic, Dayan liked the culture, language, and mentality of the people regrettably living atop ancient Israelite pottery shards. He felt in his bones the tragic nature of the Arab-Jewish competition over the same territory, in ways that Peres didn’t, or at least not yet.
Peres picked up the pace of settlement expansion in the West Bank and beefed up censorship laws. The relative press freedom in the West Bank, Dayan’s legacy, covered novels and glossy celebrity magazines, but anything smacking of support for Arafat or evidence of the ha-Nakba ran afoul of laws 87 and 97 that barred anything deemed to endanger “public order.” What really got the system baring its teeth were public calls for civil disobedience, such as strikes; and when the newspaper Joe Nasser had worked for dared call for one, Peres’s response, citing undisclosed “PLO terrorist threats,” was a total closure of the West Bank, a hermetic clampdown with half the IDF patrolling the streets to make sure it was enforced. The Palestinians of Nablus hadn’t experienced such heavy-handed repression since King Hussein sent in his Bedouin tribesmen.
For Raymonda, it brought back memories of reading Nausea during the Jordanian curfew. A welcome loophole to this closure was that Israelis could still move around freely. Uri and most of his friends had beards, so they just had to slap on yarmulkes for soldiers to wave them past checkpoints. Avnery showed up at Raymonda’s with some friends who had hacked electronics in the army. From them, she learned how to transmit voice recordings by connecting up her “Kalashnikov” to the telephone line. The beautiful thing about the hack, or so they assumed, was that it was impossible to trace. Shin Bet phone taps were useless. The trick enabled Raymonda to transmit taped interviews on Peres’s siege to the San Francisco radio station she had visited the previous year. The station broadcast the interview, a report duly and vigorously denied by the Israeli government. Once other news agencies picked up the story, Peres found himself under diplomatic pressure to end the clampdown.
Raymonda redoubled her efforts at engaging with the Israeli left, and the stream of activists, Palestinian and Israeli, converging at her house became a torrent. The upswing in the number of cars with yellow plates, parked in front of the house, attracted the attention of the “rejectionists” who had picked up the pace of murder. A fellow Palestinian brave enough to sit down with Israelis, Aziz Shehadeh, who as a young lawyer in Jaffa had worked with Raymonda’s father Habib, attracted unwelcome attention. Meeting with Israelis was a sort of acknowledgment that Israel was an established fact. Palestinians should seek to establish their separate state. In a radio broadcast from Damascus, militants lambasted him as a “traitor, a despicable collaborator. . . . You shall pay for your treason. We shall silence you forever.” Abu Nidal even tried to assassinate Arafat and his main political advisor, Abu Mazen, for being too “conciliatory” with their talk of an “olive branch” replacing the gun.
Daoud responded to a series of threatening anonymous phone calls by wanting to shut the front door to Israelis—he didn’t want to become a widower. The five children sided with their father. Like their mother, they had been raised by nuns, but they didn’t have the example of Jewish friends, survivors of the Holocaust, to balance out the rage of seeing friends arrested, or in Diana’s case, being dragged on the ground by her hair. Suha watched on as soldiers looped belts around the necks of demonstrating students at her Rosary Sisters School and herded them into military trucks, like wayward cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse. Her political heroes were Jesus, Che, and Arafat.53
“Mama,” Suha said sharply when an Israeli leftist showed up one day, wearing an army uniform, “I don’t think we should welcome soldiers into our house.” Her voice rose several octaves into a shout.
Raymonda did her best to reason with her, telling her that she shouldn’t assume all Israelis thought alike, and reminded Suha that Uri and Abie had also been soldiers. What choice did Israelis have, anyway? They had to serve.
“Yes, mama, but when they’re in uniform they can’t disobey orders, can they? They have to kill.” They were in the kitchen at the time, and the eldest son Gabi (Jubran) chimed in and reminded Raymonda that during the war in Europe, the French branded as a traitor anyone who received Nazis.
“Gabi, Israelis might be our enemies but never say they are Nazis. They aren’t.”
Raymonda decided to take her chances again with the Shin Bet, by returning to Beirut to get an explicit endorsement for engaging the Israeli left. Badly scarred Bassam Abu Sharif set up a meeting with Abu Mazen. The armed drivers picked Raymonda up at her hotel and drove her back to the Fakhani district, heavily fortified because of the civil war raging at the time.
The loud chatter in the basement room, the nerve center of Arafat’s movement, stopped the minute she entered, dressed in a knee-length silk dress and her customary high heels. Her hair flowed freely down past her shoulders in the Bridget Bardot fashion. She recognized few of the faces now riveted on her; Arafat wasn’t in the room.
Gentlemanly, Abu Mazen stood up to welcome her. In introducing her to his men in the basement, he mentioned her engagement with the Israeli left. At once, there were objections. “Which Israelis?”
Raymonda remained standing, and without a hint of trepidation, she mentioned Uri Avnery, Abie Nathan, and Ruth.
“But they are Zionists,” a large man in military dress interjected.
“What are you talking about,” Raymonda faced the man and said. “I AM A ZIONIST!” She herself was shocked at what she had just said, but she continued. “Do you even know what Zionism is? The word comes from Zion—it is about a longing to return to the Holy Land. There isn’t a day that passes that I don’t think about Acre and Haifa. Just because Jews feel an attachment to what they call Zion doesn’t mean that a man such as Uri Avnery wants to steal our land, or oppress us. Why can’t two peoples love the same land?” Her quest, she told them, was to find a way to do so.
Of all the men in the room, Abu Mazen understood her the best. He was a refugee from the Galilee. A short rather colorless man, he was nodding along, cautiously but affirmatively, as she made her case. It made no sense, Raymonda continued, to shun all contact with the other side, as if all Israeli Jews were like Dayan or Sharon. Just look at universities in Europe and the United States. They’re rebelling against their elites; young Israelis are turning against theirs, and we should support this. “We all know that eventually Jews and Arabs will have to find a way of living together.”
Abu Mazen followed up her speech by calling her a “very courageous woman” because she was “willing to risk her life to meet with Israelis.” It was a ringing endorsement from the man who would go on to become chief architect of the two-state solution with Israel.