Militants for Peace
The combination of Abu Nidal, the Israeli security services, and the rogue Jewish terrorists who blew up Major Khalaf in his Cadillac, should have made Raymonda more cautious, but she still behaved as if she were somehow immune from physical attack. The Virgin Mary protected her, she told Ruth. She surely needed divine help when there were as many as thirty activists and journalists, Arabs and Jews, crammed into her house.
No longer trying to constrain Raymonda within the bounds of propriety and common sense, Daoud offered to rent an office space for her. With his refined indignation and tenderness, he complained that since her house arrest their salon had turned into a political club or a campsite. “I love you, my dear, and I’ll love you even more if you open your own office and let us live in peace and quiet.”
She didn’t need much convincing, and Raymonda quickly found the perfect spot a hundred meters from Damascus Gate, on Salah al-Din Street, named after the great Muslim warrior who liberated the city from the Crusaders.
The timing was right, too. With Begin brandishing his Nobel Prize, and Dayan feted as warrior-turned-peacemaker, she needed to expose the way the Israeli government was redoubling its colonizing ventures in the West Bank. But to launch such an ambitious project she had to return to Beirut and consult with Arafat.
She left for Amman, and from there flew to Beirut. From the airport, a company of Force 17 men zigzagged her through the maze of gritty streets in West Beirut until they pulled up in front of the nerve center of the Palestinian resistance. Minutes later she had her second encounter with the legend.
She spoke, and he nodded along. The gist of her proposal was this: Over the years, the Israelis had built up an integrated information strategy with a highly professional press office, regular reports sent to foreign governments, and an army of tour guides and “experts” leading journalists and VIPs around the conquered territories. All the Palestinians had to offer in response were scattered reports, for the most part poorly written, laced with hyperbole, or so slapdash and cavalier with facts, sprinkled with outright fabrication, that foreign journalists, overworked and less interested in fact-checking than drinking cold Maccabee beer at the American Colony Hotel bar, preferred to rely on the Israeli government press offices.
A Palestinian press office, if done right, Raymonda said, not only could reach Israelis and people in the West; it could influence the politicians. We could counteract one of the Israeli government’s most valuable assets.
Arafat squeezed a tennis ball as she spoke. She repeated to him what she had been saying for years. The Palestinians’ secret weapon was that the Israelis are a free people. “Do you know what that means? They’d rather get a suntan on the beach than fight us. Some Israelis can be our allies.” She gave this man who knew next to nothing about real-life Israelis a crash course. Yes, Israel has its fanatics. Yes, it has Begin and Sharon. But it also has communists and disciples of Bakunin, its Uris and Amoses, it has its Abies who agonized endlessly over the morality of their state, its crazy painters and poets and prophets. She mentioned Ruth and Assi.
“Ruth Dayan?” Behind Arafat’s shades, his glowing eyeballs were expanding.
“Yes, Ruth Dayan.”
Sipping his black tea, he stared into space for a moment. “You are right. We need militants for peace, like Mrs. Dayan.”
Raymonda’s press office was in full operation. For the first time, people in Israel and abroad got credible reporting from the West Bank. A nation arose from virtual non-existence by having a presence within pages of Le Monde, the New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and the Times of London.