Ms.
Across from Raymonda’s desk, a large square window looked out onto the honking traffic of Salah al-Din Street. To clear her mind and plot her moves, nearly every day she ambled three blocks up to the American Colony Hotel, a well-known meeting place for spies from various intelligence services. Conversations were less likely to be bugged in the crypt-like bar downstairs than in her office.
She ordered drinks and handed out copies of the latest bulletin or translations in English, French, and Hebrew from the press office’s newspaper Al Awda (The Return). Raymonda was willing to talk to Israelis, meet with them, protest together, and even risk her life, for the sake of peace. But her dream of a return to Acre was still alive.
With Arafat’s blessing, the press office brought fresh vigor to a Palestinian East Jerusalem, showing strains from the comprehensive Israeli system of pass laws, permits, zoning, and multiple and sundry acts of bureaucratic malfeasance and chicanery. Gone were the salons and nightclubs and the genteel old families of the pre-1967 city. The city was full of garbage, pot-holed streets, bands of feral cats, and sagging electrical wires. Because the idea was to compete with the Israeli government press office on the other side of town by attracting foreign journalists, Raymonda made sure the office had the best coffee and aperitifs in town. Daoud dipped deeper into his savings to buy Italian furniture, French wallpaper, and plush clover-green carpet.
The office functioned as a sort of human rights switchboard, with more than a dash of full-throated feminism. For hours every day, Raymonda and her coworkers worked the phone with villages and towns and cities, talking to mayors, activists, anyone with information to share. This allowed the office to come up with a complete documentary of events: lists of the arrested and beaten, the homes ransacked and property confiscated. With the “Kalashnikov” hooked up to a phone line, Palestinian voices were heard over the airwaves.
As for feminism, her mantra was “When our women have the chance to get out from under masculine domination, you’ll see what they’ll do for Palestine.”
Her fame grew. Vanessa Redgrave wanted her opinion about Arafat, to which Raymonda replied that behind his Smith & Wesson .38, Arafat was a man of peace. In a documentary she financed, The Palestinian, Redgrave is seen dancing with a Kalashnikov. Saturday Night Live did a skit with Jane Curtin as Redgrave and John Belushi, in tails, a bowtie, and dark shades, in the role of Arafat.
Part of Raymonda’s careless sense of invulnerability, curiously, related to her feminism, which simultaneously aroused the ire of many Arab men.
When Letty Pogrebin of Ms. Magazine, a committed Zionist, came to Israel with a group of fifty other American feminists in March 1978, she wanted to meet Raymonda because of her reputation as a rebel against “Arab patriarchy,” and a believer in Jewish-Arab coexistence, making Raymonda a “feminist heroine.” Pogrebin, repressing the “hatred” she frequently harbored against Arabs for “hating Israel”—her grandfather was killed in the 1939 Arab uprising in Tiberius—invited Raymonda to address her group at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
A devoted reader of Ms. Magazine, Raymonda jumped at the chance. Of all people, American women needed to hear the Palestinian side of the story. Raymonda had on her most glamorous spring outfit, her Cosmopolitan Magazine look, as Pogrebin introduced her to the women sitting in the gilded reception hall. Israeli feminists in the audience nodded their heads in solidarity as Raymonda spoke about the evils of the occupation and the need for a peaceful state of Palestine existing side by side with Israel.
Then the fireworks began. It was a repeat of her America trip, with the same lurid accusations, the same frothing mouths.
“Israel is a democracy. How can you expect us to hand our land over to terrorists?” one woman wanted to know. An Israeli feminist tried to defend Raymonda but couldn’t because a black Baptist woman launched into a tirade. “I hate you Arabs.” She had her chest thrust forward. “You SHITS were the ones that sold us as slaves. No Jew has ever kept a black under the lash.” Raymonda, dumbfounded to find herself suddenly cast in the role of the slave trader, paused to gather her thoughts.
Are you out of your mind, she wanted to say. By the time she regained her composure, others were piping up with their own recriminations and heckles. The best Raymonda could come out with was that Palestinian “freedom fighters” would never give up the struggle for independence.
“Baby killers,” screeched multiple voices at once. “What do YOU know about FREEDOM?”
She had expected a roomful of Vanessa Redgraves and instead got hardline Likudniks. Their lack of empathy pushed her to the edge of tears. She wanted to run out of the room, and would have if she hadn’t had a vision of her mother behind a sewing machine telling her to live without hatred, and to be strong. Never buckle.
“What if,” began Raymonda, in what according to Pogrebin’s account was delivered with the “vocabulary of feminism” and “cadences” of a revivalist—“what if there remains somewhere in the Jewish state, somehow, some remnant of the great Jewish tradition of humanism? Some bits of the power your noble culture has in the diaspora where you are a minority, and you have no army. You call us Palestinian savages! The Israeli prime minister, you should know, bombed this hotel in 1946. Yesterday’s terrorist is today’s prime minister.”
More boos.
“And . . . and . . . and today’s freedom fighter will be tomorrow’s president of Palestine. His name is Yasser . . .”
BOOOOO!
Raymonda raised her voice. “His name is Yasser Arafat. And you talk about terror! The Israeli government has dehumanized us. We had a culture in Palestine for centuries. We knew English, French, music, and art. We were a light in the desert. Now we have lost everything, a people without a country. We are the Jews of the Arab world. Israelis are the Prussians . . .” Other Palestinians had said as much, just never in front of a mainly Jewish audience at the King David Hotel.
The line about the Prussians nearly caused a pogrom, and Pogrebin held back a mad stampede of angry women, hotel cutlery in hand. STOP! She bellowed this so loudly that the women quieted at last. She asked Raymonda why the Israelis put her under house arrest.
“I’ll tell you why. It was because the military authorities look at me as a malevolent propagandist for peace. Because I am telling everyone that the only way to prevent rivers of blood is for Jews and Arabs to sit down and talk, as equals. My mission is one of love, and Dayan and Begin want to muzzle me for it.”
“Does that mean you condemn terrorism?”
“Do you say the same thing about Soweto?” She quoted Sartre’s line about terrorism: a “terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others.” Which was the last thing Raymonda said before storming out of the hotel. 59
Three days later, Pogrebin and the fifty feminists boarded a bus and headed for Tel Aviv. On the highway, along the coast, they encountered the smoking remains of an Egged bus. Fedayeen, sent by Arafat’s sidekick Abu Jihad from Lebanon, had landed by sea and hijacked the bus using Kalashnikovs and rocket propelled grenades. One of the terrorists was a nineteen-year-old woman from the Sabra refugee camp in Beirut. The aim of the “operation” was to capture hostages to be swapped for Fatah militants in Israeli prison. The operation turned into a bloodbath with over two dozen Israelis killed.
Pogrebin had to dispel suspicions among many of the women on the bus that they were the real targets of the attack, and that Raymonda had somehow communicated their itinerary to the Fedayeen.60 The smoke and blood and death Pogrebin saw that day, in fact, convinced her that Raymonda was right in what she said at the King David.