Borderline Case
“Even victors are by victories undone.”
—John Dryden
The day after the funeral, Raymonda told the AP and UPI newswires: “Nobody rejoices at a man’s death, even if he is an enemy. But Dayan was a conqueror and an enemy, and nobody will forget his severe hand, the collective punishments.”
Meanwhile, Begin and Sharon were still in power. Raymonda would later need a box of Kleenex to sit through Steven Spielberg’s Munich because many of the Palestinians killed by the Mossad were friends. If the Munich massacre was the catalyst for the killings, why did the Israelis wait ten years after Munich to blow up or gun down so many moderate Palestinian intellectuals, writers, poets, translators, and journalists, many who had nothing to do with terrorism?
Her first death threat on European soil—she had accumulated a raft of them in the Holy Land—came in 1981. Along with imprisoned Nelson Mandela and Simha Flapan, the Israeli behind the New Outlook, she won a peace prize named after Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky.65 Pro-Israel groups all over Europe went to work slandering her as an anti-Semite. In Vienna, anonymous bomb threats forced her to switch hotels three times.
As a sign of just how ecumenical the threats against her were, Abu Nidal, after having just dispatched an Austrian socialist politician and head of the Israel-Austria Friendship League, sent a pair of hit-men, a Libyan and a Tunisian, to kill her for “collaborating with the Zionists.”
She was in a Viennese restaurant with her daughter Suha when she noticed two dark men nursing a tea, their eyes fixed on her. She had seen enough spy movies to know the meaning behind the hard stares. Their badly fitting polyester suits were incongruent in the upscale restaurant.
The idea that Suha could get caught in the line of fire made her heart race. As soon as she was able to think clearly, she asked Suha to go to the ladies’ room. “You need to get to a phone. Call this number”—it was the number of the PLO representative in Vienna. “Tell him we have a big problem. They have to come.”
The Abu Nidal men missed their chance when a carload of armed men showed up in the nick of time.
Raymonda was still in Europe when the Mossad targeted Majed Abu Sharar, her mentor in politics who was among the first Palestinians to extend his hand to the Israeli left. She knew him well, having stayed with him in Beirut; she introduced him to his wife. The iconoclastic Marxist, a man immune to nationalist jargon and sloganeering, believed in engaging the Israeli left. He used to say, “In these days, death is present in every action we take, in movement, and in halting, but I would rather die moving.” In October, he went to Rome to attend a writers’ conference with progressive writers and politicians from all over the world, including Uri and Amos. The bomb that killed him was hidden under his bed in a hotel on the Via Veneto.66
In July the following year in Paris the Mossad struck again, this time targeting Ibrahim Souss’s assistant Fadl Danni. It was early in the morning. Kissing his young French wife and five-month-old son as he did every morning, he got in his Peugeot and edged away from the curb. A bomb planted in the chassis of the car detonated.67
Back in Ramallah, late-night visitations by IDF soldiers, pounding on the door with the butt of their rifles, turned into such a regular occurrence that Raymonda stopped locking the front door. “Just come on in.” The most memorable interrogation session she had was with military governor Fuad Ben-Eliezer. He tried to blackmail her with “photos” he assured her would “scandalize” her family. “Oh, I hope they are lovely.” Raymonda was taunting him in a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. “They must be nudes. Are they nice? They turn you on, right? You can’t fool me, General Fuad. The trouble with you,” she said briskly, “is that you’re an Arab. And you Arab men have rather embroidered sexual fantasies, if you know what I mean. Go ahead and make them public,” she added with a wink. “Be my guest. Oh, I can even help. Take Uri Avnery’s telephone number. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to put them on the back cover of his magazine. Or centerfold, even better.” For this little bit of cheek, Prime Minister Begin slapped yet another travel ban against her.
On Raymonda’s birthday in June 1982, with Dayan’s grave still fresh amid the poppies in bucolic Nahalal Cemetery, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on a flimsy excuse, ordered the invasion of Lebanon.68 Sharon, despite a truce that had held for a year, was determined to shoot his way through West Beirut and “put Arafat in a cage.” Begin likened the assault on Arafat’s headquarters to the siege on Hitler’s bunker. In fact, Begin and Sharon wanted Arafat dead, and the man on the ground in Beirut charged with the task of tracking him down was Uzi Dayan, the son of Moshe’s brother, Zorik, and now a commander of a commando force specializing in intelligence, espionage, and reconnaissance behind enemy lines.
The Lebanon War coincided with the original Hebrew version of Raymonda’s My Home, My Prison, and it was a bestseller in the Israeli army despite the propaganda smearing her as the Palestinian Tokyo Rose. Conscripts at checkpoints asked for her autograph.69
The following year, 1983, the Israeli playwright Ruth Hazan, inspired by My Home, My Prison, wrote Mikreh Gvul or “Borderline Case,” as an imaginary debate between Golda Meir and Raymonda. In the play Golda, with her stringy hair the texture of a Brillo pad piled into a bun, looked like the owner of a cheap diner.
At one point the former prime minister (dead for five years by now) stamps her feet and exclaims, “You don’t exist,” playing off her famous refrain that there is no Palestinian people. The Raymonda character unbuttons her blouse to show a bit of cleavage. “I don’t exist?” you say, pointing at her ample breasts. “My dear Golda, let me assure you I do, as did my parents, my grandparents, and their parents’ parents’ parents’ parents all existed in Palestine, long before you showed up from Milwaukee.” She next grabs her by the throat and snarls: “Maybe I should just strangle you!”
Golda squirms, but in the end Raymonda decides to release the gasping prime minister from her clutches. With Golda on the ground rubbing her sore neck, the Raymonda character announces a more effective weapon than either terror or the slavish acquiescence to power. “I take a third way, the way of dialogue.”
“Borderline Case” was a smash hit, and the theater troupe performed all over Israel, mostly at left-wing kibbutzim. In Tel Aviv, eight hundred IDF officers turned up for a performance, many of the officers having just returned from the fighting in Lebanon. Adding to the drama of the evening, earlier that day a terrorist detonated a bomb in the open-air Jerusalem vegetable market, and the carnage provoked calls of “Mavet le-Aravim,” Death to the Arabs.
Backstage a young soldier was in the restroom with Raymonda because security was so tight they wouldn’t leave her alone. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked.
“Afraid of what? Why should I be afraid?” With a flick of her wrist Raymonda pulled a shot of cognac.
The soldier seemed incredulous. “Because . . . because . . . Do you know who is there? The chief of staff, the leaders of the IDF.” From her tone of voice, you’d think she was talking about Jehovah and his heavenly hosts.
“So what! I’m not afraid of them!”
Minutes later Raymonda was on the stage for the performance of a lifetime. At that moment she was the most recognizable, most celebrated Palestinian woman in Israel. She was both admired and feared—and her name was high up on someone’s list to be eliminated.
She introduced the play by reading out some prepared thoughts, but mid-sentence the notes fluttered to the floor. She still had the sweet taste of cognac on her tongue, and out came fire as from a blast furnace. She faced the officers. “One of your soldiers just asked me if I am afraid of you.” She was pacing the stage. “O, I know what you can do,” she pointed out into the audience. “You are all so manly, so handsome, so strong, aren’t you? O, you officers of a mighty army! Under your control, you have tanks and guns and missiles. You have the power to impose your laws; our destiny is in your hands. I look at your uniforms, your medals, badges, the stars on your shoulders—but when I close my eyes, I strip you down and see you as men; and now I address you in the name of humanity. Before you look at me through a riflescope, stare into my eyes. Do you feel, do your hands tremble, do you sense the palpitation? If you do, don’t pull the trigger.”
There was a storm of applause.
So far, so good, Raymonda was thinking. Now I should tell them what I really think. When will I ever have eight hundred officers in one room, eating out of my hands? Let the fireworks begin! L’pozez akol!
“You may haul me off to jail for what I am about to tell you. Yes, I know that your law makes it a crime to associate with the PLO. You know something? Before your invasion, I went to Beirut to meet with Arafat. I wanted to see the brave Palestinians who are fighting officers like you. I wanted to find out who they were. You know what else? I just came from Tunis, and I sat with Arafat and the Fatah leadership, with the people you just expelled from Beirut.”
She could still hardly believe her eyes. The officers were sitting upright in the cushioned seats of the theater waiting for her to speak.
At that moment five generals, the top brass in the hall, shot up from their seats and marched out. A handful of others followed.
“What did I say?” she called after them. “You brag about your democracy but you don’t want to hear the truth. You don’t want to know that peace is only possible by sitting down with Yasser Arafat.” She raised her voice. “OK, you don’t want to LISTEN to me.”
The generals slammed the door of the auditorium with a resounding boom.
She turned her attention back on the rest of the officers. “Do you want the war to continue? If you do, then let war be the answer. I’ll stop now.” She was about to say something else when an officer with the distorted beet-red expression of a man stubbing his toe sprung from his seat and informed her matter-of-factly that Arafat was a terrorist, and “so are you.” The man surely wanted to continue along this vein when his seven-hundred-and-ninety-something fellow officers told him to shut up, and the chastened little man with the red face sat back down.
From all parts of the audience Raymonda heard, “Go on! We want to hear you out, Raymonda!” This was when she told them not to be like the “Nazis who just take orders.”
Raymonda’s words were so forceful and yet so emotional and so visceral that there was no doubt in the mind of the officers that she was telling the truth.
Following the last word about taking orders, there was a protracted silence, as though the officers were either stunned, speechless or were about to rush onto the stage and drag her off to prison. Then the applause broke and rolled over her in a wave, long and sustained, giving her for a brief instant a feeling of total control over the occupiers.