Ring of Fire
The revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 brought hope but also fresh dangers. Ruth had met Suha a hundred times and thought such a beautiful and intelligent woman, a sophisticated and freethinking feminist, would have a salutary effect on the old revolutionary. By 1989, Arafat had renounced terrorism and embraced diplomacy as the only way to win Palestinian independence. She was seeing flickers of hope after two years of intifada.
Ruth’s worries were more on the Israeli side, as the Likud government continued to tighten the screws on the Palestinians. The government strategy was to hunker behind the slogan of “security” and a “war against terror,” as a cover for rapid settlement expansion and thus to prevent a two-state solution. Prime Minister Shamir and his Likud colleagues denied there was any such thing as a moderate Fatah leader—all were terrorists. Shamir’s government strictly enforced Israeli laws barring contact between Israelis and the underground movement.
Raymonda saw Suha less and less because she was married to the world’s most wanted man. He spent most of his time traveling, and when he was in Tunis, the two moved from one cramped place to another in order to keep potential killers guessing. Suha’s makeup was in one safe house, high heels in another and the collection of avant-garde French poetry in the third. She couldn’t even speak freely on the telephone because everyone knew the lines were tapped. To leave the guarded compound she needed clearance from security. “Can I go out? Is the road open?” Little wonder Suha began suffering from headaches and hypertension.
“When I go to see her,” Raymonda told a reporter, “frankly speaking, I feel like I am in a jail. It’s like being in jail.”
Raymonda soon reached out to Father Michel one last time. In the spring of 1989, one of Arafat’s top men phoned Raymonda to say that Arafat’s Russian-built plane had crashed overnight somewhere in the Libyan desert during a sand storm. Was it shot down? Was he dead? No one could say.
Cascading thoughts tumbled through Raymonda’s mind. What would happen if he was dead? Arafat was willing to sit down with the Israelis and negotiate a political solution to a conflict that had raged since before she was born. With all his flaws, this monkish warrior, this man who reached out to Weizman, embraced Abie Nathan, and still wanted to meet Ruth—he was the only Palestinian leader able to fulfill Raymonda’s “mission” to get Palestinians and Israelis to talk.
Raymonda immediately called Ruth to see if she could find out anything from Weizman. He knew nothing. The Israelis knew nothing.
She next picked up the phone and called up a cousin in Kfar Yassif in Israel and asked him, in the middle of the night, to wake up Father Michel in Rama and ask him about Arafat’s fate. The cousin did as she requested, and the old priest, who rarely slept anyway, was up waiting for him.
“Tell Raymonda there is no need to worry. Yasser Arafat is alive. I see him in the desert; there is a circle of fire around him” protecting him.
Arafat was found wandering around the wreckage of the plane two days later. The circle of fire Father Michel referred to was a shallow ditch the survivors of the crash dug, filled with airplane fuel, and lit on fire as a signal for rescuers and to ward off hungry jackals.