Separation
In Israel for every Ruth or Yael there were a hundred bearded believers excoriating Rabin for embracing “Amalek.” Many people, brainwashed for years to hate Arafat, accused an out-of-touch elite of forcing Arafat down their throats. Some rabbis went well beyond calling for Arafat’s death; the ancient cabbalistic curse they directed against Rabin wished on him a painful death.
On February 24, 1994, the American-Israeli doctor Baruch Goldstein, graduate of Albert Einstein School of Medicine, walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and emptied a clip of bullets on the Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding 125. To prevent reprisals, Rabin responded by introducing new roadblocks and a hermetic closure of Palestinian towns and villages. The Islamic movement Hamas lashed out at Arafat for his peace deal: he was less a liberator than a traitor, a collaborator with the Zionist enemy. His chic blond wife was further proof of how removed he was from Islamic purity.
Five months later Arafat and Suha flew from Tunis to the Sinai in Egypt, got into a black Mercedes, and were escorted by Egyptian security to the border with Gaza. Israeli soldiers waved Arafat through. From the border to Gaza City, fifty thousand jubilant Palestinians lined the streets tossing rose petals and showers of white rice. Raymonda stayed behind in Paris to tend to Daoud, who was gravely ill. The genteel ex-banker, who considered Oslo to be a national catastrophe, wasn’t about to swap Paris for gun-infested Gaza. “No, I will never go back,” he repeated by phone once more to his son-in-law. “Jaffa is my home, not Gaza and not Ramallah. Give me Jaffa, and I’ll change my mind.”
According to the terms of the Oslo agreement, Arafat wasn’t a triumphant Salah al-Din bringing liberation to the country, but at least he didn’t have to crawl on his belly under barbed wire as in the old days. The most recognizable Arab leader on the planet, the subject of a dozen biographies, hundreds of studies, tens of thousands of news reports, and a myriad of cabbalistic incantations, was the liberator of a few postage-stamp-sized enclaves in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, for which he was feted by the masses with their flags and smiles and sadly misplaced hopes.
Oslo changed the logic of the conflict. The Israeli military still controlled 90 percent of the West Bank, and thousands of Palestinians still languished in prison. In this respect, there was no liberation—far from it. But nor could Fatah carry on an armed struggle against a country it had agreed to settle its disputes with through negotiations. Arafat and his men needed to strike a balance between cooperation and resistance, international respectability, and the support of the street. Finding a workable formula became equally urgent and elusive.
With fanatics on both sides vowing to kill one another, Rabin and Arafat ordered their security services to separate the populations, the theory being, the less contact between Israelis and Palestinians, the less chance for violence. From Raymonda’s perspective, and from Ruth’s, the precise opposite was needed. The less contact Israelis and Palestinians had, the more suspicion remained the primary prism through which they viewed each other.
As usual, Ruth preferred actions to words. A week never passed without her jumping in her ancient Saab and sputtering off to Palestinian towns and villages, working with groups of women making rugs or embroidered bags.
Arafat and Suha lived in cramped quarters in Gaza, one of the poorest territories on earth. Revolutionaries in Algeria moved into mansions after they turned out the French; Lenin got the Kremlin. Arafat insisted on taking over a concrete building with the charm of a furniture warehouse. He and Suha had vastly different esthetic standards. She said to Vogue that he took one look at her shoe collection and likened her to Imelda Marcos, the wife of the Philippine dictator. As for their living quarters, “luxury,” he told her, “was in your father the banker’s home, not mine.” The compromise they worked out was for the monkish ex-guerrilla leader to live upstairs in a room with a cot, leaving her to decorate the entire second floor more to her francophone sensibilities.
When Suha became pregnant, she returned to be with Raymonda and her gravely sick father in Paris. Daoud died in June 1995. Raymonda buried him in Montparnasse Cemetery close to the graves of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Standing next to her children, Raymonda stared down at the casket, tears streaming down her face. Her mind turning to his literary graveyard neighbors, she reflected on the complexities of the heart. In a more ideal world, she never would have married the older man. They had come to love one another, not the passionate, romantic love Raymonda had always wanted, but a love based on affection, admiration, and loyalty. If he bristled against her foolhardy activism, he also admired her defiance and courage, her boundless exuberance.
A month later, Suha gave birth to a daughter named after Arafat’s mother Zahwa, in a private American hospital in Paris.80 It seemed like half the Paris police force was on hand after an anonymous caller had threatened to blow up the maternity ward. Burly French police, slipping a bulletproof vest over the baby, took mother and daughter to a different floor. “My God,” Arafat exclaimed when he arrived by armored car from the military airport. “This is the first day of her life, and it’s already starting.” How many babies are born wearing a flak jacket?
Arafat was beaming the first time he took Zahwa in his calloused, liver-spotted hands. Over the years, a plethora of distortions, half-truths, and fabrications had slipped into the press about him, that he enriched himself, that he was the owner of seven airliners, that he was a psycho with bottomless hatred in his heart. Behind his masks, and he had hundreds of them, was a sentimental and warm man. With Castro and Mandela, here was one of the last survivors of the anti-colonial struggles, rocking his infant daughter in his arms.
But the new father had little time for his young family, because Hamas launched a campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians to revenge the 1994 Goldstein killings in the Hebron mosque. Rabin’s response, naturally enough, was to beef up roadblocks and checkpoints.
The perverse logic was deepening: peace through separation and ever-tighter control over people’s movements: peace through strangulation.