“I Cry for You”
In November 1995 Ruth’s hip was aching too much for her to stand for hours at Israel’s biggest peace gathering ever, so she sat in her easy chair at home and watched a crowd of 300,000 gather in the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv on a gentle, warm evening. Against the background of the ugly modernist city hall building, young Israelis held up banners with a message of Peace Now! Over the previous weeks, angry right-wing protesters in Jerusalem had held up posters of Rabin wearing an SS uniform. In Tel Aviv, the mood was festive and triumphant. Few doubted that humanity would triumph over atavism and hatred.
On the stage Assi’s cousin, Aviv Geffen, sang his exquisite ballad “I Cry for You.” The crowd roared.
Aviv, Israel’s biggest pop star, wrote and sang about the same themes as Assi’s best films: love, peace, death, suicide, politics, and the perversions of religion. “I prefer Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ to ‘The Wailing Wall,’” goes one of his one-liners. As for macho Israeli culture, he diagnoses its obsession with guns and missiles as a “U-turn in evolution.” He dodged the draft.
On that balmy Tel Aviv evening, Rabin, the most unlikely peace-warrior of all, stood on the stage and gave the draft dodger a hug. Joining the old man and the rock star with mascara in the square, with the sweet smell of honeysuckle—and marijuana—wafting through the air, were Ezer, Yael, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis.
Ruth mopped up tears with tissues. She had known Rabin since the 1930s, and she had helped raise Aviv. History was making a full circle. At seventy-eight, she felt that what she had fought for for much of her life, peace and justice, was finally coming about. “I Cry for You,” she sang along. She knew the song by heart. “What should I do, should I cry for you? Should I cry? Should I die? Should I try to forget?”
Rabin’s fine-boned assassin, son of a Yemenite kosher butcher, waiting backstage, slipped through security by claiming to be Aviv’s personal driver. Aviv responded to Rabin’s hug with a kiss on each cheek, and five minutes later the prime minister was on his back, bleeding to death from bullets fired from a Beretta pistol. “The killer didn’t just kill a person,” Aviv responded when word came from the hospital that Rabin was dead; “he killed a dream.”
Two days later President Weizman, too distraught to respond, stood next to the two Schwarz sisters and the special guest, President Bill Clinton, at Rabin’s funeral. His eulogy was laconic: “Together we ate a few good things, and drank a few good things.”
Raymonda never saw Arafat, an imperturbable veteran of many battles, won and lost, more shaken than when the Shin Bet contacted him in his cramped presidential compound in Gaza to confirm the news reports. He must have understood intuitively that the bullets eliminated the best chance for the two peoples to come to terms. Nor was the chairman afraid to put his emotions on public display for a man who had become his partner. “I am very sad and very shocked for this awful and terrible crime,” he told the press, his lower lip trembling, his eyes watery and red, his face ashen. Arafat sensed dark days ahead.
Ruth celebrated her eightieth birthday in 1997 in a traumatized, and transformed, Israel. In July 1997, two Hamas militants, one wearing a Yankees baseball cap, entered into Mahane Yehuda vegetable market in Jerusalem and detonated the plastic explosives duct-taped to their abdomens, killing sixteen Israelis and wounding nearly 178 others. There was grimly familiar carnage of body parts spread across market stalls onto the clothes and hair and skin of terrified pedestrians.
The Likud was back in power after this. A series of other suicide bombings followed. Per agreement, the Israeli army had already withdrawn from the large Palestinian cities and handed its central prison in Ramallah, the Muqata, over to Arafat. The new government, headed by Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu with Ariel Sharon as the strongman in the cabinet, further restricted Palestinian movement while opening up fresh territory for the expansion of what were now 140 Jewish colonies. Thousands of villas with red-tiled roofs proliferated across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Each new suicide bombing sprouted fresh checkpoints and settlements encircling cantons—Bantustans as Daoud would have said. Uzi Dayan was the IDF’s deputy chief of staff in charge of the tightening matrix of checkpoints. If Sharon was the hangman, Uzi was the weaver of the rope.
Begun with such fanfare, the signatories to the Oslo peace process entered into a prolonged period of feinting, jabbing, counter-jabbing, and occasional blows. Negotiations between the two sides dragged out interminably, and the idea that the peace agreement would lead to a full Israeli withdrawal seemed less and less likely.
Yael continued pushing for peace to smaller and smaller audiences, without fail Ruth always at her side. For Ruth’s eightieth birthday, in an Israeli newspaper, Yael published a letter called “After my own heart.” An extraordinary piece of writing, the letter touches on Ruth’s uncanny energy and indefatigable hope when most people would stew in bitterness at a world gone badly astray. Despite a lifetime of “tears, insults, and fears,” her life is “a wonderful poem where every chapter is interwoven with youth and age, contentment and curiosity, childish innocence.” The modern-day Candide is out there every day handing out “fragments of a better future to all those who had lost hope.”
Raymonda had, by this point, returned to Palestine and was living in Ramallah. Shortly after arriving back in spring 1997, she spotted Father Michel in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Ramallah. He was living in a home for retired priests and was accompanied by younger men on either side of him, holding him by the elbows. “Father Michel!” Raymonda called from the other side of the lobby, quickening her pace in his direction. He looked at her, smiling without speaking.
“Father Michel, oh my God! For ten years, I’ve wanted to thank you.” The priest, with a shock of white hair, his tall frame slightly bent over, looked at her with effervescent eyes. “Thank you for saving my life!” Had she not heeded his warning in 1985, she certainly wouldn’t have survived.
Nodding, Father Michel reached out and took her hand; there was tenderness in his touch. It had been nearly fifty years since he first told her about her “mission.”
She asked him about “hatred in the Holy Land,” and if anything would change. He shook his shaggy gray head of hair, turned his back, and shuffled off without saying a word. The encounter would be their last; he died a short time later.
In the West Bank, what had been the stage for Raymonda’s feminist-nationalist rebellion was now strangely vacant, as the spy novel atmosphere of the 1970s and early ’80s gave way to a bureaucratic deal between the IDF and the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus. There were more people than ever in Ramallah because of the stream of people returning from exile; martini bars and Mercedes dealerships were on their way. But the spirit had changed. A dull, sullen depression had descended on erstwhile activists.
She felt isolated—Suha was in Gaza and the other children were scattered around Europe. For Raymonda, there was no going back to the glory days of the “Kalashnikov” and hacking phone lines. Abie was ill, and western journalists didn’t need her for a scoop—they went directly to Arafat or his men.
In matters of civil society, Raymonda was light years ahead of Arafat and his cronies in assessing the needs of the moment. An inveterate media aficionado, she never missed a trend. The media landscape was changing fast, and the Palestinians had to be on the cutting edge of the change. Boiling over with ideas, she drove to Arafat in Gaza with a new concept.
She might as well have been speaking Chinese. Arafat sat behind a card table he used as a desk and bounced a tennis ball on the ground as she expounded on Al Jazeera, the Internet, email, bloggers, and chat rooms. “Have you ever heard about the Drudge Report?” She proposed to start modestly, with a news and current events magazine simply called Falasteen, harkening back on the country’s first pan-Arab newspaper in Jaffa. A new Falasteen could counter the Israeli PR machinery by letting the world know what was happening on the ground.
He kept bouncing his ball. “You, Raymonda,” he said in a cheerful and yet serious tone, “you are too independent, you refuse to obey orders and rules, you’re a free thinker—and you know me, I admire your freedom. You just can’t speak on behalf of Fatah. That I can’t allow.” Arafat was wary of the phenomenon General Matti Peled once described as “bullets and missiles firing from rosy lips.” No way was he going to permit his mother-in-law to direct her liberated mind at his regime. Soon she’d be dredging up honor killing, abandoned babies, abusive husbands, the perversions of Sharia Law. Recruits would sign up for Hamas’s war against the “infidels.”
She did manage to wheedle out of him enough money to hire a small staff for the paper, nothing more.
Suspicions among Fatah leaders that her feminist tongue was “damaging the cause” surfaced in the most sensitive of places: Israeli television. Israelis were eager for gossip and insider scoops on the life of the man whose fate, for better or for worse, was tied to their own. Journalists from an Israeli TV station approached Raymonda, cameras rolling, wanting to know about her relationship with Arafat, to which she retorted, chest thrust out defiantly, that “no one created me, no one made me, not even Arafat. I am my own woman.” She also said something about not having been thrilled at her daughter’s marriage to the man whose title was now President Arafat.
She thought she was complying with Arafat’s order to keep her “free spirit” out of PLO business. His advisors didn’t have such a generous interpretation and understood the interview as an act of breaking ranks. They began blocking her access to her son-in-law.
Even Suha barely saw her husband because he was a notorious workaholic. (“He gets up early,” she told a reporter. “He leaves early, never gets back until way past midnight.”) Whenever she tried to focus his attention to normal marital matters, such as their daughter, Yasser would switch on Looney Tunes. The only freedom she had in straight-laced, Islamic, dilapidated Gaza was driving around in her latest model BMW convertible, which was more food for critics despite the fact that she was usually on her way to a clinic she ran for handicapped children in a refugee camp.
The stranglehold of checkpoints, the collapsing Palestinian economy where the best jobs were on construction sites for settlements, and the pervasive feeling that Oslo was a boondoggle, made it easy for Hamas to caricature President Arafat as an Israeli stooge. The last thing on his mind was bouncing sweet little Zahwa on his knee.
The grim reality of Oslo exceeded Daoud’s pessimism. Arafat was being squeezed from Hamas militants, wanting only to murder Israeli civilians in the name of their virulent Wahabi strain of Islam, which in turn enabled the Netanyahu-Sharon-Uzi triumvirate to cage him in, more and more. Ezer Weizman, with his powerless, ceremonial presidential post, could do little to help.
The more settlements expanded, the greater the support for Hamas and the message of violence; and the more Arafat scrambled to win back support on the street, the more he and his nine security forces turned “liberated” Palestinian areas into armed fiefdoms. The man Ruth met in the Washington hotel lobby, Georgetown Professor Sharabi, described Oslo as a “catastrophe for the Palestinians.”81
Islamic holy warriors blowing up pizzerias and the Bibi-Uzi-Sharon chokehold brought out the street fighter in Arafat. During a gathering in Bethlehem, with the Church of the Nativity behind him, he stirred up the crowd with calls for “Jihad, Jihad, Jihad.” The Israeli right, expert in the art of PR, got this out to the world.
Hamas bombings, and with Arafat bellowing out “Jihad,” marginalized people who still believed in peace. Ruth, Yael, and Avnery appeared to most Israelis, even the young who had gathered by the tens of thousands to light candles on the site of Rabin’s assassination, to be little more than crusty old has-beens. Whatever public declarations they made sounded like whistling in the wind.