Suha
Ruth’s visit to the presidential palace in Gaza brought out the best in Arafat—his boyish, spontaneous, exuberant side. But the Tawil women received less and less of his warmth, as more and more Palestinians sided with Hamas against Oslo.
Some of his top advisors wanted to force Suha into the role of a meek, docile, and most of all silent “Arab wife.” They didn’t trust a woman raised by a notorious feminist who for twenty years had bedeviled the “liberation movement” with her refusal to toe the line, with her brazen defiance of male privilege.
The advisors were far from pleased when Suha began exerting herself in a manner unheard of from the first ladies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, or Libya. She channeled Raymonda by quoting her manifesto from the Palestine press agency days, “When our women have a chance to get out from under masculine domination, you’ll see what they’ll do for Palestine.”
With Raymonda, Suha paid a visit to La Crèche to meet the women and their children. The two listened in horror to stories of women too afraid to give their names out of fear their families would find out where they were, kidnap them from the convent, and butcher them. In Gaza, Suha became a magnet for women threatened by their families, because the old Jordanian laws still on the books made honor killing a minor offense with, if at all, a few months behind bars. She took women into her home to save their lives, and asked Arafat to intervene on their behalf. To his credit, Arafat sat down with the women’s fathers and brothers and stressed the virtue of mercy.
To handle the long line of desperate women outside the front door, Suha opened up a center for abused women in a refugee camp where she heard tales of lives getting worse, not better, under the regime of “liberation.” She grew more and more pessimistic about the PLO’s grip on Gaza; she saw a “black” future—or one colored the green of radical Islam. She could barely contain her rage at the gambling casino launched in Jericho by Fatah men whose business partners included Israeli politicians. “I hate it . . . right across from a refugee camp, no less.”
As if anyone asked you, retorted her husband’s men.
In February 1999, she ruffled more feathers by giving an interview to The New York Times. The article, “Suha Arafat Is a Very Different Sort of Palestinian Freedom Fighter,” describes how the “Arab Militant in High Heels” maneuvered her blue BMW on her way to the children’s clinic, “blond hair flying,” with veiled women and donkeymongers looking on. Suha’s deadpan line, “every beautiful flower ends up surrounded by weeds” hardly endeared her to PLO men. Boiling under the surface, what she said about her husband’s allies was even worse: “It is a man’s world, and very closed—like a family with a lot of intermarriages, and, well, you know the result of that.”
A far more severe rupture between the First Lady and the president took place later that year in November, in the presence of Hillary Clinton. Suha gave the American First Lady a warm kiss and then claimed that Israel was causing a leap in cancer rates among Palestinian women and children through poisonous gas and toxic waste, which to most Americans sounded like gruel propaganda. Hillary, given the press reaction back home, had no choice but to blast her as an “anti-Semite,” which couldn’t have been further from the truth: Suha had inherited from her mother immunity to that particular mental disorder. As a personal favor to President Clinton, Arafat demanded that Suha retract the statement. She said no.
No one would dare attack Suha directly. Those who wanted to silence her chose to go to what they assumed was the source of her dangerous humanism.
They got their chance two weeks after the New York Times article appeared when an Israeli journalist, a buxom natural blond named Daphne Barak, turned up at Raymonda’s front door wearing her signature tight-fitting dress with spaghetti straps. She had made a career of interviewing A-list celebrities—Mother Teresa, Benazir Bhutto, Michael Jackson, Jane Fonda. Raymonda didn’t invite her in and explained that she had to be discreet because of the hell she got from the interview she gave to the Israelis in 1995.
“What do you mean?”
“I said things some people didn’t like.”
“Like what?” Barak had a pad of paper out and began scribbling notes.
“Well, for starters that I was against Arafat marrying my daughter.”
With that, Raymonda, full of apologies, shut the door and Barak fabricated an entire “interview” which wound up in a mass circulation Arabic newspaper in London, and included a few lines in Raymonda’s mouth about Arafat’s regime being riddled with corruption and cronyism.
Whatever Barak’s motives for her inventions—Uri Avnery suspected that Barak was a Mossad agent83—the damage was immense. The day after the interview appeared panicked neighbors reported seeing a long-bearded man skulking around Raymonda’s house in Ramallah. Raymonda then got a phone call, and the man on the other line warned her that she should return to France “for your own safety.” Raymonda recognized the voice: the caller was one of Arafat’s top advisors. He told her that her life was in danger.
The heart palpitations flared up again.
Raymonda hung up the phone. Swallowing anti-stress medication to prevent a heart attack, she grabbed her VIP pass and maneuvered past checkpoints on her way back to Israel. She headed north to a region she considered her lost home. She drove to the village of Rama to visit the grave of Father Michel De Maria. His words came back to her about hatred in the Holy Land. She spent the night in her mother’s native village of Kfar Yassif and, from a cousin’s home, rang up Arafat’s office.
The advisors didn’t want to pass him the phone. “Do you know where I am? I’m in the Galilee. If you don’t pass me to President Arafat, I’ll give a press conference here in Israel.” She employed her L’pozez akol voice.
Arafat asked her what she wanted. “I didn’t say those terrible lies to the press. Someone is trying to destroy me . . . us . . . you . . . us all. One of your men threatened me and said I had to leave our country. Where should I go? Do you want me to go back into exile?”
He denied his men said any such thing.
“Shall I give you his name? I’m sure he’s standing right next to you.”
She heard muffled sounds on the other end. “Raymonda,” Arafat said, this time with intimacy and warmth. “I believe you. Palestine is your home. You must stay.”