The Angel
Suha’s clinic for handicapped children, her visits to the nuns in Bethlehem, and her interventions on behalf of women threatened by honor killing, were sporadic, scatter-shot efforts at change, noble efforts but nowhere close to the ambitions of a woman reared on a steady diet of feminist rebellion. Deeper and more revolutionary changes were needed. Without success, Suha prodded her husband to toss out laws that more or less sanctioned the murder of women.
The response she got was the predictable equivocation of a ruler keeping two sets of books. In theory there wasn’t a single feminist precept Arafat didn’t agree with—yes, women should be equals, yes, they should control their own bodies, yes, their lives are more valuable than male codes of honor. All the while, he kept his eyes on the street. He didn’t want the Islamists to suspect him of acting against Islam at the behest of his Christian wife. It was the same refrain Raymonda had heard a thousand times: Don’t interfere; women’s rights will have to wait.
In January 2000, Zahwa came down with a serious enough fever for Suha to take her to Paris for urgent treatment. Mother and daughter decamped to the Neuilly quarter. It was a safe place far from the coming cataclysm.
Months rolled by. Ruth was one of the few Israelis Raymonda still saw. Unlike most Israelis, she ignored warnings by her government that the West Bank was a lawless and dangerous enemy territory. A jungle. The specter of the widow of the great general showing up on a Hamas website with duct tape wrapped around her face kept Shin Bet people awake at night.
With Suha gone, people who needed something from Arafat turned to Raymonda. Arafat spent most of his time in the Muqata in Ramallah, the former Israeli prison and now presidential headquarters. By this point, Raymonda knew how to deal with Arafat’s advisors—she ignored them by walking straight past the burly security men, sweeping into his office unannounced, usually at least once a day.
Whenever people had medical problems and needed money, they came to her because Arafat never said no to her; she just had to explain the reasons people needed help. Millions flowed from the presidential coffers to poor people with cancer or mental disease, or whatever. Quietly, without drawing too much attention, the president saved lives of scores of women threatened by their families for “dishonoring” them.
Arafat’s generosity was in the context of a failing regime. President Weizman blamed the Likud government for the stalemate in the peace process. “I have reached my red line,” the exasperated Weizman said in a 1999 television interview. “I’m not willing to help Netanyahu any longer. It is impossible that everyone is angry at us—the U.S., Europe, President Mubarak, King Hussein—and only we are right.”84 Some said that Weizman was working behind the scenes with opposition parties to force the grandstanding prime minister, a former furniture salesman, into calling for new elections. The Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, won.
Someone probably wasn’t too happy with Weizman’s dovish ways. Leaked reports of minor financial shenanigans led to his resignation that summer.85 Barak, while donning Rabin’s peace mantle, also had to watch his back. Just as he launched land-for-peace talks with the Syrians at Shepherdstown outside Washington, DC, Uzi Dayan, on behalf of the new leader of the Likud, Arik Sharon, led top American politicians around the occupied territories to prove that Israel could never return the land to the Arabs. The occupied territory was too important for Israeli security.
The last time Ruth saw Raymonda before the Second Intifada broke out was as Barak left for Camp David for an ill-fated encounter with Arafat. Driving her thirty-year-old jalopy across the archipelago of checkpoints, she turned up at Raymonda’s house in Ramallah, wearing a summer dress the color of cotton candy. Though for decades she had rubbed shoulders with many of the world’s most famous designers, she still preferred the old Maskit wardrobes she lovingly called her “rags.”
If she could have gotten away with it, she probably would have shown up barefoot. Ruth’s gray hair showed her age, but her iridescent green eyes, her fast and determined walk, her sinewy personality had remained constant since her first encounter with Raymonda in St. Luke’s Hospital.
Before Ruth even had a chance to say hello, Raymonda told her three mourners inside her house needed “your angel’s help.” The father of a large Christian family had just died, and his children wanted permission for their siblings and close relatives in Jordan to attend the funeral, which was in three hours’ time. The relatives were already at the King Hussein Bridge, but the Israeli soldiers wouldn’t let them through.
Raymonda was speaking rapidly and, before reaching the front door of the house, she forgot to share an important detail about the supplicants—that they belonged to a prominent family whose most famous member was Georges Habash, the founder of the militant organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Arafat’s most outspoken foe on the left. Like Daoud, Habash, likening Oslo to a poker game, rejected the Accords. Habash called Oslo a legal ruse used by the Israelis to get Arafat to give up his best available cards. While Arafat was off the Mossad hit list, Habash, otherwise known as “al-Hakim” or “the doctor,” was still a marked man for the hijacking of the Air France plane in Entebbe. He was the one who, in 1970, had dispatched the gunmen who had nearly killed Assi in Munich.
Raymonda introduced Ruth to the three mourners; only then did she come out with the name “Habash.” Ruth’s raised eyebrows signified that she knew she was standing in front of relatives of Public Enemy Number One. The guests, after politely greeting Ruth, turned back to Raymonda and asked if she could call Arafat and get him to act.
Next to Ruth was one of the mourners, a well-heeled gentleman in a finely tailored black suit. She asked him in English what was happening. The two of them huddled together, trading whispers. Ruth was shaking her head, and then she was nodding. Her face showed a range of emotions: first sadness and then an understanding smile, and then back to sadness. Her empathetic genius was again at work.
“Let me help!” she suddenly announced in a loud enough voice that everyone stopped, their heads cocked in her direction. “Just give me the names of your family members in Jordan. I’ll see what I can do.”
If you go through Ruth’s address book you’ll find the telephone numbers of most of the leadership elite of Israel, and in Raymonda’s house she made use of her best contacts in the military to help out the family of a man whose group tried to kill her son. There she was, dabbing away tears while she speedily, carefully jotted down the names, one by one; then picking up the home phone, she called Uzi because he was the master gatekeeper. At the time he was on the front lines in Lebanon.
Uzi Dayan! The mourners could hardly believe their ears.
Ruth contacted an office within the Ministry of Defense, and within a few minutes she was connected directly to him. Ruth hung up and said, with her good-witch magic, that Moshe’s nephew promised to contact the commander of the King Hussein Bridge across the Jordan and get permission for the family to pass. It seemed to make no difference to Uzi that the Habash family was involved.
After the family gave their effusive thanks to the “angel” and left, Ruth told Raymonda the story of Uzi. Ruth knew some of the scars Raymonda had been carrying since she was a little girl, the expulsion, the killing, and the destruction of her family. Now Ruth told her about Uzi’s scars. Just as Raymonda was a terrified little girl in a convent, not knowing if her parents were dead or alive, Uzi’s father Zorik lay rotting in a field.