An Improbable Friendship Read online

  Also by Anthony David

  Once Upon a Country: A Palestine Life (with Sari Nusseibeh)

  Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem 1913–1923

  Edited and translated by Anthony David

  A Life in Letters: Gershom Scholem

  Edited and translated by Anthony David

  The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959

  Copyright © 2015 by Anthony David

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  David, Anthony, 1962- author.

  An improbable friendship : the remarkable lives of Israeli Ruth Dayan and Palestinian Raymonda Tawil and their forty-year peace mission / Anthony David. — First English-language edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-62872-568-1 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-62872-631-2 (E-book)

  1. Dayan, Ruth—Friends and associates. 2. Tawil, Raymonda Hawa—Friends and associates. 3. Arab-Israeli conflict—Influence. 4. Women and peace—Israel. 5. Women, Palestinian Arab—Malta—Biography. 6. Israel—Biography. 7. Malta—Biography. I. Title.

  CT1919.P38D394 2015

  327.1’72095694—dc23

  2015027734

  Cover design by Laura Klynstra

  Cover photo: Alexey Stiop / Shutterstock

  Printed in the United States of America

  To the memory of Jackie Kahn, whose friendship and encouragement inspired Ruth Dayan to tell her story.

  “Only those who are capable of listening to the unforgetting silence of this tormented soil, from which everyone begins and to which everyone returns, Jews and Arabs, has the right to call it homeland.”

  —Meron Benvenisti

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: A Secret Story

  Part I 1917–1956: Of This Tormented Soil

  Chapter 1: “The Happiest Day of My Life”

  Chapter 2: The Syrian Prince

  Chapter 3: Night Squad

  Chapter 4: The “Cripple”

  Chapter 5: A Christmas Tale

  Chapter 6: Civil War

  Chapter 7: Fall of Haifa

  Chapter 8: Hotel Zion

  Chapter 9: Villa Lea

  Chapter 10: Married to the State

  Chapter 11: Ave Maria

  Chapter 12: Women of Valor

  Chapter 13: The Beauty Contest

  Chapter 14: “Maskiteers”

  Chapter 15: A Mission in Life

  Chapter 16: Tristesse

  Chapter 17: Moshe’s War

  Part II 1957–1970: Two Friends

  Chapter 18: Punished by Love

  Chapter 19: Mandelbaum Gate

  Chapter 20: Under the Shekhina’s Wing

  Chapter 21: New Face in the Mirror

  Chapter 22: Reverence for Life

  Chapter 23: A Man Problem

  Chapter 24: The Women’s Strike

  Chapter 25: Six Days

  Chapter 26: The Dayan-asty

  Chapter 27: Open Bridges

  Chapter 28: The Return

  Chapter 29: The Emperor

  Chapter 30: In the Bosom of My Country

  Chapter 31: This Is Not a Democracy!

  Part III 1970–1995: Dialogue

  Chapter 32: St. Luke’s Hospital

  Chapter 33: Honor Killing

  Chapter 34: Umm al-Mu’in

  Chapter 35: “Wrath of God”

  Chapter 36: L’pozez Akol (Blow Up Everything)

  Chapter 37: Mission Renewed

  Chapter 38: “Guns and Olive Branches”

  Chapter 39: Neve Shalom

  Chapter 40: The Quest

  Chapter 41: House Arrest

  Chapter 42: The Comedians

  Chapter 43: Crossing Boundaries

  Chapter 44: The Good Witch

  Chapter 45: Militants for Peace

  Chapter 46: Ms.

  Chapter 47: The Tomb of God

  Chapter 48: A Furious Aura

  Chapter 49: Borderline Case

  Chapter 50: Beyond the Walls

  Chapter 51: The Bomb

  Chapter 52: A Debt of Love

  Chapter 53: “Better a Living Woman Than a Dead Hero”

  Chapter 54: Uprising

  Chapter 55: Living with History

  Chapter 56: Ring of Fire

  Chapter 57: Oslo

  Chapter 58: Life According to Agfa

  Chapter 59: Separation

  Chapter 60: “I Cry for You”

  Part IV 1995–the present: Walls

  Chapter 61: Three Kisses

  Chapter 62: Suha

  Chapter 63: The Angel

  Epilogue: Great Wall of Zion

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  For her passion and belief in this book, my profound gratitude to my agent and friend Dorothy Harman. Without you, Dorothy, this book would never have been written. Esther Margolis, our partner, has also worked tirelessly and with astonishing energy to make this book a reality. My thanks to my publisher and editor at Arcade, Jeanette Seaver, who has more than lived up to her reputation as one of the great figures in publishing today. With her legendary sense of language and story, Jeanette fashioned a manuscript into a book. The rest of the team at Arcade, through the proofreading and design process, has done an extraordinary job in making this book complete. Finally, I want to thank Clare, my love, who accompanied me on this journey.

  Prologue

  A Secret Story

  Sometimes it can seem that the only thing Israelis and Palestinians share is a common skepticism that there can ever be a solution to the conflict. As an American writer living and working in Jerusalem, this pervasive pessimism is what compelled me to write about Ruth Dayan and Raymonda Tawil. These two women, from the most prominent families of their respective nations, turned a chance encounter after the Six Day War into an improbable lifelong friendship that shows how, with empathy and common sense, the seemingly insolvable Middle-Eastern conflict can have an end.

  Ruth and Raymonda did more than defy national taboos. At great risk and, on occasion, attracting dangerous attention to themselves, both women worked together for decades to address the underlying sources of the conflict. The more time I spent with these extraordinary women, the more I realized their story had to be told.

  “How dare Ruth!” Raymonda said at the start of our Skype video conversation. She had just woken me up at 3 a.m. I was in my apartment in Jerusalem; she was at her home in Malta, where she lives with her daughter, Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat’s widow. After four years, I knew Raymonda well enough to distinguish between her emotions of anger, frustration, and hurt. She was clearly angry. I could see it in the way she kept slipping off her glasses and putting them back on again.

  “I don’t want to have a book now,” she continued. “How can I put my name next to Ruth’s? Do you know what she said
to me?”

  “Raymonda, calm down. Tell me what happened.” Despite the early hour, the idea that my book on Raymonda and her best friend, Ruth Dayan, would suffer yet another setback made me break out in a sweat. I’d already abandoned a ghostwritten version of the story in favor of a straight dual-biography. Would I have to start over again from scratch?

  “Anthony, I know how much time you’ve put in this book. But I just can’t go on. Make it into a novel if you want. Turn it into an Agatha Christie murder mystery because I think I’m going to kill her. . . .”

  “What happened?” I poured myself a cup of coffee.

  “What happened? As usual, Ruth defended Moshe. Can you believe it, after all these years?”

  From my experience, the two women’s forty years of friendship and their basic agreement on the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and on almost everything else, never prevented the occasional flare-up. Which was only to be expected because Raymonda Tawil was Yasser Arafat’s mother-in-law, and Ruth is the widow of Moshe Dayan, the most celebrated Jewish general since Joshua and a man who spent much of his military career doing everything in his power to hunt down Arafat.

  “Raymonda,” I said to her, sipping my coffee. “Ruth was married to Moshe for decades, she had three children with him, she loved him—and still does. Okay, you think he was a psycho. But . . .”

  She cut me off and insisted, with sniffles, that I call Ruth and tell her “finito! I’m pulling the plug on the book.”

  Ruth was awaiting my call. The woman nearly at the century mark has more energy than most college students. She, too, had the voice of someone who had just stopped crying.

  “Hi, Ruth.”

  “Hi.”

  “I just got off the phone with Raymonda, and she tells me you’ve been quarreling.”

  “Quarreling? She screamed at me.” Her voice was quivering.

  “She says you yelled at her first.”

  “And what do you expect me to do when she sends me such an email?” This was the first mention of an email. “And it’s all your fault.” When I inquired why I was to blame, she explained that my interviews with Raymonda had dislodged memories, reopening old wounds. “She wrote terrible things. Just awful. I will NEVER speak with her again.”

  “Ruth, I’ve heard you say that a dozen times, and you two always reconcile. You love one another.”

  “This time I mean it. Just read the email.”

  “What does it say?”

  Ruth got up and went to her office to read the email from the computer. Raymonda’s message began with “My dear Ruthy, you are a great woman, you are compassionate, full of humanity, a woman I can call my best friend because you are your own army of love. While your husband was hunting down our best men, you were racing around Palestine looking for women to help. You are a feminist hero.”

  “C’mon Ruth, it’s not such a bad letter.”

  “Why does she have to say that about Moshe?”

  “My God, do you expect Raymonda to like Moshe?” Ruth, who downplays her own latent case of PTSD, doesn’t fully appreciate how scarred the woman she calls her “soul mate” is after a life of exile and loss.

  “Well, that’s not the reason I’m finished with her,” she snapped with the gravelly voice of a longtime smoker. “Anyway, what can I do about Moshe and his wars? He’s long gone, and Arafat too is already in the ground. And I’ll be keeping them company soon enough. I’m not suited for this world any longer, what it’s become. I want to go . . . to nowhere.” Ruth, usually alive with the exuberance and vitality of a teenager, suddenly sounded weary.

  “So Ruth, why are you angry if it’s not because of Moshe? What else did Raymonda say?” When Ruth first contacted me to be her ghostwriter, never did I imagine I’d also need to be a psychologist and Middle East peace negotiator.

  “She said I was a colonialist. Can you imagine? Me? She was up in arms because she said there was a ‘Made in Israel’ tag on some embroidery we made in Bethlehem thirty years ago.” For decades Ruth ran a project for women in the occupied territories. “Those women had NO jobs.” She raised her voice. “Would Raymonda have preferred that we let them STARVE?”

  “Are you telling me that the two of you fought over a tag?”

  “Sometimes you really are stupid. It’s not just a tag. I spent the best years of my life working with Palestinian woman and here comes Mrs. Jane Fonda telling me I was an exploiter. I’ve never been more insulted.”

  I skyped Raymonda back to see if she had really called Ruth a colonialist, and she gave me a long lecture on how Palestinian embroidery was like handspun cloth for Gandhi in India. As she spoke I noticed the way she set her teaspoon down on a saucer and uncrossed her legs, like she was heading into a bruising fight.

  After a few more minutes of explaining to me the symbolism of a “Made in Israel” tag, she grabbed a book Ruth wrote in the 1970s, And Perhaps, flipped it open, and read aloud a passage that made Ruth sound like the smug wife of the colonial administrator: “Palestinians are called the Jews of the Arabs. Villagers would work in an Israeli supermarket. I was so thrilled that ordinary people meet on an everyday level.” With anger flaring up again in her voice, Raymonda then asked me to pass on the message to Ruth that she’d rather go hungry in her own country than work at the checkout aisle in an Israeli grocery store.

  For the next two hours, I was on the phone now with Ruth, now with Raymonda, until a three-way Skype conversation left us all laughing. The tag was forgotten, the friends loved one another again, and the book about their friendship survived another crisis. Raymonda said goodnight by admonishing her dear friend to stay healthy. “We need you, Ruth. We love you. We still have so many things to do together.”

  “Okay, Raymonda. I’ll keep going a bit longer.” Ruth pressed the palm of her hand onto the computer screen: she was wearing a ring made from a Roman coin given to her by the iconic former mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek.

  I first met Ruth at the end of 2008 after she rang me up and said I might be the right person to be her ghostwriter in recounting a “secret story” she had been lugging around for decades, and invited me to Tel Aviv. It was a bit like Barbara Bush contacting a historian with news of a “confession” she needed to get off her chest.

  I had just moved from New York to Jerusalem to take up a job teaching literature and media at a program run by Bard College inside a hard-bitten Palestinian university in the West Bank village of Abu Dis, right next to the Israeli Separation Wall. All I knew about the Dayans was that General Moshe was probably the most iconic figure in the Israeli pantheon, a military genius people placed in the company of Hannibal and Admiral Horatio Nelson. For my students, he was the dark, villainous crusader who in 1967 had conquered their country in six fateful days.

  Of course, like all my Israeli friends, I kept up on the scandals regarding Ruth and Moshe’s son Assi, the most famous scion of the Dayan dynasty. I was an avid fan of his darkly existentialist films, and of his hit sitcom Be-Tipul and its HBO version, In Treatment. A mass-market tabloid had recently featured Assi, the master of the nihilistic-surrealist vision of Israeli life, naked and sitting like an anchorite on a pillar with his false teeth clutched in one hand.

  The other fearless child, the daughter Yael, whose well-deserved fame comes from her championing of human rights—gays, illegal immigrants, and of course Palestinians—is also the high priestess of the family legacy, defender of the brand, and the Dayan child most like her father. Moshe’s missing eye, so to speak—Moshe lost one eye during the Second World War. Another Dayan, Moshe’s nephew Uzi, built the Separation Wall snaking through the West Bank. I crossed it every morning on the way to work. Other than that, the Dayan name was to me something like the Kennedys, a glittering dynasty generating boundless materials for historians, mythographers, gossip columnists, and urban planners looking for new street names.

  I took the bus down. Ruth lives across the street from a power plant, the Dov Hoz Municipal Airport, and
a construction site fueled by a building boom. Her apartment building is one in a line of nearly identical blocks. There is nothing in the middle-class and shrub-lined look of the place to suggest that the first wife of a Homeric legend lives upstairs.

  She buzzed me in and I took the stairs to her third-floor apartment. The door, with a ceramic, turquoise-colored nameplate in Hebrew and Arabic next to it, was already open, and someone from inside said, “Come in.” I stepped across the threshold, and there she was standing in front of me, with thick gray hair and a few strands drooping around her beautiful face. Set deep on the bridge of her nose were horn-rimmed reading glasses. She had on bubble-gum pink lip-gloss, a necklace made of smooth peach pits—Moshe, as I would later learn, made it for her while serving time in a British prison in 1939—and a flowing dress that could have been worn on the ballroom floor of the Titanic. The ring with a Roman coin was on her finger.

  “Hi, I’m Ruth,” she said holding out her hand and staring at me with pale green eyes. She spoke in perfect English with a slight British accent. When I shook her hand, she stepped forward and I realized she was barefoot.

  I stepped inside Ruth’s world, utterly dumbfounded. Festooned to the wall next to the door—too large to miss—was a painting of General Dayan in what looked like the pose of a Prussian officer, with the iconic eye-patch replacing the Teutonic monocle. “Oh, Assi did that,” Ruth explained with a chuckle. That the son of the chief architect of what most Israelis consider history’s most ethical army could create such a caricature was the first sign I was entering a weird and remarkable place.

  I wandered around the apartment, which was like a shrine. There were talismans in every nook and cranny. “Excuse the junk,” she said to me, gesturing with one arm. Dead for over thirty years, Moshe seemed to cast his long shadow into every corner of the living room. Hanging over a mother-of-pearl cabinet was a bronze and stainless steel replica of his head with an eye-patch. Her other son Udi, a sculptor who wields a blowtorch the way a poet does a pen, made it out of metal from a scrapyard. My eye caught sight of a black-and-white photo above the sofa, a framed photo of two young lovers sitting in grass reading a book of poetry. I had a mental image of the two teenagers rolling around in fields of daisies.