An Improbable Friendship Read online

  A mere dozen years later, Ruth married a farmer who could gallop bareback on a horse like an Apache.

  At the time of Moshe Dayan’s birth in 1915, his parents Shmuel and Dvora lived on the collectivist kibbutz called Degania, the “Wheat of God,” close to the Sea of Galilee. As with the Schwarz family, matriarchal dominance characterized the Dayans. Shmuel, not able to endure the backbreaking demands of farming, got work with Dr. Ruppin at the Jewish National Fund whose mission was scouting for land to buy for new Jewish settlements. With her jet-black hair worn in a coronet and covered with a kerchief Russian-style, Dvora was the intellectual of the family: before arriving in Palestine, she studied statistics and sociology in Kiev and in 1910 made a pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana to touch the body of the dead saint. At Degania with her stout constitution, she also did most of the heavy work around the farm.

  The family soon moved to a new agricultural commune after the JNF bought 20,000 acres from the Sursuks, a Lebanese Christian family who centuries earlier had gotten it from the Ottoman government. For generations the farmers from the Arab village of Ma’alul, just up the hill, had been working the land, never imagining it could change hands so easily. JNF agents, doing some crude philology, assumed the Arabic “Ma’alul” was a bastardized form of “Nahalal,” the Israelite town Joshua had given to the Tribe of Zebulon. Shmuel Dayan and JNF men named the new settlement Nahalal.

  Life was harsh in the malarial frontier country known as the Plain of Esdraelon or, in Hebrew, “Emek Israel.” Dayan’s son Moshe was named after the legendary redeemer who once upon a time led his people from Egyptian captivity; it was also the name of a local Jewish boy murdered by a Bedouin donkey thief. Moshe was one of the first children born on a kibbutz, the ur-kibbutznik, a Zionist Davy Crockett. One Israeli historian would label him the “first born of the sons of redemption.” The weekly bath in the Dayan household was in a big copper tub, the water heated over a wood fire outside, and each member took turns in the bathing.

  Moshe barely attended school because he was too busy farming. His skin turned dark in the sun while planting, reaping and riding the wagon up the hill to Ma’alul to deliver wheat to the only mill in the region.

  Ruth and Moshe’s courtship was brief: they met during a summer camp Ruth attended in Nahalal in 1934. Back home in Jerusalem, she couldn’t get the handsome Moshe out of her mind—the “first born of the sons of redemption” was the ultimate catch. A year later, she returned to Nahalal for good with a trunk filled with clothes and books. While taking a few walks around a eucalyptus forest, the two young lovers carved their names on a tree—“M. + R.” That was the extent of their courtship.

  Marrying Ruth and joining the Schwarz household offered Moshe some immediate dividends. While he was prepared to join a work team in the swamps that was, he confessed to his bride, a “real paradise of malaria and tuberculosis,” he openly envied her middle-class family in Jerusalem and the perks of city life. Even more enticing was her access to power. The Schwarzes were a lot better connected than the Dayans. Rachel and Tzvi were high school schoolmates with top members of the Zionist leadership in the country. They were also close to the founders of the Haganah, the underground Jewish army.

  Rachel Schwarz might have been a socialist, but she couldn’t imagine her daughter living in a leaking shack and sharing her life with a penniless and uneducated country bumpkin. She spoke with Harold Laski, the Marxist economist whom she knew from her time at the London School of Economics, and with Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist movement. Laski and Weizmann in turn pulled strings with Cambridge University to offer Moshe a spot. Ruth and Moshe took a fourth-class passage on the SS Mariette Pasha, packing a few threadbare clothes into a Bedouin rug of camel hair instead of the proper leather suitcase offered by Ruth’s parents. They made a rather “lunatic pair,” Ruth recalled, with their grubby sandals and decidedly egalitarian attitudes.

  The let’s-rough-it attitude only went so far. Rachel and Tzvi subsidized them with regular sums of money, and their upper crust friends helped find them a place to stay. Moshe first had to learn English properly. The two pedaled around the city on old bicycles, with Ruth helping him improve his English.

  Moshe hated London, despised the damp climate, and it offended his Bedouin sense of male honor to be dependent on a mere girl to communicate with people he wanted nothing to do with, anyway. His attention was soon back on Palestine, a country suddenly aflame with civil war.

  2

  The Syrian Prince

  Months after the Schwarz-Dayan wedding, in April 1936, at his Montfort Castle on the other side of the Esdraelon Valley from Nahalal, Habib Hawa threw a glittering three-day wedding extravaganza for his sister-in-law. The English called Habib the “Syrian Prince” because of his poise and sense of entitlement, and the fact he lived in a Crusader fortress.

  Habib was raised in a wonderful jumble of worlds: on top of the pyramid stood the Ottoman governor and his retinue of officers and belly dancers, there were the patriarchs in Jerusalem, Latin and Greek with their icons and archaic rivalries; next came families like his headed by men traveling back and forth to Alexandria, Damascus, and Beirut on the new railway line, men who carried on long conversations about a better future over the glowing red embers of a nargilla while sipping Lebanese wine. These aristocratic families were served by a bevy of butlers and maids and mistresses. On the bottom of the social rung were peasants sweating in the fields. Bedouins with long flowing desert robes occasionally led their camels through the countryside. Automobiles began to appear on the roads when Habib was a young boy.

  Habib was a product of the Ottomans, if only because its decrepitude determined much of his early life.

  His grandfather was the governor of Aleppo and his father the honorary British consul. Habib studied at the elite Jesuit St. Joseph School in Lebanon and then Alexandria—when he returned to Palestine on visits, he took a private train. In the Galilee, his family owned 40,000 acres around the family’s Montfort Castle, and members of a Druze clan took care of the tobacco fields, the pork farm, and the stables of Arabian horses.

  Back in Alexandria he lived the life of a young dandy. He grew a fashionable toothbrush mustache and cavorted with his class peers and the demimondes of the city, lighting the ladies’ Dunhill cigarettes using ten-pound notes.

  Habib eventually headed off to study law at the Sorbonne and stood out with his olive-colored thin face, his tall and slender frame, his francophone polish and refinement. Following the British capture of Palestine in 1918, he returned to Acre to manage his family’s far-flung and feudal string of properties and estates including seventeen villages. Habib, with his own ship for trading in wheat and other commodities, became the chief contractor of the British army in Palestine and Egypt.

  Habib reminisced to his daughter Raymonda many years later, after becoming a pauper with a bad limp from an Israeli bullet, how since the days of Richard the Lionheart the country hadn’t seen such a grand wedding feast. “I was like King Sarastro in the Magic Flute!” There were belly dancers, French chefs, costumes for a ball, a full orchestra brought in from Cairo, and over a hundred guests, including top British officers and Arab notables with herringbone jackets and monographed handkerchiefs.

  Raymonda’s mother, Habib’s wife and the sister of the bride, was the only one at the castle privy to his secret plan. With the brandies and finest whiskeys flowing, he chose the perfect moment to launch a rebellion he hoped would frustrate, once and for all, the Zionist designs on his country and his honor. Under the veneer of the pleasure-seeking grandee, free-wheeling, fun-loving Habib was an Arab nationalist with a strong awareness of a thousand years of family history in Palestine, and someone who regarded British rule as a mere stopgap before Arabs could become the masters of their own fate.

  The English brought modern administration, indoor plumbing, the rule of law, and helped Arabs build a modern society, and for that he was grateful. What he resolutely
opposed was the Zionist plan to erect a tractor-drive modern Jewish state in Palestine, and to do so with British backing.

  To get to the castle in their fleet of Fords, Citroëns, Mercedes, and even a few Rolls-Royces, guests traveled along a bumpy country road. Most of the invitees must have been delighted to attend the three-day party because it felt like reentering the romance of the Crusader period. Nowhere in Palestine was there such pomp, nowhere was the food so sumptuous, nowhere the atmosphere more glittering. The only frown in the otherwise perfectly choreographed ceremony was on the face of Habib’s sister Sylvie. It had been four years since her younger brother had “dishonored” the family by marrying “the wild villager,” and she had yet to forgive him.

  The “wild villager,” named Christmas and the sister of the bride, wore a Coco Chanel dress, rayon stockings, and a string of pearls. Habib was still very much in love with his wife’s lithe beauty, feisty character, and American-bred independence: Christmas came from a family in the Christian village of Kfar Yassif close to Haifa, and was raised in New York. She had decisively New York attitudes about gender, democracy, equality, and the ludicrousness of class snobbery. She would be the source of her daughter’s feminism. She and Habib’s sister Sylvie avoided one another. In a society in which women were expected to “keep among themselves,” Christmas smoked cigarettes with the officers and businessmen, talked politics with some of the invited political leaders, and held her own during debates about the brewing conflict with the Zionists.

  On the second day of the wedding party, following yet another bacchanal feast, and after Habib had retired to his chamber for a nap, Christmas saw the signal from the valley. She roused her husband and told him the guerrillas were ready to strike.

  Habib dressed in his tuxedo and tails, stopped the thirty-piece orchestra, and asked the British officers to meet the guerrilla leaders he now summoned up from his stables. The meeting was brief and cordial. Without giving away details of precise time and place, Habib let the officers know there would be trouble that evening. The two sides shook hands, the officers left the wedding, and the fighting broke out later that night. Nahalal, the biggest settlement in the north of the country, was the first target. The Plain of Esdraelon has been the pathway of warriors since the Battle of Megiddo in the fifteenth century BCE. There the Greeks battled the Maccabees, and the Jewish armies defied the Romans; Mongols, Mamluks, Salah al-Din, and Allenby all seized the valley because of its immense strategic worth. It was the most natural place for the rebels to begin their attacks.

  That night guerrillas shot dead the gardener who had taught Moshe how to graft fruit trees.

  3

  Night Squad

  Meanwhile, in London, Ruth dragged Moshe to the Old Vic Theatre to see Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; not understanding a word, he left at intermission. Ruth, on the other hand, sat enraptured at strong, noble, beautiful Julius Caesar, played by John Glenn. She cycled home, the line burning in her ears: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

  The fact that Moshe’s parents had named him after a victim of Bedouin violence was a constant reminder that the Jews had but a tenuous hold on their ancient land. Though for Arab nationalists the Zionist appetite for land was a casus belli, the leaders of the Yishuv had no choice other than rapid expansion. With the Nazis in power in Germany, they had to bring as many Jews in from Europe as possible, and this required buying land for the growing population. Arthur Ruppin, alarmed by events in his native Germany, had what he described as a “congenial” chat with the chief Nazi race theorist, the so-called “race pope” Dr. Hans F. K. Günther, a man obsessed with blond hair and long Aryan foreheads. Jews weren’t inferior to “Aryans,” Dr. Günther assured him; they just had no place in Germany. Ruppin and the Zionist leadership worked hard to transport shiploads of threatened Jews to Palestine.

  For Moshe, the need for the Zionists to break the will of the Arab opposition was greatly reinforced by the first reports of the raid on Nahalal. With his teacher killed, and family and friends under attack, being marooned in London threw him into a fury. He began snapping at Ruth over trifles; everything was wrong, the weather, the food, the people, and English language; if she didn’t share his feelings about Erez Yisrael, there had to be something wrong with her, too.

  Ruth cabled home an SOS, and Ruth’s parents immediately sent money for the tickets, and the two were off.

  Habib Hawi continued supporting the nationalists as the rebellion spread out and turned more deadly. He moderated his backing with prudence after a British district commissioner was assassinated in the Galilee and the British overreacted by dispatching a group of Arab notables into exile. The leadership of the rebellion shifted away from men such as Habib, university-educated gentlemen, to armed gangs and unlettered men fighting in the name of Islam.

  As part of a system of defense against raids, Moshe joined a group from Nahalal to set up a settlement in the hills just above Nahalal, the site mentioned in the Bible. Moshe, Ruth, and their friends lived in the makeshift fortress, continuing working on their farms, hiring themselves out as guards, or planting JNF pine seedlings to transform treeless grazing lands into the King George V Forest.

  Ruth and Moshe got a room in a primitive two-room shack with a crude wooden planked floor. Moshe banged together a table and bed from oak logs. The outhouse was located out back, in the direction of a reeking cowshed.

  Insurgents took shots at the hut after sundown. Moshe wasn’t around much. He had received orders from the Haganah to join the Jewish Auxiliary Force, a British special police unit preventing guerrillas from puncturing holes in an oil pipe and lighting the oil on fire. By the spring of 1937, as commander of a small group, Moshe wore a woolen Turkish tarbush and khakis with sergeant’s stripes.

  Once again, Ruth’s elite background helped Moshe, a mere rural cop, rise above his village origins. Her first teenage boyfriend Zvi, a fellow Jerusalemite, was now a rising star in the Haganah, and with his sense of purpose and ambition, his education in languages and military strategy, and his charisma, many considered Zvi destined to lead the underground organization. One day in 1937 he pulled up to the Dayan hut behind the wheel of a Studebaker loaded down with heavy guns and grenades. In the passenger seat was Orde Charles Wingate. Wingate, wearing a safari hat, was the British army’s top man in counter-insurgency operations and someone Moshe would come to consider a genius, the “Lawrence of Judaea.”

  Wingate, a Scotsman and member of the Plymouth Brethren sect, was also a crackpot noted for tics such as wearing an alarm clock around his wrist and, in a threadbare Palm Beach suit or preferably naked, belting out his favorite Old Testament passages. Winston Churchill’s personal physician considered him fit for a lunatic asylum.

  “Ruthie,” Zvi called from outside the hut. The familiar voice made her knees wobble, and she struggled to catch her breath, as if the oxygen had been suddenly sucked from the room.

  She opened the door and led Zvi and the British officer into the house. Was it a mistake not to stay with the gangly Zvi with his china-blue eyes, who wrote her love letters and even a short book written by hand into a school notepad titled “Diary of a Bloated Fool”? Wasn’t Zvi brimming over with life, the opposite of brooding, melancholy Moshe? Wasn’t he the only one who ever truly loved her? Sure, she and Moshe took trips up to the ruins of a nearby Crusader castle to make love. But Moshe was more businesslike than romantic, his mind never fully turned from the fighting down in the valley.

  Zvi gave Ruth an awkward peck on the cheek, and from his furtive stares she sensed his undiminished love. But Zvi wasn’t there to rekindle a teenage flame. He drove to Nahalal to recruit Moshe into Wingate’s Special Night Squad. Moshe came in from the field behind the hut, greeted the two men, and suggested they step outside to talk. He wasn’t certain he could trust Wingate, and instructed Ruth to rifle through his knapsack in search of anything suspicious while the men discussed military affairs.

  In the mont
hs that followed, Ruth saw less and less of Moshe, as he developed a student-guru relationship with the strange Scotsman. Before carrying out an operation, Wingate recited passages from the Book of Joshua referring to particular tracts of territory, and like a football coach he pepped up his warriors with talks of “You are sons of the Maccabees, the first soldiers of the Jewish army.” Following each successful ambush, he stripped naked, munched his raw onions, and buried himself again in the King James Bible.

  Moshe picked up from Wingate a fondness for the ancient Israelites. He was especially impressed with Joshua’s—and Wingate’s—“iron will” and his desire to “carry the fight to the enemy.” One letter to Ruth recounts a guerrilla action against eighty Arab insurgents with Wingate at the front, his stout pistol in hand and his bible in his knapsack, and Moshe and seven of his men trailing behind.

  Arabs, naturally, regarded the Scotsman and his counter-insurgency methods as criminal. Wingate ordered his commandos to burn down or blow up over one hundred houses in Kfar Yassif, Christmas’s ancestral village.

  4

  The “Cripple”

  Ruth was hoping that the birth of their first child in 1939 would keep her man around the hut more, and the name they gave their daughter must have put a wide smile on Wingate’s face: “Yael” is the fearless woman in the Bible who dispatched her pagan foe with a tent peg.

  But Ruth saw Moshe even less because Mandate authorities, while shooting and bombing Arabs into submission and chasing the mufti out of Jerusalem, had at last admitted that the policy of creating a Jewish homeland against the will of the majority of the population was a lot more trouble than it was worth, especially with war on its way in Europe. The new policy, introduced in 1939 and known as the White Paper, throttled Jewish immigration, severely limited land purchasing, and foresaw a transitional period of ten years during which the British would maintain control, followed by elections for an independent national parliament. The math was obvious: free elections meant Arab domination and the end of the Zionist dream. Habib and his friends clinked glasses of brandy, toasting diplomatic victory.