An Improbable Friendship by Anthony David

Author:Anthony David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2015-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

33

Honor Killing

In February 1970 Assi was enough of an international star to be invited to London to audition for the role of the communist Perchik in the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof. During a stopover at the Munich airport, while walking to the El Al 707 with the pilot and an actress heading for the same audition, he saw Arabs running toward them. “What are they doing?” he turned and asked the pilot. “Assi, not all Arabs are terrorists,” the pilot jested, which was his way of telling Assi not to be so paranoid. But the men, Marxist rivals to Arafat’s Fatah movement, kept racing pell-mell toward them and began shooting and tossing bombs. A bullet hit the leg of the actress. One passenger was killed, eleven wounded. Assi got off unscathed, but his international acting career took a fatal hit because American newspapers spun the attack as an assassination attempt against him. Signing on the son of Moshe Dayan during the high-water point of international Palestinian terror was too much an insurance risk for the producers. Paul Michael Glaser ended up landing the role of Perchik.

Months after the attempted hijacking, Ruth got a call from her sister Reumah. She had to rush to a military hospital in Tel Aviv. She and Ezer’s only child, Saul, was in critical condition. While serving on the front line in the Israeli-occupied Sinai, an Egyptian sniper shot him in the head. Doctors weren’t sure he would survive. At the hospital Ezer, the cocky, hard-drinking, always joking architect of the Six Day War, sat in the corridor with his face in his hands. From the movements of his shoulders, Ruth knew he was crying. Was the conquest of the Sinai and West Bank worth Saul’s life? Ezer was asking himself the same question that night.

On the way back to Assi’s apartment in Jaffa, Ruth stared up at the sky. It was a clear evening and the star Sirius twinkled bright. Her mind turned to her first love Zvi and the torpedo that probably sent him and his men to the bottom of the sea. All the territory in the world couldn’t compensate Ruth for the lives she’d seen ruined or destroyed because of war.

Ruth, to keep her mind off Moshe and now Saul, turned much of her attention to the Palestinians. Abie Nathan asked her to deliver toys to the death-defying nuns at the “La Crèche” convent who were operating an “underground railroad.” The sisters furtively searched garbage dumps for babies abandoned by their unmarried mothers; families saw in them “seeds of the devil.” Often, pregnant woman fled to the convent from fathers and brothers who, as in some dark fetish, felt they had to butcher them to redeem family honor. The women gave birth behind the safety of convent walls. Working with Israeli and European women’s groups, the nuns helped some of the women escape with their children across the Green Line into Israel.

Having been raised by nuns, Raymonda was well acquainted with the brave “La Crèche” sisters’ dangerous rescue work.

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