Raquela (57 page)

She left the hospital and made her way through the overgrown foliage to the nursing school. The glass entrance door was shattered. Through the yawning hall, she entered the once-luxurious living room. Empty. Desolate. The droppings of birds mingled with the rubble.

She closed her eyes. She saw Carmi. His British uniform. His movie-star smile. Carmi was singing:
Raquela…Raquela…Raquela…it's the most beautiful name in the world
.

At the United Nations the Arabs and the Soviets sought, as in 1956, to achieve in diplomacy what they had failed to achieve by blockade and war.

Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin himself flew to New York to address a special session of the General Assembly in June 1967. He accused Israel of “treacherous” aggression. President Lyndon B. Johnson, supporting Israel, called for face-to-face negotiations, freedom of the waterways, and a just settlement of the problems of refugees.

The Arabs refused. The special session ended in shambles. Meeting in a summit in Khartoum in September 1967, the Arabs adopted three “nos”: no recognition; no negotiations; no peace.

The next month, October 1967, the Security Council, undaunted by the three nos, adopted what would later become famous as “Resolution 242.” It called for “a just and lasting peace…withdrawal from occupied territories [though by no means withdrawal from
all
the occupied territories]…the renunciation of all forms of belligerency, blockade or organized warfare…freedom of navigation through international waterways…the right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries…a just settlement of the refugee problem.”

The refugee problem! Arthur Goldberg, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, who drafted much of Resolution 242, explained that settling “the refugee problem” meant settling it for all refugees, Jewish refugees as well as Arab refugees.

The victory of the Six-Day War opened the borders that had been closed since 1948, and a million Arabs, some in refugee camps, others living in towns and villages or on the land as farmers, came under Israeli military government.

In July 1967, Yasir Arafat, head of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), set up headquarters in the casbah in Nablus on the Israeli reoccupied West Bank. The PLO had been created in 1964 as an umbrella for Arab terrorist groups. Its covenant was simple:
DESTROY ISRAEL
.

In the months following the Six-Day War, Arafat, constantly moving his headquarters, organized saboteurs and terrorists to whip up the Arabs on the West Bank and in Gaza, to terrorize not only the Jews but also the Israeli Arabs who had remained loyal to Israel throughout the war.

The August morning was mountain cool. Moshe and Raquela drove south of Jerusalem through Bethlehem on their way to visit an Arab refugee camp outside Hebron. Hundreds of Arabs in white
keffiyehs
and white cotton pantaloons were doing road work with primitive picks.

“Machines could do in a few hours what will take these Arab workers weeks or months,” Moshe said. “But government policy is to give Arabs the same work relief we give new immigrant Jews, with the same pay.”

Outside Hebron, they drove through barren hills to the refugee camp.
Would it look like Athlit or Cyprus?
Raquela wondered. All these years she had seen devastating pictures of Arab refugee camps. Tents and muddy roads. Listless, weary men. Overburdened women. Half-naked children.

A United Nations sign, inscribed in English and in Arabic, told them they had reached the Fawwar Refugee Camp run by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency).

They entered the camp on foot. Raquela walked through the grounds unbelieving. No tents. No metal huts. No barbed wire. Nearly a thousand one-family houses in pastel pinks and grays ran in narrow streets up and down the small hills.

“This is like no camp I've ever been in!” she exclaimed. “It's like a modern town.”

Dozens of children followed them to the clinic. They introduced themselves to the camp nurse and a visiting UNRWA doctor and spent the next hour discussing the problems of the pregnant women and newborn babies.

They left the clinic and followed a line of people entering a warehouse. Inside, they watched curiously as each adult showed a ration card to a young Arab in white shirtsleeves standing behind a counter.

He checked the card, counted the names listed, and then handed out large cans of cooking oil, bags of lentils, and fifty-pound white muslin sacks of flour.

Raquela moved closer, reading the English legend on the flour bags:

BREAD FLOUR
ENRICHED, UNBLEACHED
“FORTIFIED WITH CALCIUM”
DONATED BY THE PEOPLE
OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NOT TO BE SOLD OR EXCHANGED

Driving home on the unfamiliar road, Moshe seemed lost in thought. Finally he said, “To be a refugee living in a camp is tragic. But to be used as a political pawn for nineteen years by Arab nations—God only knows what happens inside the psyches of children who grow up in an atmosphere of hate.”

Raquela was trying to sort out her emotions.

“When I think of how we took care of our refugees—especially the Jews who came from Arab lands…” She looked off into the horizon. “Keeping any people in a camp—even one like this, which looks like a suburb—does terrible things to them.”

“The Arab countries could have absorbed them easily,” Moshe said, “the way thirty-five to forty million refugees from World War Two were absorbed. Instead, the Arab states kept them in camps to fester, and contributed little or nothing to take care of them. Do you know who footed most of the bill—the American taxpayers!”

“I hate camps—all camps,” Raquela said bitterly. Memories of Athlit and Cyprus made her shudder. “I wish we could liquidate them, outlaw them all.”

“Hm,” Moshe grunted. “That would be Utopia.”

“They're evil!” Raquela exploded.

“Sure they're evil. Even the best camps are evil. People deteriorate in them. Become demoralized. It's a scandal. Take those ration cards we saw. Every person listed gets a monthly supply of food and clothes. Sometimes there are ten names on one card. The names never get crossed off. People die and their deaths go unreported. Young men leave the camps for Kuwait and other oil countries. They earn a fortune, but their names stay on the cards.” He chuckled. “The other day Prime Minister Eshkol joked at a meeting I went to, ‘When I'm reincarnated, I want to be an Arab refugee. You get everything for nothing and you never die.'”

A few days later, another scandal was revealed; the refugees had been selling their rations to buy guns and ammunition. American food—
not to be sold or exchanged
—had been exchanged for guns to kill Israelis.

Then the biggest scandal of all surfaced: the United Nations camps had become the proving grounds for terrorists.

In October 1969, the week Prime Minister Levi Eshkol died and Golda Meir was sworn in as interim Prime Minister, terrorists blew up a supermarket, tossed grenades into a bank, and bombed the cafeteria of the Hebrew University, where many of the students were Arabs as well as Jews.

Terror was on the streets, in the busy marketplaces. And still Yasir Arafat's
fedayeen
failed to disrupt daily life in Israel. His fighting arm, El Fatah, turned to a new form of terror: skyjacking.

The first plane to be hijacked was an El Al jet flying from Rome to Tel Aviv on July 22,1968. The terrorists forced the pilot to land in Algeria. Most of the world condemned the terrorists, and also Algeria, for granting them asylum, but aside from this, the world did nothing.

A year later, on August 28, 1969, a TWA plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv was hijacked and forced to land in Syria. Among the passengers was Shlomo Samueloff, professor of physiology at the Hebrew University, and husband of Raquela's friend, from training camp, Naomi Samueloff. He was held prisoner in Damascus for one hundred days.

Terrorism became a way of life. Israel retaliated with massive bombings of the Fatah strongholds. And still the terrorists failed to paralyze the country.

Jerusalem boomed. Mayor Teddy Kollek was now responsible for East as well as West Jerusalem. Born in Vienna in 1911, Teddy had come to Palestine as a pioneer in 1934 and helped found Kibbutz Ein Gev, on the Sea of Galilee. During World War II he was in Europe, in charge of contacts with the Jewish underground. He returned to become part of David Ben-Gurion's inner circle of idealistic men and women fighting for the birth of Israel. After the state was born, Teddy served as minister plenipotentiary in Washington, then returned to Jerusalem as director general of the prime minister's office.

Now, as mayor, he drew upon his vast experience to rebuild a united city. He drove his car at all hours of the day and night through the city streets. His office door was always open. Hadassah had taken a vow to return to Scopus; he gave them support. New apartment houses were rising on the hills all around the city; he helped choose the sites and the architecture. He extended the city's services—water, electricity, garbage collection—to the Arab sectors of East Jerusalem; he set up additional mother-and-child-care centers in Arab and Jewish neighborhoods; he met with the leaders of the three religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—to help the three communities coexist in a united city.

Each day thousands of visitors from America and Europe flew into Israel and headed straight for Jerusalem. Christians and Jews entered the Old City to worship in churches and synagogues that had been closed to them during the nineteen years of Jordan's occupation.

A new exodus began. Russia finally opened a crack in the Iron Curtain and allowed thousands of Jews to leave. They were scientists, engineers, doctors, nurses, artists, musicians. A new ingredient in the pressure cooker.

The cities were burgeoning; the population, with births and new immigrants, reached three million.

On the West Bank, Israel taught the Arab farmers how to farm their land with twentieth-century tools, and allowed them to truck their produce across the “Open Bridges” to Jordan. The West Bank grew prosperous. Israel helped the Arabs market their roses to Europe, their strawberries to England, where the Queen dined on them for breakfast even in winter.

Across the Open Bridges, Israel permitted tens of thousands of Arabs from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab lands to come from Jordan, to take their sick to Hadassah and other hospitals, to visit relatives and travel freely about the Jewish state.

These were pieces of the peace. But “a just and lasting peace” was still a dream. The Arabs kept repeating, No recognition, no negotiation, no peace.

In November 1969, Amnon, now eighteen, began his three-year army service.

Raquela balanced her life with work and the family. The U.S. government renewed its grant to the research team. They were to continue the study of all infants and pregnant women in Jerusalem, recognized more and more as the ideal city for the controlled study of pregnancy, its diseases and cures. The team under Dr. Davies and Raquela published its first scientific paper, “The Jerusalem Perinatal Study,” in the
Israel Journal of Medical Sciences
.

In the summer of 1971 Raquela filled the house with Papa's lilies. Jenny, Moshe's firstborn, was marrying Yaakov Navot, a dark-haired young man with luminous dark eyes, the oldest son of nine children born in Morocco.

Only Papa was missing. Papa—strong, loving, Papa, who had been father to Amnon and Rafi after Arik's death, who had planted the trees under which the ceremony was now held—was dead.

As a wedding present to the young couple, Moshe and Raquela sent them to England, where Yaakov enrolled in the London School of Economics while Jenny worked in the Israeli embassy.

Soon after the wedding, Raquela and Moshe took Rafi with them to Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, where Moshe taught medical education. While Rafi attended public school, Raquela, free of responsibilities for the first time in years, relaxed in the social life of academe and took trips with Moshe and Rafi into the gently rolling countryside.

In February 1972, Raquela returned to her work in Jerusalem, rested and happy, but Moshe was restless. The Kupat Holim (the Sick Fund of the Histadrut Labor Federation) had come to him, as professor of medical education, and asked him to work out a program for a community-oriented medical school.

There were now three medical schools in Israel—in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Sitting in his study at home one evening, Moshe listed on a long yellow pad the things he felt were wrong in all three medical schools, including his own, in Jerusalem.

Intrigued by his list, he then set down what he would do if he could start all over again. It was he who had molded the first medical school in Israel in 1951.

Long past midnight, Raquela entered the den. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Coming to bed, Moshe?”

His face was flushed with excitement. “Look at this.” He handed her the pad.

Raquela studied his notes. “Moshe, this material is fantastic! This whole idea of yours—it's the human side of medicine, not only the scientific. You've got to fight to promote it. It could revolutionize medicine.”

“That's it exactly. I want to see medical education and medical care combined. You have to work with both hands. I'd like to see medical students go out into the community the very day they start medical school. I want every student involved with patients—with human beings—in their homes, where they live. All that our students see now is the bed in the hospital. But ninety percent of medicine happens
outside
the hospital. In homes. In places like your mother-and-child-care centers. These are never seen by students. I can see this happening on a regional basis; the best place might be the Negev frontier in that young university in Beersheba, the University of the Negev.”

Moshe organized his recommendations into a position paper. The Kupat Holim and the University of the Negev, enthusiastic about the proposal, submitted his paper to the National Council of Higher Education for approval.