by Robert Fisk, The Independent

“I was born here and I have a right to live here – the same thing goes for the Arab population”

On the wall of the flat is a photograph of a beautiful young woman with long, dark hair. She is sitting on a lawn with a handsome young man in British uniform.

I am sitting opposite a lady aged 95, the sea glittering behind her Tel Aviv balcony, her memories of the old Palestine and the new Israel as sharp as a teenager’s. She is the woman in the photograph.

The man is Moshe Dayan, the former Israeli chief of staff who conquered East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Golan in 1967, Israel’s golden boy, whose values – so his widow Ruth Dayan believes – have been distorted by the country’s present leadership.

After Zionism
Many times she has spoken out to tell the world – and Israelis – that the country’s right-wing governments are ruining Israel, that Zionism has “run its course”.

Now she sits in her tartan skirt, surveying her journalist visitor.

“I could look you up on the internet in two minutes,” she says. “I read that you are pro-Arab. You shouldn’t be. You should be pro-world. There shouldn’t be any discrimination between races. Discrimination has a lot to do with what’s happening. The Bible is a beautiful philosophical book. But it’s full of cruel wars…”

I tell Ruth that she shouldn’t believe all she reads on the internet, that a website recently denounced me as a Mossad agent because I had “revealed” in The Independent that my mother’s maiden name was Rose. She bursts into laughter. “When Israelis tell me there is “no one to talk to” [among the Palestinians], it gets on my nerves,” she says. “Most people who deal in politics, don’t see Arabs. I go to the terri- tories – but I have to have a [Israeli] permit to get into Ramallah.”

Her accent in English is poised, slightly upper crust and she obviously admires the country which ruled mandate Palestine until 1948. “I am an Anglophile,” she says proudly, a woman born in Ottoman Palestine in 1917, moving to London with her parents. She was “the only child in the whole of England who was a Jewish Palestinian”.

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