The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

by Sandy Tolan

The story of Dalia and Bashir was first broadcast as a special forty-three-minute documentary for NPR's Fresh Air, and the response was overwhelming.

The key to this openness, I think, lies in the interweaving narratives: When someone sees his or her own history represented fairly, it opens up the mind and heart to the history of the Other.

First had come the unbearable tension and the trauma before the six days of war. Alien voices broadcasting from Cairo told her people to go back where they came from or be pushed into the sea. Some Israelis thought the threats were funny, but for Dalia, who had grown up amid the silence of unspeakable atrocities, it was impossible to fully express the depths of fear these threats awakened.

For a month before the war, it had felt to her that the end was coming. "Not just the disintegration of the state, but the end of us as a people," Dalia remembered. Alongside this fear was a determination, born from the Holocaust, "to never again be led like sheep to the slaughter."

Dalia's family had been spared the atrocities in Bulgaria by acts of goodwill from Christians she was raised to admire and remember. Now, she believed her people had a destiny on the land of Israel. This was partly why she believed what she had been told: The Arabs who lived in her house, and in hundreds of other stone homes in her city, had simply run away.

Khair al-Din came from Morocco to preside as a judge for the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans, based in Istanbul, would rule Palestine for four hundred years. At its height, the empire stretched from the outskirts of Vienna through the Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. From Istanbul, the Ottoman sultan bequeathed to Khair al-Din the productive waqflands that would sustain the family for centuries. By 1936, Palestine was under the rule of a new overseer, the British, who had arrived at the end of World War I as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

The British had arrived in 1917, the same year of the historic Balfour Declaration, in which England pledged to help establish a "national homeland for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This was a triumph for Zionism, a political movement of European Jews founded by Theodor Herzl.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, and the situation for Jews was deteriorating across Europe. Within a few years, demands for Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. Underground Zionist organizations began smuggling boatloads of Jews in ever greater numbers from European ports to Haifa, along the northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine. The British authorities struggled to control the flow. Between 1922 and 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine quadrupled—from 84,000 to 352,000. During the same time, the Arab population had increased by about 36 percent, to 900,000.

By the mid-1930s. Arab leaders had declared that selling land to the Jews was an act of treason. They were opposed to a separate Jewish state, and, increasingly, they wanted the British out of Palestine.

In 1895, Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, had written that in purchasing land from the indigenous Arabs for a Jewish homeland, "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Indigenous. So like what we did to the Indians? Use might to basically take what was theirs?

with the evacuation of the Arab population from the valleys, we get for the first time in our history a real Jewish state."

"The whole Bulgarian Orthodox Church," he promised, "will stand up for the Jews."

at the critical time, ordinary people—in Kyustendil, in Plovdiv, in Sofia, across the country—stood by the Jews of Bulgaria. As a result, the Jewish population of an entire nation did not perish in the gas chambers at Treblinka.

Arabs argued that the Holocaust survivors could be settled elsewhere, including in the United States, which had imposed its own limits on settlement of European Jews. The Zionists, too, were intent on settling the refugees in Palestine, not anywhere else.

In February 1947, when the ship Exodus arrived in Palestine's Haifa port, British authorities refused to bend their immigration limits, denying entry to the 4,500 Jewish refugees and forcing them to board other ships and return to Germany. A French newspaper called the ships a "floating Auschwitz." The incident shocked the Western world and deepened support for the Zionist movement.

Despite the conflict, many Jewish intellectuals in Palestine had argued that Israel's long-term survival depended on finding a way to coexist with the Arabs.

A few Israelis raised their voices in alarm. "We still do not properly appreciate what kind of enemy we are now nurturing outside the borders of our state," the agriculture minister, Aharon Cizling, warned in a cabinet meeting. "Our enemies, the Arab states, are a mere nothing compared with those hundreds of thousands of Arabs [that is, Palestinian refugees] who will be moved by hatred and hopelessness and infinite hostility to wage war on us, regardless of any agreement that might be reached. . . ."

"The right of innocent people, uprooted by the present terror and ravage of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return."

In the span of a few months in 1948, two hundred thousand refugees had poured into this narrow band of sand dunes and orange groves along the Mediterranean, more than tripling its population. Two thousand people per square mile were crowded onto a strip of land surrounded by Israel, Egypt, and the sea. All supplies had to travel three hundred miles through the Egyptian desert and cross Gaza's only border with the Arab world—the Sinai Peninsula, to the southwest. "It is therefore hardly surprising that conditions very rapidly deteriorated,"

Gaza

Dalia found this trauma a direct challenge to her faith. Though Moshe and Solia had never been religious—they rarely went to the synagogue and were the essence of "secular Zionists"—Dalia's own belief in God had, she felt, always been a part of her. Few people in Ramla seemed to want to talk about what had happened in Europe during the war, but Dalia had seen the people with numbers on their arms. As she grew older, she learned about the atrocities in Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. She found this truth indigestible. For God to allow this to happen, she would recall thinking, is utterly unconscionable. She was furious. "You have created human beings!" she would shout to her Creator. "You have to take responsibility for Your creation! You have to be more active in preventing such things!"

an urgent telegram arrived in Washington from the U.S. embassy in Amman with a personal message from King Hussein. "USG [United States Government] seriously risking hostility of the entire Arab world and complete loss of influence in the area for the indefinite future by the appearance it has given to Arabs of identifying itself with Israel over the Tiran Straits and related issues,"

Six months earlier, in only six days, Israelis had engineered a stunning reversal of their image across the world: from victim to victor and also to occupier. The exhilaration of victory and the public exaltation in Israel and internationally had given way in some quarters to reflections on the brutality of war and the morality of the occupation. One young Israeli writer, Amos Oz, was already calling for a full withdrawal from the occupied territories on ethical grounds. Oz was also part of a team of young kibbutzniks who sought to chronicle the mixed emotions of Sabras, the native-born Ashkenazi Israelis, who were "dazed by the magnitude of their victory and, no less, shocked by the revelation of what war really is."

Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land. Their civilization, their history, their heritage, their culture. And now we are strangers. Strangers in every place. Why did this happen, Dalia? The Zionism did this to you, not just to the Palestinians."

"You are leaving us in the sea," Dalia finally said. "So what do you propose for us? Where shall we go?" "I'm very sorry, but this is not my problem," Bashir said quietly. "You stole our land from us. The solution, Dalia, is very hard. When you plant a tree and it's not the place for it to live, it's not going to grow. We are talking about the future of millions of people."

"Bashir," Dalia pleaded, leaning forward, "don't try to fix one wrong with another wrong! You want to turn us, again, into refugees?" What am I doing here? she thought. What is the point of continuing this conversation?

Each had chosen to reside within the contradiction: They were enemies, and they were friends. Therefore, Dalia believed, they had reason to keep talking; the conversation itself was worth protecting.

At the core of Dalia's faith was the conviction that personal dialogue was the key to transformation. If Bashir was in fact part of the PFLP, if he was connected to the Supersol bombing, it showed that "personal relationships meant nothing in the face of collective forces. If national interest comes before our common humanity," Dalia said, "then there is no hope for redemption, there is no hope for healing, there is no hope for transformation, there is no hope for anything!"

Dalia's family—they were all very kind. But what does that matter? They were the people who took our house."

Five days into the intifada, however, a new group emerged from the same Gaza refugee camp that had spawned the uprising. It would be called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas.

Hamas favored no recognition of Israel and no compromise on the right of return. The organization sought an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. Its charter described Jews as conspiring "to rule the world" and declared that the elimination of Israel would be a historic parallel to the victory of Saladin over the Crusaders eight centuries earlier. Hamas's uncompromising stance on the right of the refugees to return to their homes, and the group's growing role in social welfare programs in the occupied territories, would prove popular. The group was immediately seen as an on-the-ground rival to the PLO, whose leaders, including Yasser Arafat, were in exile in Tunis.

I appeal to both Palestinians and Israelis to understand that the use of force will not resolve this conflict on its fundamental level. This is the kind of war that no one can win, and either both peoples will achieve liberation or neither will.

"It's a different kind of self-understanding," countered Yehezkel, the religious scholar. "What are you going to do about that? Why do you think Israelis are afraid of you? We are not as afraid of the entire Syrian army with all its weaponry as we are of you. Why do you think that is?" Ghiath looked at Yehezkel in amazement. Nuha and Dalia remained silent as Yehezkel continued: "Because you are the only ones who have a legitimate grievance against us. And deep down, even those who deny it know it. That makes us very uncomfortable and uneasy in dealing with you. Because our homes are your homes, you become a real threat."

That is why you cannot be satisfied. For you, every viable solution will always be lacking in justice. In a peace plan, everybody will have to do with less than they deserve."

She knew this would not give Bashir everything he longed for or demanded. Yet, after all this time, she thought, must not each of us be willing to compromise?

"Why pretend we could defeat Israel by force of arms?" he would recall. "If that wasn't possible, why not face reality and deal?"

"He just kept saying 'no' to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own," Barak told Israeli historian Benny Morris. Arafat, Barak said, believed Israel "has no right to exist, and he seeks its demise." This became the prevailing view in the United States and Israel: that in rejecting Israel's "generous" offers, the PLO chairman alone was to blame for the failure at Camp David. Many other observers, including diplomats present at Camp David, believe the reasons for the summit's failure were far more complex and were partly the result of American favoritism toward the Israeli side and deficient understanding of the Palestinian perspective.

"For all the talk about peace and reconciliation, most Palestinians were more resigned to the two-state solution than they were willing to embrace it,"

"They were prepared to accept Israel's existence, but not its moral legitimacy," Malley and Agha wrote of the Palestinian delegation at Camp David. "The notion that Israel was 'offering' land, being 'generous,' or 'making concessions' seemed to them doubly wrong, in a single stroke both affirming Israel's right and denying the Palestinians'. For the Palestinians, land was not given but given back."

Yet for the many people who’ve been touched by The Lemon Tree—there are now some three hundred thousand copies in print, in multiple languages—it is also fair to ask: Given the bleak reality in the Holy Land, how much change can any one book generate?

Since Dalia and Bashir last saw each other, in 2005, multiple wars have devastated Gaza, killing more than 3,200 Palestinian civilians, including more than one thousand children, mostly killed by Israeli air strikes. During that same time, twenty-nine Israeli civilians died from Hamas or other militant rocket attacks launched from Gaza. None of those were children. Yet, despite the dramatic disparity in casualties, throughout Israel, and in the media, Palestinians are often portrayed as the aggressors, and Israelis, the victims.