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

by Sandy Tolan

Arafat, however, knew that Muslims around the world expected the Palestinians to be custodians of the Haram al-Sharif and therefore that no Palestinian could sign away sovereignty. He knew that if he did, he might not live long enough to see any agreement implemented. "Mr. President," he said to Clinton, "do you want to come to my funeral? I would rather die than agree to Israeli sovereignty to Haram al-Sharif."

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.

All of this was exacerbated, according to these critics, by poor American preparation and rivalries between Madeleine Albright's State Department and Sandy Berger's National Security Council, which resulted in what American insiders calle...

"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'.

"Liberal, well-meaning Israelis who thought they were building cultural bridges and alliances were forced to confront the fact that there were endemic problems and injustices in Israeli society that required much more than cross-cultural encounter and coexistence activity. It required social and political transformation on a societal scale."

son of the late dean of Tel Aviv University Law School. "I won't take part in a siege enforced against hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children," Sergeant Rosen-Zvi declared in a letter to a superior officer. "I won't starve entire villages and prevent their residents from getting to work each day or to medical checkups; I won't turn them into hostages of political decisions. A siege against cities, like bombing raids from helicopters, does not stop terror. It is a sop to placate Israel's public, which demands 'Let the IDF win.'" Israel's policies, the young "refusenik" declared, were creating "nurseries of terror."

"I could share their anger over the incessant terror attacks," Yehezkel wrote later in the Jewish magazine Tikkun, "but I vehemently rejected their racist and hateful attitudes.

I am part of the problem because I came from Europe, because I lived in an Arab house. I am part of the solution, because I love."

Dozens of the deaths were of children under ten years old; thirteen were babies who died at checkpoints as their mothers gave birth. "With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli," an Israeli columnist wrote. "Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent?"

Ghiath had adopted what he considered a patient and practical attitude. "I can't draw the map of the world in two hundred years," he said. "Before one hundred years there was no Soviet Union. Two hundred years ago, Ottoman troops were in Vienna. Before two hundred years, there was nothing called Germany. Who is to say what the next hundred years will bring? Now Israel rules America. But I don't know what happens after one hundred years. It is the Israeli opinion that for the time being I cannot go back. So I yield up: I don't plan for coming generations. We can't do anything."

"The intifada brought us this wall," Ghiath proclaimed. He shrugged. "I'm a practical person. Since I can do nothing, I'm sad for nothing. If what you want does not happen, want what happens."

On the wall to her left was a picture of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP and PLO official assassinated by Israeli helicopter rockets in 2001.

We don't have our independent state, and we don't have our freedom. We are still refugees moving from one place to another place to another place to another place, and every day Israel is committing crimes. I can't even be on the board of the Open House. Because I'm Palestinian, not Israeli. If somebody comes yesterday from Ethiopia but he's Jewish, he will have all the rights, when I'm the one who has the history in al-Ramla. But for them I'm a stranger."

By not accepting the state of Israel or by not accepting the state of Palestine, I think none of us has a real life here.

And it's so clear to me that you and your people are holding the key to our true freedom. And I think we could also say, Bashir, that we hold the key to your freedom. It's a deep interdependence. How can we free the heart, for our own healing? Is this possible?

For Dalia, the key to coexistence lay in what she called "the three A's": acknowledgment of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948, apology for it, and amends.

Yes, she believed, the Palestinians have the right of return, but it is not a right that can be fully implemented, because the return of millions of Palestinians would effectively mean the end of Israel.

For Dalia, the solution lay in two states, side by side—much as they had existed prior to the Six Day War in 1967,

Bashir believed the solution lay rather in 1948 and the long-held dream of return to a single, secular, democratic state.

"Our enemy," she said softly, "is the only partner we have."

Yes, being moved to understand history in a new way is powerful indeed. Yet it is something else to understand and influence the structures of power which hold the status quo in place; indeed, which squeeze the pincers ever tighter.

“I often ask myself questions about the memories of the places. For me it always has to do with the expansion of the heart. I find it a constant challenge to my own bias. For me it always confronts me with the story of the other.”

They are symptomatic of a steady deterioration of relations between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israel claims ever more West Bank land, the settler population surpasses eight hundred thousand, and seventeen Israeli settlements encircle East Jerusalem, long the place Palestinians fought for as the capital of their new nation of Palestine.

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.

Palestinians are often portrayed as the aggressors, and Israelis, the victims.

Jerusalem. Under these proposals, Israel would retain military control around Palestinian borders, and even control the precious underground water lying beneath Palestinian cities and towns.