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

by Sandy Tolan

The plan stipulated that 54.5 percent of Palestine and more than 80 percent of its cultivated citrus and grain plantations would go to a Jewish state. Jews represented about one-third of the population and owned 7 percent of the land. Most Arabs would not accept the partition.

Why, they asked, should their homeland become the solution to the Jewish problem in Europe?

The Haganah would soon develop detailed battle plans, including the control of Jewish areas beyond the UN partition line, in an area designated as part of an Arab state.

"The boundaries of the state," Ben-Gurion wrote, "will not be determined by a U.N. resolution, but by the force of arms."

"Regrettably, our forces have committed criminal acts that may stain the Zionist movement's good name," Shitrit would say later.

Talk of a return to Zion went on for several decades in the pages of prewar Zionist newspapers in Bulgaria. Arabs already living on the land did not figure in these discussions, and some Bulgarian Jews would recall reading about the "land without people for a people without land."

A statement from the extremist Jewish militia group the Stern Gang claimed responsibility, calling UN observers "members of foreign occupation forces." David Ben-Gurion, Israel's prime minister, detained two hundred members of the Stern Gang, including one of its leaders, future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, and ordered the other extremist Jewish militia, Irgun, led by another future premier, Menachem Begin, to disband and turn over its weapons to the Israeli army.

The right of return originally advocated by Count Bernadotte was enshrined by the United Nations in December 1948. UN Resolution 194 declared that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of

those choosing not to return."

It was already clear, however, that Israel had no intention of implementing Resolution 194 and that the United Nations had no power to enforce it.

For the refugees—the destitute in the camps or the more well-off like the Khairis—the central trauma was not in selling off gold or finding enough to eat. Rather, it lay in the longing for home and, conversely, in the indignity of dispossession.

Bashir and his siblings breathed in the atmosphere of humiliation and defeat, and for Ahmad's firstborn son, avenging the loss of Palestine became a singular goal, even in play. His siblings and neighborhood children would find pieces of wood to fashion as guns and play "Arabs and Jews," like cowboys and Indians, in the dirt streets.

With its capture of territory beyond the UN partition line, Israel was now in control of 78 percent of Palestine.

Bashir would remember

learning the history of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, which he, his classmates, and his Palestinian teachers could speak of from personal experience and with deep conviction: The Jews expelled us; we have a right to return.

The Palestinians had begun to understand that their return would not come about through diplomatic pressure. Though the Palestinian "right of return" dominated most conversations in the streets, souks, and coffeehouses, it was clear that no government in the world was prepared to force Israel to accept the terms of the resolution guaranteeing the right of return.

In a letter to the UN's Palestine Conciliation Commission, the director of Israel's Foreign Ministry wrote that "it would be doing the refugees a disservice to let them persist in the belief that if they returned, they would find their homes or shops or fields intact. . . . Generally, it can be said that any Arab house that survived the impact of the war . . . now shelters a Jewish family."

Over the years, for Bashir and hundreds of thousands of other refugees, hope for return had turned to despair and then rage.

As for the Arabs, Dalia's textbooks would report that they ran away, deserting their lands and abandoning their homes, fleeing before the conquering Israeli army. The Arabs, one textbook of the day declared, "preferred to leave" once the Jews had taken their towns. Dalia accepted the history she was taught. Still, she was confused. Why, she wondered, would anyone leave so willingly?

For the Sabra, the Holocaust survivors often represented the shame of Jews going like sheep to the slaughter. Thus, Dalia would recall years later, the phrase Never again was not only a promise by Jews not to repeat the past; it indicated a desire, rooted in shame, to distance themselves from the image of the victim.

David Ben-Gurion famously called Holocaust survivors "human dust" and said that "turning these people of dust into a cultured, independent nation with a vision will be no easy task."

An agricultural worker charged with turning Holocaust survivors into productive farmers advised colleagues: "We must understand who we are working with . . . a community of rejects, of pathetic and helpless people.

To the outside world, Israel had made it clear, once and for all, that it would never grant the Palestinian refugees the right of return. The year before, the Israel Lands Administration had destroyed some of the last remaining Arab villages in a campaign known as "Leveling Villages," and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, in response to criticism from an Arab Knesset member, replied, "Not destroying the abandoned villages would be contrary to the policy of development and revitalization of wasteland, which every state is obliged to implement."

For Palestinians, resistance meant no compromise on the right of return, no matter how firm Israel's position. Bashir, like most Palestinians, believed there was only one way the land would come back to his people. Force expelled us from our land, he reasoned, and only force will get it back.

For nineteen years, Palestinian refugees had been waiting for the moment when they would return to their homes. At first they had

thought this would happen in a matter of weeks. When Israel barred them from coming back, hopes shifted to the UN resolution advocating the right of return. Years later, still in exile, the refugees began to put their faith in "armed struggle."

She had never felt like this, yet she understood that for others something terrible and familiar was reawakening. Later she would recall it as a "collective fear of annihilation." Her mother's face wore an expression of perpetual worry.

But in a community where people were still walking

around with numbers on their arms, Dalia believed, "one had to take sick fantasies seriously."

An aggressive armed force was able to oust that people from their country and reduce them to refugees on the borders of their homeland. Today the forces of aggression impede the Arab people's established right of return and life in their homeland. . . . I may ask how far any government is able to control the feelings of more than one million Palestinians who, for twenty years, the international community—whose responsibility herein is

inescapable—has failed to secure their return to their homeland. The UN General Assembly, merely confirms that right, at every session.

"We thought the victory was in our hands," Bashir would say thirty-seven years later. "That we would be victorious and we would be going back home. After nineteen years we really had the very strong feeling that we were going back to our lands, houses, streets, schools—to our lives. That we would get our freedom back, that we would be liberated, that we would get back to the homeland.

Palestinians could rely only on themselves to deliver their own justice. It was clear that the right of return, guaranteed by United Nations Resolution 194, would never

be delivered by the UN or the international community.

Fathers demanded their sons seek the safety of higher education in Cairo or London; one son, a young man named Bassam Abu-Sharif, asked his father, "What is a PhD when we have no country?" He did not want to be "an eternal foreigner, a landless, homeless, stateless, shamed, despised Palestinian refugee."

to Bashir, his family, and hundreds of thousands of refugees in the camps of the West Bank and Gaza, the sudden nearness of the lost gardens made exile even more intolerable. In the summer of 1967, the dream of return was as ferocious as ever.

For the Israelis, the annexation would unite both sides of Jerusalem and provide Jews with permanent access to holy sites, including the Temple Mount; for the Arabs of East Jerusalem, whose dream was to have the capital of a future Palestinian state in their midst, "unification" was a belligerent act by an occupying power.

"You are a leader," they would tell Bashir. They had been following his activities with the striking lawyers and assumed he knew much more. "Give us details about the resistance." Each time, his reply would be the same: "I believe in one thing: Palestine. And I hate one thing: occupation. And if you want to punish me, do it."

In either case, the boundaries would be far different from those outlined by the 1947 UN partition plan. Israel would retain control of 78 percent of historic Palestine, including al-Ramla and Lydda.

On December 11, a few miles from the house in Ramla, Palestinian rebels attacked Israel's national

airport. The action was a failure tactically, but it marked the arrival of a new faction in the would-be independence movement: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Its leader was George Habash, the refugee from Lydda who had marched through the hills in the punishing heat in July 1948.

At the end of 1967, Bashir was released from jail. He would report days of interrogation; no formal charges were filed.

On the other hand, many soldiers returned to the kibbutz disturbed by the feeling of having become, in the words of one Sabra, "just machines for killing. Everyone's face is set in a snarl and there's a deep growl coming from your belly. You want to kill and kill. You've

got to understand what things like that did to us. We hated and hated."

Israelis had increasingly seen themselves as a nation of victims, especially since the 1963 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem had pulled the Holocaust from the shadows. Now the Sabras, many of whom were children of Holocaust survivors, found themselves confronting an occupied civilian population: mothers pleading with soldiers for the release of their sons; wives, for their husbands; old men bent over sticks, looking with confusion at a battalion passing by and yelling in a language they couldn't understand.

As warm as the family was, Dalia was struck by how temporary their home felt. She looked around at the couches, the tile floor, and the framed photographs on the wall. Yet something central was missing. Dalia couldn't identify it precisely, but she felt as if the whole family was sitting on its suitcases.

"And I started expressing my understanding of their sense of exile," Dalia recalled. "And that I could understand their longing for their home. I could understand their longing for Falastin through my longing to Zion, to Israel. And their exile I could understand from my own exile. I had something in my collective experience and through which I could understand their recent experience."

Bashir had never been able to understand how another people's ancient longing—their wish to return home from a millennial exile—could somehow be equated with the actual life of generations of Palestinians who lived and breathed in this land, who grew food from it, who buried their parents and grandparents in it.

"I know that my people were killed, slaughtered, put in gas ovens. Israel was the only safe place for us. It was the place where the Jews could finally feel that being a Jew is not a shame!" "But you are saying that the whole world did this, Dalia. It is not true. The Nazis killed the Jews. And we hate them. But why should we pay for what they did? Our people welcomed the Jewish people during the Ottoman Empire. They came to us running away from the Europeans and we welcomed them with all

that we had. We took care of them. But now because you want to live in a safe place, other people live in pain. If we take your family, for example. You come running from another place. Where should you stay? In a house that is owned by someone else? Will you take the house from them? And the owners—us—should leave the house and go to another place? Is it justice that we should be expelled from our cities, our villages, our streets? We have history here—Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramla. 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."