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

by Sandy Tolan

In 1974, the Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer published a memoir, With My Own Eyes, detailing her interviews with prisoners who had endured an "ordeal of beatings and humiliation." She described prisoners who showed evidence of blows to the head, hands, and legs; who told of

being punched in the face while blindfolded; who arrived for jailhouse interviews in bloodstained shirts; who described hanging from a wall by handcuffs tied to iron bars; who reported interrogations with "electricity and sticks"; whose feet and hands were bound until they bled.

Langer's accounts of abuse and torture would be supported by the Israeli League for Human and Civil

Rights, whose director, Israel Shahak, wrote in the foreword to With My Own Eyes that "nobody . . . whatever his political or philosophical opinions, can deny that the cases of persecution, oppression and torture described in this book are not only true in themselves, but are also characteristic of Israeli rule in the occupied territories."

The Times concluded, "Torture is organized so methodically that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders. It is systematic. It appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy."

Odeh's father, Josef, whose house was demolished about three weeks after the bombing, described being taken to the prison to witness his daughter's interrogation: When they took me back . . . Rasmiah couldn't stand on her own feet. She was lying on the floor and there were bloodstains on her clothes. Her face was blue and she had a black

eye. . . . They were beating me and beating her, and we were both screaming. Rasmiah was still saying: "I know nothing" And they spread her legs and shoved the stick into her. She was bleeding from her mouth and from her face and from her end. Then I became unconscious."

This was a time not only of cold war, but of revolution, inspired in part by massive and worldwide street protests against the Vietnam War and, in some cases, support of the Vietcong. In the third world, the Vietcong were often seen as freedom fighters and the United

States as their oppressors. Similarly, the Palestinian rebels, through the hijackings and other high-profile operations, quickly became identified on the Left with the struggle for revolutionary justice against an occupying power.

"When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we killed a hundred Israelis in battle," Habash said. "For decades world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us

now." In much of the world, however, the PFLP tactics had turned people against the Palestinians and their liberation movement.

The PFLP operations, moreover, provoked a massive Israeli crackdown. Thousands of Palestinians were jailed, including many who had no knowledge of any guerrilla operations. They were held indefinitely without charge. The PFLP tactics thus became a growing source of tension within the Palestinian nationalist movement, and in February 1969, the same month Bashir was arrested, a new faction broke off from the PFLP, soon to be called the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abu Laila, one of the DFLP founders, believed the "lunatic actions" of the PFLP against civilians outside Israel had "smeared the legitimacy of the resistance." The DFLP leadership also objected to the rhetoric of "pushing the Jews into the...

PFLP fighters staged perhaps the most spectacular operation in the history of the Palestinian resistance. Their plan was to simultaneously hijack three New York-bound airliners

from European capitals, thereby maximizing the number of U.S. passengers and the consequent international attention. The airliners would then land in an old British airfield in the Jordanian desert, where the passengers would be held until Israel released Palestinian political prisoners.

"I'm sorry," Bassam Abu-Sharif shouted through his megaphone to the several hundred passengers, standing in the sun in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, "we have just hijacked you to the desert in Jordan. This is a country in the Middle East, next to Israel and Syria. We are fighting a just war, a war for the liberation of our country from Israeli occupation. The reason you're in the middle of it is that we want to exchange you for prisoners who were taken in Israel and other countries."

After six days, the crisis at "Revolution Airport" ended with all hostages safe and three charred

jumbo jets in pieces on the tarmac, blown up by PFLP fighters to demonstrate their seriousness to the world. Within days, however, King Hussein used the PFLP's spectacle as reason for swift action against all Palestinian factions in the country.

Through her encounter with the Khairis, Dalia, now twenty-one years old, had begun to question the stereotypes she was raised with: the stories of mistrust, suspicion, and hatred.

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!"

"Bashir," Ahmad said when his son was finally sitting in front of him, "did you notice where this prison is? This is exactly where our olive trees used to be." Ahmad said the land had been bequeathed to Khair al-Din al-Ramlawi by the Ottoman sultan in the sixteenth century. The waqf land had remained in the family for at least twelve generations, until 1948. Bashir realized the symbolic was also the literal: He was being imprisoned on his own land.

He was barely able to see, but he could make out the figure of a Jewish man in his mid-fifties: Moshe Eshkenazi, from Bulgaria. The two men stood facing each other across the threshold: Ahmad and Moshe, two fathers of the same house.

"They could not extract a confession from me. They were false accusations. Because if they had been able to prove it, I would have been sentenced to life in prison, not for fifteen years. However, I am Palestinian. I have always hated the occupation. And I believe that I have the right to resist it by the means that are available to me. Yes, at one stage the means were violent. But I understood them. I understood the actions of the Palestinian fighters who were ready to sacrifice themselves. I still understand them."

In the eighteen years following the Israeli occupation in June 1967, an estimated 250,000 Palestinians—or 40 percent of the adult male population—had seen the inside of an Israeli jail.

"When Bashir was in prison, my father used to fall asleep with the radio in his lap," Khanom remembered. "When he heard the prisoners were on a hunger strike, he used to go on a hunger strike with them. We would tell him the strike was over so he would eat, and he would know we were trying to trick him. He would say, 'That's not true, they would have announced it on the radio.'

Indeed, the Camp David accords envisioned a five-year transition to "full autonomy" for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet Palestinians were not represented in the Camp David talks, and the accord did not address the dreams that remained central to millions of Palestinians: the right of return

and the future of Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state.

"We have suffered many massacres. Dawayma. Kufr Qassam. Deir Yassin. In the face of these massacres and dispossessions, if anyone thought that the Palestinians would react as Jesus Christ would have, he is wrong.

The house was Dalia's, legally. Nevertheless, "I could not deny that I lived in the house for all those years, while the family that built it had been

expelled. How do you balance such realities? How do you confront them and respond to them?

Israelis controlled the land the Palestinians lived on and guarded access to the streams and aquifers running through and beneath it. They could arrest and imprison Gazans or West Bankers under

shifting laws and military regulations not subject to public review.

Israel, wanting to weaken Arafat, had initially encouraged the growth of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, whose members had established Hamas. Now Hamas issued fervent denunciations of the "Zionist entity" and its repression of the intifada.

Local committees sprang up from the grass roots to coordinate demonstrations, plan hit-and-run operations against Israeli platoons, conduct secret classes when the Israeli authorities closed local schools, protest Israeli taxes, remove Israeli products from the shelves of local markets, and form bread, poultry, and sewing cooperatives to replace income when the men could no longer work in Israel.

In Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, thousands of Palestinians, part of a tax revolt against the Israelis, turned in their Israeli-issued ID cards and sat in silent protest at the municipality. Israeli troops dispersed them with tear gas.

In the first three weeks of the uprising, twenty-nine Palestinians would die in demonstrations as the Israeli army continued its policy of using live ammunition; soon, facing growing international criticism, Yitzhak Rabin, now defense minister, would shift IDF policy to "force, might, and beatings," as soldiers began deliberately breaking the hands and arms of stone throwers. Still, the death toll rose; in the first year of the intifada, at least 230 Palestinians would be shot dead by Israeli troops and more than 20,000 were arrested. Thousands were captured in predawn raids in the refugee camps, as soldiers broke down doors, hauled young stone throwers out of their homes, and loaded them onto buses. Many of the young men and boys would be jailed without charge under "administrative detention."

ISRAEL DEFIES UN AND DEPORTS FOUR PALESTINIANS, read a headline in the January 14 edition of the Times of London. "Israel defied the United Nations Security Council openly yesterday and deported four Palestinians to southern Lebanon, as its inner cabinet met to approve even tougher measures to put down the disturbances which are continuing unabated throughout the occupied territories," the dispatch stated.

The same day, under the headline FOUR EXPELLED SECRETLY, the Jerusalem Post reported on its front page that Bashir and the three other activists accused of "inciting riots in the administered territories" were "shuttled secretly by helicopter to the northern edge of the Southern Lebanon Security Zone at noon yesterday, without a word of notice to their families or lawyers." The deportations, the newspaper indicated, were widely denounced around the world as a human rights violation and antithetical to a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Even

the normally reserved U.S. State Department issued a statement of "deep regret" about...

"They deserve to have an entity. Not the PLO, not a state, but a separate entity." Rabin believed that Israel could not agree to the Palestinians' central political demand—recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and to Yasser Arafat as their leader. To do so, Rabin argued, would require Israelis to compromise on the right of return for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and that, the defense minister argued, would be "national suicide."

It was very painful for me, as a young woman 20 years ago, to wake up to a few then well hidden facts. For example, we were all led to believe that the Arab population of Ramla and Lod had run away before the advancing Israeli army in 1948, leaving everything behind in a rushed and cowardly escape. This belief reassured us. It was meant to prevent guilt and remorse. But after 1967, I met not only you, but also an Israeli Jew who had personally participated in the expulsion from Ramla and Lod. He told me the story as he had experienced it, and as Yitzhak Rabin later confirmed in his memoirs.

I well understand that terror is a term relative to a subjective point of view. Some of Israel's political leaders were terrorists in the past and have never repented. I know that what we consider terror from our side, your people considers their heroic "armed struggle" with the means at their disposal. What we consider our right to self-defense, when we bomb Palestinian targets from the air and inevitably hit civilians, you consider mass terror from the air with advanced technology. Each side has an ingenuity for justifying its own position. How long shall we perpetuate this vicious circle? . . .

You, Bashir, have already experienced one expulsion from Ramla as a child. Now you are about to experience another from Ramallah forty years later. You will thus become a refugee twice. You may be separated from your wife and your two small children, Ahmad and Hanine, and from your elderly mother and the rest of your family. How can your children avoid hating those who will have deprived them of their father? Will the legacy of pain grow and harden with bitterness as it passes down the generations? It seems to me, Bashir, that you will now have a new opportunity to assume a leadership role. By its intention to deport you, Israel is actually empowering you. I appeal to you to demonstrate the kind of leadership that uses nonviolent means of struggle for your rights . . . 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.

The Israelis controlled most of the zone, aided by a force they had financed and organized, the South Lebanon Army, but the area was far from pacified. Hostile villages chafing under the Israeli occupation had spawned the Army of God, or Hezbollah. Their objective was to expel the Israelis from southern Lebanon, to which end they began firing Soviet-made Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.

Left behind in Lebanon were nearly half a million Palestinians living in squalid refugee camps. They had arrived in Lebanon in 1948, fresh with the promise they would be going home "after fifteen days." Thirty-four years later, they still taught their children the names of streets in villages long since destroyed. None had been given Lebanese citizenship, which they assured their hosts they didn't want anyway. Their only wish, they insisted, was to exercise their UN-sanctioned right of return.

Their mission, ostensibly, was to root out two thousand militants said to still be in hiding after the departure of the PLO. As Israeli

generals and foot soldiers stood by just outside the camps, and the Israeli forces launched night flares to illuminate the militias' search, the Phalangist gunmen began a forty-eight-hour killing spree. Every living creature in the two camps—men, women, babies, even donkeys and dogs—was slaughtered by the Phalangists.

Israeli forces provided bulldozers for the digging of mass graves by Lebanese forces. By Israel's later estimates, at least 700 Palestinians had been slaughtered; one independent international commission put the death toll at 2,750.

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."

For nearly his whole life, he had watched Israel deny his right to come home while it accommodated waves of Jews from the Middle East, Ethiopia, Argentina, and the Soviet Union.