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

by Sandy Tolan

To me Zion is an expression of my very ancient longing, for me it's a word that symbolizes a harbor for my people and our collective expression here. And for him, it's a regime of terror. Something that's an obligation to fight. And to resist in every way. Because for him if Zionism is a reign of terror, then terrorism is an appropriate answer!"

The Fanous family history in Ramla went back centuries. Michail's father, Salem, a Christian minister, had been held as a prisoner of war by the Israeli army after the occupation of al-Ramla in 1948. Salem Fanous had accepted imprisonment in the POW camp as God's will, but he would not tell his children about it until decades later, a few days before his death.

Michail had spent much of his thirty years trying to reconcile his identity as a Christian Palestinian citizen of Israel. He had grown up with the Zionist narrative, which for an Arab boy was inherently confusing. When his classmates insisted the other Arabs

had fled Ramla like cowards, Mikhail would shout, "No, they didn't, just ask my father!"

To them, accepting Oslo represented a surrender of 78 percent of historic Palestine; even the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, which represented the other 22 percent, Israel didn't seem prepared to hand over. Already the Israeli government had announced plans for thousands of new housing units in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisioned as their capital, and Israeli construction crews were building new "bypass" roads to better facilitate the travel of settlers from the West Bank to Israel.

On February 25, 1994, a medical doctor and American settler named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs, part of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where Bashir had received his aqiqa ceremony in 1943. The settler from Brooklyn pulled an M-16 from beneath his coat and opened fire, killing twenty-nine Palestinians praying in the mosque. Survivors pummeled him to death. Six weeks later, Hamas, the militant Islamic organization, abandoned its strategy of attacking only Israeli military targets. On April 6, a car bomb exploded in the Israeli town of Afula, killing six Israeli civilians. Hamas claimed responsibility. A communiqué declared the attack was revenge for those who died in the Hebron massacre.

Suicide bombers recruited by Hamas and Islamic Jihad blew themselves up in Netanya, Hadera, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and occupied portions of the Gaza Strip, killing dozens of Israelis; Hamas leaders claimed each attack on civilians was

a direct response to Israeli attacks that killed Pale...

"sleep deprivation, hooding, prolonged standing or sitting in unnatural positions, threats, beatings and violent whiplashing of the head. . . . Applied in combination, these methods often amount to torture." Many of the suspects were later released without charge.

but some of his longtime cohorts in exile built mansions in Gaza, all the more striking for their juxtaposition against the squalor of the refugee camps on one of the most crowded places on earth. One of the mansions, estimated to cost $2 million, was built for Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, who would later succeed Arafat as the leader of the Palestinians. "This is your reward for selling Palestine," a graffiti artist scrawled on the mansion stones.

For the average Palestinian in the refugee camps and cities, the withdrawal of Israeli troops and tanks would bring immense change to daily life. Anyone moving from town to town in the West Bank, however, still faced military checkpoints and the confusion of traveling through multiple jurisdictions. A map of the West Bank after Oslo II resembled a series of scattered islands, and critics of Oslo, whose numbers were growing, worried that the map resembled a fractured vision of a truncated Palestinian state.

Dalia believed that Israel had to give up the settlements in those lands and that thousands of Jews would have to move. Even though this was part of what she, too, considered the biblical land of Israel, for centuries it had also been home to other people. Hard as it was, Dalia believed, each side in this conflict had to give up something precious.

An hour west, in Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Rabin was at a rally at Kings of Israel Square, where one hundred thousand Israelis had gathered in support of peace with the Palestinians. The prime minister—who had fought against the Arabs in 1948, 1956, and 1967; who had authorized "might, force, and beatings" against Palestinian youths in the intifada; and who for years had opposed recognition of the PLO—addressed the crowd: I was a soldier for twenty-seven years. I fought as long as there was no prospect of peace. I believe that there is now a chance for peace, a great chance, which must be seized. . . . I have always believed most of the nation wants peace and is prepared to take risks for peace. And you here, who have come to take a stand for peace, as well as many others who are not here, are proof that the nation truly wants peace and rejects violence. Violence is undermining the foundations of Israeli democracy. It must be rejected and condemned, and it must be contained. It is not the way of the state of Israel.

Yitzhak Rabin was dead. He had been shot at point-blank range by a twenty-year-old religious law student, Yigal Amir. "I acted alone," Amir told police, "and on orders from God." Rabin's blood, Israel would soon learn, had seeped through his shirt pocket and soaked the page of the peace anthem.

Arafat did not budge. "If anyone imagines that I might sign away Jerusalem, he is mistaken," the Palestinian chairman told the president. "I am not only the leader of the Palestinian people, I am also the vice president of the Islamic Conference. I will not sell Jerusalem. You say the Israelis move forward, but they are the occupiers. They are not being generous. They are not giving from their pockets but from our land. I am only asking that UN Resolution 242 be implemented. I am speaking only about 22 percent of Palestine, Mr. President."

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.

"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."

Some accounts maintain that the apparent Israeli offer of 92 percent, when factoring additional land deductions in East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, actually amounted to far less, and that Israel would have retained sovereignty over airspace, aquifers, "settlement blocs" in the West Bank, and a "wedge" of Israeli land between East Jerusalem and the Jordan River that would have divided Palestinian territory. In essence, this critique holds, Palestine would have been...

"a reaction that reflected less an assessment of what a 'fair solution' ought to be than a sense of what the Israeli public could stomach. The US team often pondered whether Barak could sell a given proposal to his people, including some he himself had made. The question rarely, if ever, was asked about Arafat."

The next day, at the end of Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, large crowds of Palestinians began throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Most of the demonstrators were young men and teenage boys, and none fired weapons, according to later investigations. Israeli troops opened fire with live ammunition, killing four Palestinians.

Over the next eight weeks, however, nine times more Palestinians were killed than Israelis, and the disparity in rates of wounded civilians was higher still. Israel blamed this on Palestinians seeking "moral high ground by deploying children to stand in front of men with machine guns who fire at Israelis." Numerous fact-finding teams found such cases to be the exception, not the rule.

On the Israeli Right, talk returned of a disloyal "fifth column" of Arabs who might have to be expelled from Israel. Other prominent Israelis, including the tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi, advocated an increasingly popular idea: "transferring" all Palestinians out of the West Bank to Jordan and returning Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people.

"Suddenly, Arabs opened up with statements of pain," Yehezkel recalled. "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."

The talks came closer still, and at one point the two sides appeared close to an actual agreement. In the end, they foundered, in part on the issue of right of return. "We cannot allow even one refugee back on the basis of the 'right of return,' " Barak would say. "And we cannot accept historical responsibility for the creation of the problem."

In February 2002, Arafat published an appeal on the op-ed page of the New York Times, declaring that "the Palestinians are ready to end the conflict" and have a "vision for peace . . . based on the complete end of the occupation and a return to Israel's 1967 borders, the sharing of all Jerusalem as one open city and as the capital of two states, Palestine and Israel. It is a warm peace," Arafat added, "but we will only sit down as equals, not as supplicants; as partners, not as subjects; as seekers of a just and peaceful solution, not as a defeated nation grateful for whatever scraps are thrown our way."

In some areas, Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank met with little Palestinian resistance. Occasionally resistance was peaceful: In Ramallah, doctors at the Arab Care hospital sat down in front of Israeli tanks approaching the casualty ward. When Israel attacked Jenin in April, however, gunmen from the Jenin refugee camp fired back, and a major battle ensued. Israeli soldiers abandoned their armored vehicles and chased the gunmen down the narrow alleys of the Jenin refugee camp, where Palestinian fighters hid, waiting to ambush them. In response, armored IDF bulldozers plowed into the camp, demolishing more than 130 homes, shops, and refugee offices and burying some people alive under the rubble. At least fifty-two Palestinians were killed, twenty-two of them civilians.

In the summer of 2002, Sharon intensified a policy of demolishing Palestinian houses in the occupied territories—a policy initiated by the British during the Great Arab Rebellion of the 1930s. The Israeli policy was carried out against families of suicide bombers and other militants; for "military purposes," primarily in Gaza; and against Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem who had built without the permits Israel required of them. Human rights groups estimated that between ten thousand and twenty-two thousand Palestinians lost their homes as a result of the policy and hundreds of acres of their olive groves and other crops were uprooted as part of a military strategy to improve the nation's security.

"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."

At 7:10 A.M., the bus rolled to a halt at the Mexico Street stop in Kiryat Menachem. The doors opened, and more workers and students began to board. At that moment, Abu Hilail reached under his coat and detonated the bomb he had strapped to himself. The explosion ripped the bus apart, sending human limbs flying through the gaps where the windows had been.

The next day, Prime Minister Sharon ordered Israeli troops back into Bethlehem, where they reoccupied the city, imposed a military lockdown, conducted house-to-house arrests, and blew up five homes, including the house where Nael Abu Hilail had lived with his parents and siblings.

The day after the attack, an Arab resident living near the Landaus was stabbed in the back by three Jewish youths.

A Palestinian bakery down the road was stoned by an angry mob and its glass cases smashed.

Yehezkel came to the baker's family to show his solidarity and to try to reason with the group's leaders. They insulted him and questioned his Jewishness. "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. . . . My heart has broken many times as I confronted the deeply painful real...

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."

He had lost count of the number of times he'd been imprisoned, but it was safe to say that Bashir, now sixty-two years old, had spent at least a quarter of his life in a cell. This time, Bashir said, he was not convicted of anything, or charged, or even questioned. He

had spent most of his "administrative detention" playing chess and trying to keep warm in the outdoor tent prison.

For many Palestinians like Bashir, such claims, grounded in a 1948 United Nations resolution, remained paramount; for others they were less important than ending the occupation, now in its thirty-eighth year. Since the outbreak of the second intifada, more than 550 Palestinians under the age of eighteen had been killed. This was five times the number of Israelis of that age. One of the most recent victims was Iman al-Hams, an unarmed thirteen-year-old Palestinian girl. She was shot and killed by an Israeli officer, who then, according to accounts from his fellow soldiers, fired a stream of bullets into her body. 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.

Daily humiliation was unavoidable for Palestinians traveling out of their own town or village. Bashir himself had been waiting for months for the Israeli authorities to grant him the permission to travel to Jordan for medical treatment. Numerous reports documented ambulances denied passage at checkpoints. Other Palestinians endured lengthy waits in long lines at muddy, potholed crossings or on foot at the checkpoint turnstiles. In one incident, a young Palestinian man on his way to a violin lesson was told by Israeli soldiers to take out his instrument and "play something sad" before he was allowed to pass.

"We can't be scattered all over. And meanwhile, they [Israelis]

come from all over to live in our home." She crossed her arms. "Someone has to convince America of our right of return. Everybody should go back to his house. What about us these last fifty-six years? Whoever cares about us? Everybody cares only about them.

"Oh, my God," Dalia gasped. To her left, a long line of vehicles pointed south, nearly frozen in place. Young Palestinian men and boys passed between the cars, offering gum, cactus fruit, cucumbers, kitchen utensils, and soap to frustrated, immobile drivers.

This was Israel's "security barrier" separating the West Bank from Israel and, in some cases, the West Bank from itself. Construction for the barrier had begun in 2002 and would include six thousand workers digging trenches, stringing razor wire, erecting guard posts, laying concrete, and installing tens of thousands of electronic sensors. Part wall, part electrified fence, the construction project would cost $1.3 billion, or more than $3 million per mile. "The sole purpose of the

"They are building the wall," said Nidal, "so they don't have to look into our eyes."

Palestinians called the barrier the "apartheid wall" and accused Israel of grabbing more land in the West Bank under the guise of security. The barrier did not follow the 1967 border, or Green Line, and in some cases it carved deep into West Bank lands to incorporate settlements. In the summer of 2004, the UN's International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled, "The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law." The court suggested Israel was creating a "fait accompli" on the ground by annexing West Bank lands in lieu of a political settlement.

“He wanted to get to know me,” Bashir remembered. “They were so happy and excited to meet the character in the book. They were really happy that I built a friendship with Dalia.” “Despite what you have said,” said the agent, “we are still touched by the book.” “Unfortunately you don’t understand the message of the book,” Bashir said, still cuffed to the chair. Dalia had struggled to come to grips with the meaning of Palestinian dispossession, and had taken her own personal steps to help make amends. “Dalia was the only one in Israel who understood,” Bashir insisted. There was a pause. “I am aware of your history in Europe,” Bashir said. “So you recognize the Holocaust?” Solli asked. “Yes. But,” Bashir added, “you have gone from the victims to the victimizers.”

Every week, they go the site of a different village that once stood in old Palestine. They want to try to reclaim, at least for moments, a sense of their broader homeland, and to show, in the words of their guide, that “what we can do is to be here. This land is not just belonging to Israelis.” “The serendipity is quite mind-blowing,” Dalia says after learning of the group’s mission. “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.”