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

by Sandy Tolan

British Mandate from 1917 to 1948,

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.

As Dalia says, "Our enemy is the only partner we have." SANDY TOLAN

July of 1967.

group taxi

Sheyrut

War of Independence;

Nakba, or "Catastrophe."

Near the jacaranda stood the lemon tree.

Dalia was aware she had grown up in an Arab house,

It was 1936, and Ahmad Khairi was building a home for his family.

farmers in Palestine would produce hundreds of thousands of tons of barley, wheat, cabbage, cucumber, tomato, figs, grapes, and melons. The Khairis tended oranges, olives, and almonds in a communal waqf, land owned collectively by the extended family and administered under Islamic law.

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.

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. By this time, the Khairis of al-Ramla

The Khairis' stone house was finished by late 1936.

But the sense of security the Khairis might have hoped for in their new home, on the land their families had inhabited for centuries, was tempered by the reality of daily life in Palestine in late 1936. By then, their homeland was in the midst of a full-scale rebellion.

The Great Arab Rebellion

Wednesday evening, April 15, 1936, as Ahmad Khairi and his friend Benson Solli made plans to break ground in al-Ramla, the trouble began.

The attacks, reprisals, and counterreprisals had begun. The British brought in military

British troops responded with baton charges, live ammunition, and a new tactic: demolitions of the stone homes of suspected rebels and their relatives.

cotton from Gaza.

sprinkled sugar and pistachios atop the kanafe.

By the end of 1936, a relative calm had settled on Palestine. The Arab Higher Committee had suspended its general strike and rebellion in response to a British promise to investigate the underlying causes of the conflict.

Peel and his fellow commissioners recommended Palestine be partitioned into two states—one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. "Partition offers a prospect," the Peel Commission concluded, "of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace." Hundreds of Arab villages, and at least 225,000 Palestinian Arabs, were inside the proposed boundaries of the new Jewish state;

some 1,250 Jews resided on the Arab side of the partition line.

The Arabs would fight for a single, independent, Arab-majority state.

Still, Mustafa Khairi was a mayor in a land under foreign occupation and by definition needed to cooperate with the British authorities. Despite his self-image as a nationalist, he was known to oppose Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the rebel leader of the Arab Higher Committee. Sheikh Mustafa was for a time a member of the National Defense Party, which was aligned with Husseini's rivals, and considered to be "collaborators" with the Zionists.

The new British policy marked a sharp change from the Peel Commission plan of only two years earlier.

The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine.

By the turn of 1940, the British authorities had finally defeated the Arab Rebellion

by orchards and wheat fields close to the mountainous

British officials announced they would hand over the problem of Palestine to the newly formed United Nations. A UN fact-finding team arrived to investigate the roots of the struggle for Palestine. It was the eleventh such fact-finding body to come to the area since 1919.

the fall of 1947, nearly everyone in Palestine was anxious about the UN investigation and how its recommendations could determine their future.

arguileh (water pipe)

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the ex-mufti of Jerusalem, was in exile and his image permanently tainted in the West. The ex-mufti had taken up with the Nazis in Berlin, where he tried to mobilize Arab support for the Axis. To many Arabs in Palestine, the ex-mufti was still a nationalist hero fighting against the British and the Zionists, and they looked to him to deliver an independent state across the whole of Palestine and to defend them in the event of war. These would be extremely difficult tasks to perform, especially from exile.

In November, Transjordan's King Abdullah met secretly with Zionist leaders along the Jordan River, and the two sides forged an agreement to essentially divide Palestine between them: The Jews would have their state, as outlined in the plan being discussed in the United Nations, and Abdullah would expand his desert kingdom to include land on the west bank of the Jordan River, on territory the UN was considering as an independent Arab state.

On the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, the UN General Assembly had voted, thirty-three states in favor, thirteen opposed, with ten abstaining,

to partition Palestine into two separate states—one for the Arabs and one for the Jews.

A UN minority report, which recommended a single state for Arabs and Jews, with a constitution respecting "human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction as to r...

Palestine was to be divided. After three decades of colonial rule, the British would leave on May 15, 1948. If all went according to plan, the Arab and J...

The partition would place more than four hundred thousand Arabs in the new Jewish state, making them a 45 percent minority amid half a million Jews.

There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only sixty [actually 55] percent."

At Deir Yassin, an Arab village just west of Jerusalem, Jewish militia had massacred hundreds of women, children, and unarmed men. Details were scarce, but the family heard stories of innocents being lined up and shot in their homes by the militia of the Irgun and Stern Gang. There were rumors of rape. Ahmad and Zakia were terrified. They had nine children, seven of them girls.

On May 14, in the nearby coastal city of Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence

"It is," he proclaimed, "the self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in its own Sovereign State."

Truman had barely signed his letter when Egyptian ground forces were attacking Israeli settlements in the Negev and advancing toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem;

Syrian and Iraqi forces were entering Palestine from the east; and soldiers of King Abdullah's Arab Legion were crossing the Jordan River and marching west.

Legion forces took up positions in Ramallah and Nablus north of Jerusalem, on lands Abdullah wanted for the "W...

After the massacre by Irgun forces in Deir Yassin, the specter of that militia penetrating al-Ramla had city leaders in a state of near panic.

armistice