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

by Sandy Tolan

I began interviews with Bashir Khairi in Ramallah and Dalia Eshkenazi Landau in Jerusalem,

It had even developed its own militia, the Haganah, which, in addition to the extremist militia groups Irgun and the Stern Gang, fought to expel the former benefactors.

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.

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.

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

These battered refugees-turned-soldiers were highly motivated to defend their new homeland and joined an organized infrastructure that had been decades in the making.

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

Two months later, in the wake of the conquest of al-Ramla and Lydda, Israeli officials would not acknowledge that forced expulsions had taken place. In an August 1948 report submitted to the International Red Cross conference in Stockholm, the Israeli delegate declared "that approximately

300,000 Arabs left their places of residence in the territory occupied by Israeli forces, but not one of them has been deported or requested to leave his place of residence [emphasis in original]. On the contrary, in most of the places the Arab inhabitants were given to understand that there is no reason whatsoever for their flight . . . "

As for the former residents, the Israeli government designated them as "absentees." They had simply run away, Moshe and Solia were told, with their soup bowls steaming on the table.

This law would become an endless source of bitterness between Israel and the Arab world for the next half century and beyond. For the Palestinian Arabs in exile, the law, and each wave of Jews admitted to the new state, denied their own dreams of return; for the Israelis, the law went to the core of their identity: to provide a safe haven for every Jew who wished to make aliyah, the Jewish migration to Israel.

The model held up for all of the immigrants, especially the men, was the Sabra, the native-born Israeli whose optimism, strength, and mythical heroism was something for all to aspire toward. Sabra came from the Hebrew word tzabar: a. cactus fruit, thorn-covered but sweet inside. In 1950s Israel, the Sabra was the New Israeli Man: handsome, tough, physically strong, an ardent Zionist, upbeat, without fear, and unencumbered by the weakness of his ancestors. The Sabra, by definition Ashkenazi, from a

generation that had come to Palestine before the Holocaust, had shed the shameful baggage of the old country. He had become, in essence, the Israeli embodiment of Ari Ben Canaan, Leon Uris's hero in Exodus. The Sabra was, in the words of one Israeli writer, "the elect son of the chosen people."

Social engineers consciously cultivated this image as an alternative...

Two young men emerged from the growing guerrilla movement: Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad. Arafat and Abu Jihad believed

return would come only if it was led by an autonomous Palestinian political and military organization devoted to armed struggle. Neither

Together the two men had founded the guerrilla group Fatah in the wake of the Suez conflict.

"3000-man raid with tanks and planes was all out of proportion to the provocation"—in this case, a Fatah land mine that had killed three Israeli soldiers on November 11.

The president assured the king that "my disapproval of this action has been made known to the government of Israel in the strongest terms." He also addressed a fear King Hussein had expressed since the raid.

Regarding "Your Majesty's concern that Israel's policies have changed and that Israel now intends to occupy territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River," the president assured the king, "we have good reason to believe it highly unlikely that the events you fear will in fact occur. Should Israel adopt the policies you fear it would have the gravest consequences. There is no doubt in my mind that our position is fully understood and appreciated by the Israelis."

The Arab states still put up a rhetorical front—in the days after the war, they would publicly declare "no reconciliation, no negotiation, and no recognition" regarding Israel—but these were increasingly taken as empty words by Palestinians.

fedayeen—freedom fighters, or, literally, "those who sacrifice."

happen. The next month, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" in exchange for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

The irony was that Bashir was trying to shield Dalia from the eyes of her own army, of which she was now a part. She was faced with a decision, and she came to it quickly: She would not allow anyone to tell her whom she could or could not see.

"spectaculars" brought a sense of power out of defeat and attention to the Palestinian cause as never before. Many Palestinians believed their attacks were against not Israeli civilians, but rather "soldiers in civilian clothing" in a "colonial settler regime" that could be mobilized against them in a moment's notice.

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.

Five weeks earlier, Gaza and then the West Bank had exploded in demonstrations against Israel's rule. For twenty years, Palestinians living in the Israeli-controlled territories had seen nearly every aspect of public life dictated by an occupying force. Israelis determined school curriculum, ran the civil and military courts, oversaw health care and social services, established occupation taxes, and decided which proposed businesses would receive operating

permits. Though the Israelis had allowed the formation of some civil institutions, including trade unions and charities, by the mid 1980s the 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza seethed under occupation. 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. For twenty years, resentment and resistance had built up, and by late 1987, it had reached a point of explosion.

Gaza refugee camp that had spawned the uprising. It would be called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. Its leader, a crippled, bearded, middle-aged man named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had fled with his family from the village of al-Jora in 1948; the village was later destroyed and the Israeli city of Ashkelon built on its rubble.

The group was immediately seen as an on-the-ground rival to the PLO, whose leaders, including Yasser Arafat, were in exile in Tunis.

Israel, wanting to weaken Arafat, had initially encouraged the growth of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, whose members had established Hamas.

Hostile villages chafing under the Israeli occupation had spawned the Army of God, or Hezbollah.

"You mean," Dalia said, "they will be evacuated for you to return to your original homes? I hope you can understand why Israelis are afraid of you. Israel will do everything to prevent the implementation of these dreams. Even under a peace plan you will not return to your original homes."

Dalia said, "I'm not going to explain to you what the yearning for Zion means to us. I will just say that because you see us as strangers in this land, that is why we are afraid

of you. You should not think that I myself am free of fear. I have a good reason to be afraid: The Palestinian people as a collective have not accepted the Jewish home in this land. Most of you still consider us a cancerous presence among you. I struggle for your rights despite my fears. But your rights have to be balanced against our needs for survival. That is why you cannot be satisfied. 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."

He who plants barley, Dalia, will never reap wheat. And he who plants hatred can never reap love. That leadership has planted hatred in our hearts, not affection. It has destroyed all human values the day it destroyed our childhood, our existence, and our right to live on the soil of our homeland. Your change, Dalia, and your new perspective was attained through research and investigation. And your ability to see things the way they are in reality, not the way they were told to you.

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...

You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything. These things have consequences. Failure will mean the end of the peace process. Let hell break loose and live with the consequences. You won't have a Palestinian state and you won't have friendships

with anyone. You will be alone in the region."

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...

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...

"For all the talk about peace and reconciliation, most Palestinians were more resigned to the two-state solution than they were willing to embrace it," Malley and Agha wrote.

"They were prepared to accept Israel's existence, but not its moral legitimacy," Malley and Agha wrote of the Palestinian delegation at

Camp David. "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."

Barak and other Israelis charged that Arafat had planned the new intifada as part of a "grand plan" of terror and violence after the failure at Camp David. 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.

"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."