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

by Sandy Tolan

I have not taken liberties with the history, no matter how minor. At no point do I imagine what probably happened, for example, at a family event in 1936 and state it as fact; nor at any moment do I describe what someone was thinking unless those thoughts are based on a specific recounting in a memoir or interview. Rather, the scenes and sections of the narrative are built through a combination of the available sources.

It was the true story of one house, two families, and a common history emanating from walls of Jerusalem stone on the coastal plain east of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. From a single house, and the lemon tree in its garden, lay a path to the histories, both separate and intertwined, of the Khairi and Eshkenazi families, and to the larger story of two peoples on one land.

Like many Americans, I grew up with one part of the history, as told through the heroic birth of Israel out of the Holocaust.

I knew of Israel as a safe haven for the Jews. I knew nothing about the Arab side. For millions of Americans, Jew and Gentile, it was the same. They too were raised with the version of Middle Eastern history as told in Exodus, Leon Uris's hugely influential mega-bestseller, first published in 1958, then made into a movie starring Paul Newman. In Uris's engaging novel, Arabs are alternately pathetic or malicious, or perhaps worse; and they have little real claim to their land: "If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it—much less run from it without real cause." But as generations of historians have since documented, and as Dalia and Bashir recounted to me in their own words, the actual history of the two peoples' relations is far more complex, not to mention richer and more interesting.

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. Though I've reported from more than thirty countries over the last twenty-five years, the feedback I received from that single program was greater than that from all the stories I'd ever done, put together. Clearly the story had awakened a desire for a deeper narrative, one that would penetrate beneath the headlines and the endless cycles of repeated history, and explain how we got to this difficult place.

Not everyone is comfortable hearing the story of the Other.

In Gloucester, Massachusetts, a lifelong supporter of Israel said that this was the first talk about the subject of Israel and Palestine that he had not left feeling angry.

understanding can only come from a recognition of each other's history.

When someone sees his or her own history represented fairly, it opens up the mind and heart to the history of the Other.

tensions. The British had arrived in 1917, the same year of the historic Balfour Declaration, in which England pledged to help establish a "national homeland for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This was a triumph for Zionism, a political movement of European Jews founded by Theodor Herzl. The British had authorized "an appropriate Jewish agency" to help develop public works, utilities, and natural resources—in essence, the beginnings of a Jewish government in Palestine.

Between 1922 and 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine quadrupled—from 84,000 to 352,000. During the same time, the Arab population had increased by about 36 percent, to 900,000. In those intervening fourteen years, as the Jewish community in Palestine had grown more powerful, a nationalistic fervor began to rise among the Arabs of Palestine. For decades, Arabs had been selling land to Jews arriving from Europe. Gradually, as land sales increased and Jewish leaders pressed their call for a state of their own, many Arabs began to fear Jewish domination. Already more than 30,000 Arab peasant families, or nearly a quarter of the rural population, had been dispossessed through the sale of land to Jews, many by absentee Arab landowners. The families arrived impoverished in the cities of Palestine and in many cases earned wages by building houses for the new Jewish arrivals. By the mid-1930s. Arab leaders had declared that selling land to the Jews was an act of treason. They were opposed to a separate Jewish state, and, increasingly, they wanted the British out of Palestine.

The act of planting was thus an act of faith and patience.

Arab nationalists had long suspected the British of favoring the Jews over the Arabs in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration had helped put in motion the machinery for building a Jewish state, including a trade union, a bank, a university, and even a Jewish militia, known as the Haganah. As for the Arabs, Balfour said simply that the Jewish homeland would not adversely affect "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Others sympathetic to the Zionist cause had warned against such measures. Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, for example, had long advocated what Einstein called "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic peoples," who "may have a great future in common."

The Arabs were as stunned by the Peel Commission's proposal as Ben-Gurion was excited. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, promptly rejected it, not only because of the transfer plan, but because of the partition itself. The Arabs would fight for a single, independent, Arab-majority state.

of thousands of Jewish refugees, the British government released its White Paper, accepting many of the demands of the Arab Rebellion. The British agreed to strictly limit Jewish immigration and to tighten restrictions on land sales in Palestine. Most important, the White Paper called for a single independent state.

The White Paper was a major concession to the Arabs. For the Jews of Palestine, it was an abandonment of British support for a Jewish national homeland promised in the Balfour Declaration, at a time when the situation for Jews in Europe was growing more perilous. Within weeks, Jewish paramilitary squads were attacking British forces, planting explosives in Jerusalem's central post office, and carrying out attacks on civilians in Arab souks. The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine.

For many of the 1,800 Bulgarian Jews on the train from Sofia—or the tens of thousands of Hungarian, Romanian, or Polish Jews emigrating in the fall of 1948—the journey to Israel represented a return after two thousand years of exile, a chance to fulfill the Talmudic promise "He who makes four steps in Israel, all his sins will be forgiven."

"This sense of injustice, frustration and disappointment has made the refugee irritable and unstable," a UN report acknowledged.

As the occupation wore on, a sense of calm and clarity began to settle over Bashir. The loss was devastating, but it made one thing clear: 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.

That my life here is at their expense, and if they want to realize their dream, it's at my expense."

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.

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 1967,1 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 was amassed at the intensity of his perception that Zionism was this incredibly evil manifestation and that this was his experience," she reflected. But she was a child of Zion, the "mountain of God." "There was no way I could accept this description of the Zionists, my people, me, as being the expression of darkness. 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!"

called "the three A's": acknowledgment of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948, apology for it, and amends. Acknowledgment was, in part, to "see and own the pain that I or my people have inflicted on the Other." But she believed this must be mutual—that Bashir must also see the Israeli Other—lest "one perpetuate the righteous victim syndrome and not take responsibility for one's own part in the fray." Through this acknowledgment, she and Bashir could act "as mirrors through which our own redemption can eventually grow." As for amends: "It means that we do the best we can under the circumstances towards those we have wronged." But for Dalia this could not involve a mass return of refugees. Yes, she believed, the Palestinians have the right of return, but it is not a right that can be fully implemented, because the return of millions of Palestinians would effectively mean the end of Israel.

"Our right of return is a natural human right," Bashir said. "The Israelis created this problem, and they can't place more burdens on us to solve it."

"We couldn't find two people who could disagree more on how to visualize the viability of this land," Dalia said, standing and slipping on her sandals. "And yet we are so deeply connected. And what connects us? The same thing that separates us. This land."

In some ways, the specifics of Bashir’s decision to maintain silence with Dalia do not matter. They are symptomatic of a steady deterioration of relations between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israel claims ever more West Bank land, the settler population exceeds half a million, hundreds of checkpoints and other barriers continue to dot the land, and Israeli military forces retain control of sixty percent of the West Bank, and of Gaza by air and sea. Since Dalia and Bashir last saw each other, in 2005, multiple wars have devastated Gaza, killing an estimated 2,400 Palestinian civilians, including more than 900 children, mostly from Israeli air strikes, compared to 26 Israeli civilians, killed by rockets launched from Gaza. Despite those numbers, the thousands of Hamas rockets, combined with the tunnels it dug into Israel, deeply rattled Israel’s already-traumatized population.