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

by Sandy Tolan

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.