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

by Sandy Tolan

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.