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

by Sandy Tolan

I have decided, after much experimentation, to use the classical Arabic "al-Ramla" when looking at the city through Arab eyes and "Ramla" when describing the place through the Israeli experience. This way, it is clear that I am referring to the same place—and,

My assignment came on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the first Arab-Israeli war—known as the War of Independence to Israelis, and the Nakba, or catastrophe, to Palestinians. I wanted to explore how this event, and the history that followed it, was understood by ordinary Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. I needed to find two families linked by history in a tangible way.

I came across something real. 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.

Dalia believed God had a hand in Israel's survival and compared her own feeling of awe and wonder with the feeling she imagined her ancestors had when witnessing the parting of the Red Sea.

Dalia's family had been spared the atrocities in Bulgaria by acts of goodwill from Christians she was raised to admire and remember. Now, she believed her people had a destiny on the land of Israel. This was partly why she believed what she had been told: The Arabs who lived in her house, and in hundreds of other stone homes in her city, had simply run away.

Why, she thought, would You allow Israel to be saved during the Six Day War, yet not prevent genocide during the Holocaust? Why would You empower Israel's warriors to vanquish its enemies, yet standby while my people were branded and slaughtered a generation earlier?

Near the jacaranda stood the lemon tree. Another family had planted that tree; it was already bearing fruit when Dalia and her parents arrived nearly nineteen years earlier. Dalia was aware she had grown up in an Arab house, and sometimes she wondered about the previous residents. Had children lived here? How many? How old? In school Dalia had learned that the Arabs had fled like cowards,

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.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, and the situation for Jews was deteriorating across Europe. Within a few years, demands for Jewish immigration to Palestine increased.

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.

The Great Arab Rebellion had erupted the previous fall, when an Arab nationalist named Sheikh Izzadin al-Qassam took to the hills near Jenin in northern Palestine with a small band of rebels.

With the birth of baby Khanom, Zakia and Ahmad now had four daughters. Ahmad still waited for his son, and he had begun to wonder if his wife was capable of bearing one.

Ben-Gurion would declare, "I support compulsory transfer." 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."

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.

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

The now ex-mufti had resumed his nationalist struggle against the British and the Zionists by taking up with the archenemy of the British Empire: Nazi Germany.

The key figure was Aleksander Belev, former member of the Fascist Guardians of the Advancement of the Bulgarian National Spirit, or Ratnitsi. Belev was to be the principal authority on the "Jewish question" in Bulgaria. It was Belev who had traveled to Berlin to study the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and the other Nuremberg racial laws, which would result in Bulgaria's 1941 Law for the Defense of the Nation.

In fact, King Boris's capitulation to such "ideological enlightenment" had cost the lives of more than 11,300 Jews from Bulgaria's annexed "new lands" of Macedonia and Thrace. Almost without exception, they were exterminated.

In February 1947, when the ship Exodus arrived in Palestine's Haifa port, British authorities refused to bend their immigration limits, denying entry to the 4,500 Jewish refugees and forcing them to board other ships and return to Germany. A French newspaper called the ships a "floating Auschwitz." The incident shocked the Western world and deepened support for the Zionist movement.

It was the eleventh such fact-finding body to come to the area since 1919.

Zionism, the political movement devoted to the emigration of European Jews to the Holy Land, had taken hold in Bulgaria in the early 1880s, just as the nation freed itself from the Ottoman "yoke."

Talk of a return to Zion went on for several decades in the pages of prewar Zionist newspapers in Bulgaria. Arabs already living on the land did not figure in these discussions, and some Bulgarian Jews would recall reading about the "land without people for a people without land."

The Zionist papers were shut down after the 1941 anti-Jewish Law for the Defense of the Nation. By October 1944, however, less than a month after the liberation from the pro-Fascist regime, Bulgarian Zionists had already begun to regroup.

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."

World War I would bring about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain's entry into Palestine, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with its promise to help establish a "Jewish national home." Three decades later, in May 1948, as David Ben-Gurion declared independence for the new state of Israel, the dreams of the "Jewish Jules Verne" had become reality.

The Khairis were not enduring hunger on this scale, in part because Zakia was selling her gold, but Bashir began to understand the humiliation of the refugee.

It was increasingly clear, however, that the people of al-Ramla had been forcibly expelled. "According to the Red Cross representative who had been in Tel Aviv," declared a confidential U.S. State Department air gram, "the Jews on capturing [al-Ramla] forced all the Arab inhabitants to evacuate the town, except Christian Arabs, whom they permitted to remain.

At summer's end in al-Ramla, several hundred Arabs were still locked behind a barbed-wire fence. Most of the families were Christian; they were considered less of a threat to the new Israeli state than the Muslims of al-Ramla.

Moshe Dayan's Commando Battalion Eighty-nine, having little to patrol, had been among those looting.

In the late summer and early fall of 1948, Arab men tried to return to their villages from exile in Ramallah and elsewhere. Many crossed porous front lines—Bashir believes his father was among them—entering their villages and fields at night to gather belongings or harvest what they could. The Israeli government considered them "infiltrators," and some were shot on sight.

the Israel Defense Forces had called upon Jews to work the Arab fields, declaring: "Every enemy field in the area of our complete control we must harvest. Every field we are unable to reap—must be destroyed. In any event, the Arabs must be prevented from reaping these fields." Control was turned over to local kibbutzim. A few Israelis raised their voices in alarm. "We still do not properly appreciate what kind of enemy we are now nurturing outside the borders of our state,"

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's prime minister, detained two hundred members of the Stern Gang, including one of its leaders, future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, and ordered the other extremist Jewish militia, Irgun, led by another future premier, Menachem Begin, to disband and turn over its weapons to the Israeli army.

As Arab governments jockeyed and maneuvered, the refugees never stopped longing for home. The right of return originally advocated by Count Bernadotte was enshrined by the United Nations in December 1948. UN Resolution 194 declared that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return." The resolution—known simply as "one-nine-four"—generated tremendous hope for the Khairis and refugees across Arab Palestine. It was already clear, however, that Israel had no intention of implementing Resolution 194 and that the United Nations had no power to enforce it.

For the refugees—the destitute in the camps or the more well-off like the Khairis—the central trauma was not in selling off gold or finding enough to eat. Rather, it lay in the longing for home and, conversely, in the indignity of dispossession.

As with all refugees. ☹️

By the summer of 1949, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had signed armistice agreements with Israel; the war was officially over. With its capture of territory beyond the UN partition line, Israel was now in control of 78 percent of Palestine.

In a letter to the UN's Palestine Conciliation Commission, the director of Israel's Foreign Ministry wrote that "it would be doing the refugees a disservice to let them persist in the belief that if they returned, they would find their homes or shops or fields intact. . . . Generally, it can be said that any Arab house that survived the impact of the war . . . now shelters a Jewish family."

Palestinians were frustrated not only by Israel's refusal to accept the UN resolution advocating their return; they also chafed under Egypt's refusal to allow them to organize politically.

an IDF soldier named Ariel Sharon

Over the years, for Bashir and hundreds of thousands of other refugees, hope for return had turned to despair and then rage. By the mid-1950s, however, the prospect for return suddenly seemed real again. It was personified around a single figure who would fire the Arab imagination. His name was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the son of a postal worker, who had come to power in Egypt

Nasser's emergence would rattle officials from Washington to London to Paris to Tel Aviv. Soon he would begin to harness the power of Palestinian nationalism, transforming a group of fedayeen, or guerrillas, into an Egyptian military unit. Tensions between Egypt and Israel would increase in the coming years, resulting in the Suez conflict, a military victory for Israel that would, ironically, fortify Nasser's position as the undisputed leader of a growing pan-Arab movement.

Tens of thousands of Jews had come to Israel from the Arab countries since 1950.

The Jews from Arab lands, on the other hand, were discouraged from speaking Arabic or from listening to their beloved classical Arabic music, especially with the rise of Nasser.

villages. From 1948 until the mid-1960s, hundreds of villages were demolished—by bulldozers, by army units training demolition crews, and by aerial bombing—to be replaced by new cities, expanded kibbutzim, or JNF forests. The work of the mizrahi and other immigrants for the JNF thus served several purposes: It eliminated the former residences of villagers who might attempt to "infiltrate" across the armistice lines; it cemented Israel's position against the UN resolution that authorized the return of Palestinian refugees; and it ensured low-paying work for thousands of poor Jewish immigrants from the Arab countries and elsewhere.

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."

For the Sabra, the Holocaust survivors often represented the shame of Jews going like sheep to the slaughter. Thus, Dalia would recall years later, the phrase Never again was not only a promise by Jews not to repeat the past; it indicated a desire, rooted in shame, to distance themselves from the image of the victim.

As Nasser's strength grew with the rise of pan-Arab nationalism, and threats emerged from the Arab Nationalist Movement and a new group called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the relative quiet between Israel and the Arab world seemed doomed.

For Palestinians, resistance meant no compromise on the right of return, no matter how firm Israel's position. Bashir, like most Palestinians, believed there was only one way the land would come back to his people. Force expelled us from our land, he reasoned, and only force will get it back.

The U.S. had determined, in its own military analysis and in meetings with high-level British officials, that Israel would win any conflict against its Arab enemies in little more than a week.

At stake, Nasser assured the president, was something more important than the Straits of Tiran or the withdrawal of UN forces. Rather, he said, it was about defending "the rights of the people of Palestine": An aggressive armed force was able to oust that people from their country and reduce them to refugees on the borders of their homeland. Today the forces of aggression impede the Arab people's established right of return and life in their homeland. . . . I may ask how far any government is able to control the feelings of more than one million Palestinians who, for twenty years, the international community—whose responsibility herein is inescapable—has failed to secure their return to their homeland. The UN General Assembly, merely confirms that right, at every session.

Nasser himself had declared, at a press conference on May 28, "We are prepared, our sons are prepared, our army is prepared, and the entire Arab nation is prepared."