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

by Sandy Tolan

7:45 A.M. on Monday, June 5, 1967, French-built Israeli bombers roared out of their bases and crossed into Egyptian airspace. Flying below radar, the jets angled toward Egyptian bases in Sinai, the Nile delta, and Cairo. Fifteen minutes later, tanks and infantry of Israel's Seventh Armored Brigade moved west into Gaza and toward the Sinai frontier. The war with Egypt had begun. No action at that hour was taken against Jordan, Iraq, or Syria. At 9:00 A.M., Prime Minister Eshkol sent a message to King Hussein

Israel's surprise attack of five hundred sorties had destroyed virtually all of Egypt's Soviet-built fighter jets, and now the Jewish state had the sky over Sinai all to itself.

The facts told a different story. By midafternoon of June 5, the air forces of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt had all been demolished. Israeli pilots now patrolled the entire region virtually unchallenged and were free to attack Egyptian ground troops in Sinai or Jordanian infantry moving toward Jerusalem. From this point, the outcome of the war was written. The Six Day War was essentially decided in six hours.

Not only did the Israelis capture and occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they now held the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Perhaps most shocking of all was that East Jerusalem, and the Old City with its holy sites, was now in the hands of the Israelis.

The great paradox of the occupation was that suddenly historic Palestine was easier to reach than at any time since 1948. Within days of Israel's capture and annexation of East Jerusalem, the boundary that had separated Hussein's Hashemite kingdom from Israel and West Jerusalem became nearly invisible.

the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, had established a formidable network of Palestinian informants whose eyes and ears recorded every revolutionary movement.

Israelis had increasingly seen themselves as a nation of victims, especially since the 1963 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem had pulled the Holocaust from the shadows. Now the Sabras, many of whom were children of Holocaust survivors, found themselves confronting an occupied civilian population:

Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land. Their civilization, their history, their heritage, their culture.

"For two thousand years we were praying three times a day to return to this land," she told Bashir. "We tried to live in other places. But we realized we were not wanted in other places. We had to come back home."

Dalia felt the depth of the Khairis' gratitude for her having simply opened the door to the house in Ramla. "And this was an amazing situation to be in," she remembered. "That everybody could feel the warmth and the reality of our people meeting, meeting the other, and it was real, it was happening, and we were admiring each other's being, so to speak. And it was so tangible. And on the other hand, we were conversing of things that seemed totally mutually exclusive. That my life here is at their expense, and if they want to realize their dream, it's at my expense."

"You are leaving us in the sea," Dalia finally said. "So what do you propose for us? Where shall we go?" "I'm very sorry, but this is not my problem," Bashir said quietly. "You stole our land from us.

Each had chosen to reside within the contradiction: They were enemies, and they were friends.

agents of the General Security Services, or Shin Bet.

Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer published a memoir, With My Own Eyes, detailing her interviews with prisoners who had endured an "ordeal of beatings and humiliation."

in 1977, the Sunday Times of London would publish a detailed investigation of "allegations of systematic torture by Israel of Arab prisoners."

The Times charged that torture was overseen by all of Israel's security services, including the Shin Bet, military intelligence, and Israel's Department of Special Missions.

Many of the guerrilla attacks against Israel were launched from Jordan, and this sharply raised tensions between King Hussein and Israeli leaders

From Cairo to Baghdad to Damascus to Amman, thousands of Arabs flooded rebel offices to volunteer in the renewed fight against Israel.

the surging radical movements in Europe began to feed the Palestinian nationalists with wide-eyed anti-imperialists: Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, and German youths who had become frustrated with the capitalist system and its leaders.

Soon, infamous revolutionary groups and fugitives throughout the West became identified with the Palestinian struggle.

Habash said. "For decades world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now." In much of the world, however, the PFLP tactics had turned people against the Palestinians and their liberation movement.

For two weeks in September 1970, civil war erupted as the king's troops engaged PLO, PFLP, DFLP, and other Palestinian factions in fierce battles in the Palestinian refugee camps formed after 1948 and in provincial towns across the desert kingdom.

On November 19, 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat made an unprecedented trip to Jerusalem, signaling his willingness to make a separate peace with Israel despite the continuing opposition of the rest of the Arab world. Two years later, after intense negotiations with U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David accords, which ended the state of war between Egypt and Israel.

Many Palestinians, including Bashir, believed the Egyptian president had sold them out by negotiating his own deal and not focusing on a comprehensive settlement involving all the parties.

Palestinians thus came to see their deepest fears realized: They were still stateless, the occupation was becoming more entrenched, and now they would need to go forward without Egypt, their most powerful ally

In 1981, the Egyptian president would pay for his courage, or his cowardice, with his life. On October 6, while watching a military parade with foreign dignitaries, he was assassinated by gunmen from Islamic Jihad in Cairo.

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.

For years the PLO, a coalition of nationalist resistance groups, with Arafat's Fatah at its center, had dominated Palestinian political discourse. Five days into the intifada, however, a new group emerged from the same Gaza refugee camp that had spawned the uprising. It would be called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas.

Hamas favored no recognition of Israel and no compromise on the right of return.

Yitzhak Rabin, now defense minister, would shift IDF policy to "force, might, and beatings," as soldiers began deliberately breaking the hands and arms of stone throwers. Still, the death toll rose; in the first year of the intifada, at least 230 Palestinians would be shot dead by Israeli troops and more than 20,000 were arrested. Thousands were captured in predawn raids in the refugee camps, as soldiers broke down doors, hauled young stone throwers out of their homes, and loaded them onto buses.

Netanyahu, the UN ambassador, had forged many of his own convictions after the death of his brother, Yonatan, during an Israeli raid against a PFLP hijacking in Entebbe, Uganda.

"My love for my country," Dalia wrote, "was losing its innocence . . . some change in perspective was beginning to take place in me."

Each side has an ingenuity for justifying its own position. How long shall we perpetuate this vicious circle? . .

I appeal to both Palestinians and Israelis to understand that the use of force will not resolve this conflict on its fundamental level. This is the kind of war that no one can win, and either both peoples will achieve liberation or neither will.

Israel had occupied southern Lebanon for six years, since its 1982 invasion and attack on Beirut.

Two weeks after PLO forces left, hundreds of Palestinian civilians were slaughtered in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut. The killings began one day after the murder of Lebanese Christian president Bashir Gemayel, whom the Israelis had hoped to help install as a friendly head of state. The executioners were Phalangist Christian militias who had entered the camps after Gemayel's death at the encouragement of Ariel Sharon and other Israeli military officers.

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."

The Allenby Bridge was named after the British general who led his troops into Palestine in 1917 at the beginning of the British Mandate. After eight decades of rule by British, Jordanian, and Israeli forces, the bridge was now under limited control of the newly formed Palestinian Authority. The partial autonomy was a result of the Oslo peace accords, symbolized by the handshake between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Bashir's first days back in Ramallah were bittersweet. Arafat's embrace of Oslo, together with his pledge to control "terrorism and other forms of violence," had begun to pit the champion of Palestinian liberation against the disparate Palestinian factions that had grown increasingly unsettled about Oslo. To them, accepting Oslo represented a surrender of 78 percent of historic Palestine; even the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, which represented the other 22 percent, Israel didn't seem prepared to hand over.

By October 1995, polls showed that support among Palestinians for the "peace process," and all it represented, had plummeted to 39 percent.

The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, did little to blunt such criticism. If anything, the image of a longtime enemy of the state onstage with the two Israeli leaders only fueled the attacks. In 1995, Netanyahu accused Rabin of helping to establish "the Palestinian terrorist state."

Violence is undermining the foundations of Israeli democracy. It must be rejected and condemned, and it must be contained. It is not the way of the state of Israel.

The Israelis believed an agreement with the Palestinians was their best chance for long-term security. In July 2000, two months after Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon, Barak, Arafat, President Bill Clinton, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and teams of negotiators spent two weeks at Camp David in search of a historic final agreement with the Palestinians.

the United States would offer a massive aid program, in the tens of billions of dollars, to resettle and rehabilitate the refugees—now numbering more than five million, many in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Bill Clinton lost his temper. "You have lost many chances," the president told Arafat, echoing former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban's slogan that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. "First in 1948 . . . now you are destroying yourselves in 2000. 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 asking that UN Resolution 242 be implemented. I am speaking only about 22 percent of Palestine, Mr. President."

Barak was also furious with Arafat. He had gone further than any Israeli prime minister to make peace. Arafat, by contrast, "did not negotiate in good faith" and never intended to come to any agreement. "He just kept saying 'no' to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own,"

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.

Robert Malley, part of the Clinton team

What much of the world viewed as historical concessions by Arafat at Oslo, many Palestinians looked upon as terms of surrender by the man who stood against the United States and its allies. "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."