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

by Sandy Tolan

  The poorest of the Gaza refugees survived on a UNRWA diet of 1,600 calories a day, including a standard monthly ration of twenty-two pounds of flour; about a pound each of sugar, rice, and lentils; and milk for children and pregnant women. Without meat or vegetables, the diet contained just enough nutrients and calories to stave off starvation.

  Ahmad had found a job in Gaza using his carpentry skills to make wicker furniture for other refugees. UNRWA paid him not in cash, but in extra rations of flour, rice, sugar, and fat. For the Khairis, every cent (or "mill") of every Palestinian pound was spoken for. Zakia continued sparingly and strategically to sell off her gold, but the proceeds went only for essentials. Though Ahmad remained protective of his daughters, the extreme situation led to what would have previously been unthinkable: The family sought and received permission from Sheikh Mustafa for the women to work. Bashir couldn't recall a single day when his mother and sisters weren't working. Zakia and her elder daughters now made extra money embroidering Palestinian table covers and pillows or knitting sweaters and scarves. Nuha, who was seven when the family moved to Gaza, remembers wearing crudely knit sweaters with pockets so low that her arms could not reach them. Zakia, only months removed from a life of servants, perfumes, and private baths, had become crucial to the family's survival. She removed her veil.

  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. At all economic levels, the disruption of normal family life was having profound effects on the children.

  Bashir and his siblings breathed in the atmosphere of humiliation and defeat, and for Ahmad's firstborn son, avenging the loss of Palestine became a singular goal, even in play. His siblings and neighborhood children would find pieces of wood to fashion as guns and play "Arabs and Jews," like cowboys and Indians, in the dirt streets. "He insisted that he always play the Arab," Khanom remembered. "He would be very angry if anyone would try to get him to play the Jew."

  In the spring of 1949, news arrived from Jericho: Sheikh Mustafa had died. He had been visiting relatives in the Jordan Valley. Standing on the front steps of the house of the Dajani family, he had grown dizzy. He went inside to sit while Mrs. Dajani prepared him lemonade. Before she could bring it, he was dead.

  Had the Khairis been in al-Ramla, Sheikh Mustafa's body would have been washed, dressed in white cloth, carried to the mosque for prayers, then immediately taken to the cemetery and placed in the earth, all according to Muslim custom. Under their current circumstances, the family arranged for the body to be transported in a closed wooden coffin to the family cemetery in al-Ramla, where the Israelis would allow him his final place of rest.

  "He died of a heart attack," Bashir said. "But really, it was from a broken heart."

  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. The next April, King Abdullah completed his annexation of the West Bank, infuriating Palestinian nationalists. A year later, he would pay for this prize with his life when a nationalist linked to Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the ex-mufti of Jerusalem, shot the king in the Old City as his teenaged grandson, Hussein, watched in horror. In the aftermath of the Arab loss of Palestine, leaders in Egypt and Syria also fell to assassins' bullets. In Gaza, the Egyptians responded by repressing all forms of political expression, and Palestinian nationalism was forced underground.

  Two governments were essentially in place now in Gaza: the Egyptians, who imposed the equivalent of martial law on the stateless Palestinians; and the United Nations, through UNRWA, which was now responsible for feeding, training, and educating the hundreds of thousands of refugees.

  "Their clothing after three years has become shabby and ragged," declared a UN report in 1951. "The majority of the men employed on Agency road-building projects had no shoes. Both blankets and the tent flies issued as additional protection are often diverted from their proper use and cut up for clothing. The most fortunate are the children in schools (less than half the total number of children on the rolls), who have generally been given both clothing and footwear." For some formerly well-off, past and present coexisted: One Khairi cousin recalled running around Gaza barefoot, wearing his glasses.

  In Gaza City, Bashir, Nuha, and their younger brother, Bhajat, shared the same one-room class in a UNRWA school. At first they sat on the dirt floors of cramped UNRWA tents, and later at UNRWA desks in an old brick house, where the schooling took place in shifts: locals in the morning, refugees at 1:00 P.M. UNRWA schoolteachers, who were mostly refugees themselves, doled out UNRWA pencils, clothes, fish oil, vitamins, and milk. School began with a salute to the Egyptian flag. Bashir would remember learning the history of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, which he, his classmates, and his Palestinian teachers could speak of from personal experience and with deep conviction: The Jews expelled us; we have a right to return.

  "Palestine is our country," the refugee children would recite at the beginning of each school day:

  Our aim is to return

  Death does not frighten us,

  Palestine is ours,

  We shall never forget her.

  Another homeland we shall never accept!

  Our Palestine, witness, O God and History

  We promise to shed our blood for you!

  Bashir was a good student, and his teachers considered him especially attentive.

  Bashir turned ten in 1952. By now the dream of immediate return had transformed into the reality of long-term struggle. The Palestinians had begun to understand that their return would not come about through diplomatic pressure. Though the Palestinian "right of return" dominated most conversations in the streets, souks, and coffeehouses, it was clear that no government in the world was prepared to force Israel to accept the terms of the resolution guaranteeing the right of return.

  "This sense of injustice, frustration and disappointment has made the refugee irritable and unstable," a UN report acknowledged. "The desire to go back to their homes is general among all classes; it is proclaimed orally at all meetings and organized demonstrations, and, in writing, in all letters addressed to the Agency and all complaints handed in to the area officers. Many refugees are ceasing to believe in a possible return, yet this does not prevent them from insisting on it, since they feel that to agree to consider any other solution would be to show their weakness and to relinquish their fundamental right."

  For the Israelis, the idea of return was moot. 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. Banned political groups, including the Communist Party and the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, had begun to hold secret meetings in the camps, advocating armed struggle to make al-Awda (Return) possible. "There are occasional strikes, demonstrations and small riots," the UN report noted. "There have been demonstrations over the census operation, strikes against the medical and welfare services, strikes for cash payment instead of relief, strikes against making any improvements, such as school buildings, in camps . . . in case this might mean permanent resettlement. This then is rich and tempting soil for exploitation by those with other motives than the welfare of the refugee."

  Refugees whose peasant lives had been replaced by squalor and malnutrition proved a receptive audience to the talk of return to a liberated Palestine. Some volunt
eered to launch attacks across the armistice lines in Israel, as the endless cycle of strike and retaliation took root in the sands of Gaza. In the summer of 1953, Palestinian guerrillas crossed the armistice lines and attacked a family in the new Israeli city of Ashkelon, which was built on the ruins of a Palestinian village. The attack killed a restaurant owner and his daughter. Two weeks later, an IDF soldier named Ariel Sharon led his unit on a nighttime reprisal. Nineteen people died in the el-Bureij refugee camp.

  Bashir remembers a daytime attack in 1954 near his school. He and a friend ran from the school in terror; moments later, as the two boys veered in separate directions, Bashir's friend was hit and killed. At school the next day, Bashir stared at his classmate's empty chair.

  Bashir later lost his favorite teacher, Salah al-Ababidi, who was slain with his wife. A refugee from Jaffa, al-Ababidi taught gymnastics and led the children each day in patriotic songs. The teacher often spoke of his love for Jaffa, of one day going home, and of freedom fighters for Palestine.

  By 1955, Bashir, now thirteen years old, had grown more serious and mature beyond his years. His older sisters looked up to him. "We never felt Bashir was our brother," Khanom said. "Even though we were older, we always felt that he was like our father. He was the dominant figure, he was the one to take care of us." More than ever, Bashir was focused on return. It would avenge the Palestinian defeat; it would restore his family's dignity; it would repair the loss his father, mother, and siblings had suffered. It would wash away the shame of dispossession. 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 in 1952 after the expulsion of the British and the exile of King Farouk. As Farouk sailed away on his royal yacht, Nasser began to implement a plan for Arab unity that would include the "liberation of Palestine" and the return of the refugees. His "philosophy of revolution" would be unlike any ever expressed by Arab leaders. Bashir saw the Egyptian president as a man who could unify the entire Arab world, or what Nasser sometimes called the Great Arab Nation, and restore its dignity after the humiliating defeat in 1948. For some he was even a hero in the mold of the Saladin, the great warrior who defeated the Crusaders in Jerusalem eight centuries earlier.

  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.

  After nearly nine years in Gaza, Ahmad and Zakia Khairi decided to move the family back to Ramallah. They had come into a family inheritance and would be able to buy a modest property in the West Bank and think about higher education for the children. It was 1957.

  Ahmad took the first group—Khanom, Bashir, and their sister Reema, the youngest of the ten children, to Egypt, where they would fly directly to the West Bank airport at Qalandia, just south of Ramallah.

  "On the plane my father fainted," Khanom remembered. The children were alarmed, but the stewardess was flirting with a co-worker and paid them little attention. "When we landed he was still in what now seemed like a coma. Everyone got out of the plane and we tried to wake him, we tried to push him out of his chair. We hit his face to wake him. He did not wake up. The captain came and said, 'It seems he is dead.'"

  Bashir, fifteen years old, brought his face close to his father's and took his hand. "Yabba, wake up!"

  Ahmad opened his eyes. "Yes, my son," he said. "What is it?" The family would tell this story for years: Ahmad would respond only to the voice of his firstborn son. "This was the miracle touch of Bashir," Khanom recalled.

  Father and son emerged from the plane into the cool air of Qalandia, just south of Ramallah, in the West Bank of the Kingdom of Jordan.

  Seven

  Arrival

  ON NOVEMBER 14, 19485 a busload of immigrants approached the town of Ramla from roads to the north and west. The bus slowed as it reached a military blockade at the edge of town. Inside were the first Israeli civilians to come to the conquered city, part of a larger group of three hundred immigrants, mostly Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, and Poles, arriving that day from the transit camps near the Mediterranean coast at Haifa.

  As the bus rolled past the checkpoint, Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi looked out at a ghost town. Sheep, dogs, chickens, and cats roamed the streets. Soldiers watched over rows of empty dwellings. Stone houses stood open, their contents spilling out onto the yards. One arriving immigrant would remember a donkey tied to a post in a house with no doors. Smoldering mattresses littered the streets.

  The bus passed cactus hedges and lines of olive and orange trees, then it stopped and everyone got out. They were greeted by a representative of the Jewish Agency. Behind him, Moshe and Solia could see a street lined with Arab houses. It was a simple procedure, immigrants would recall; they were free to enter a house, inspect it, and claim it. The paperwork would come later.

  Moshe and Solia came upon a house to their liking. It was in good shape and virtually empty, though not brand-new. Clearly, someone had lived there before. It was a stone house with an open layout and plenty of space. There was a carport the family might use someday, and in the yard in back there was a lemon tree.

  Lying in bed in their new home, the couple knew they had not arrived to the safe haven they had sought. Israeli and Egyptian forces were fighting just south of Ramla, and the line of defense was perilously close to their new home. After two weeks in Ramla, Moshe and Solia celebrated Dalia's first birthday. It was December 2, 1948, a year and three days after the United Nations partition vote and the beginning of the battles over the shape of historic Palestine.

  The family had been given a steel-framed bed, blankets, a kerosene lamp, a camping stove, four large candles, and a ration card for sugar, oil, powdered eggs, and milk. Another family of three had moved into an adjacent room. Solia's mother, brother, two sisters, and a brother-in-law were making final plans to leave Bulgaria, and the house would soon shelter eleven. Eventually the families would sign agreements with the state, which had declared itself the "custodian" of the houses it considered "abandoned property." The Eshkenazis lived on "K.B. Street." This was a temporary name; a municipal committee would soon prepare lists of Jewish historical figures and recently fallen war heroes to replace the Arabic names on the street signs.

  The Eshkenazis landed in a town under military rule in an emerging nation still at war. The spoils of conquest, and of sudden flight, were still being hauled away. Soldiers piled couches, dressers, lamps, and other heavy items into the backs of army trucks. Much of the "goods, equipment and belongings of absentee owners," state records would later indicate, were to be "collected in storehouses" and "liquidated through sale." Some of the men found temporary work sweeping out the Arab houses to prepare for more busloads of new immigrants; their children sold cigarettes brought on the boats to the soldiers standing guard. To the children, it was all an adventure. In the afternoons, they would roam the foreign streets, feeling like discoverers, taking over an empty house to set up a secret club, searching the rooms for marbles or other treasures left behind. Often when they returned, they would find the place occupied by immigrants. These new arrivals, many of whom were survivors of the concentration camps in Europe, asked few questions. Most found empty houses to live in, then went looking for work.

  In the early months, jobs were scarce and seasonal. A few people were employed building and paving roads. Others walked, hitchhiked, and rode bicycles to the Jewish citrus groves near Rehovoth; decades later, immigr
ant children of the time would remember fathers and uncles with one hand on the handlebar and the other balancing a ladder, pedaling toward the orchards. Some immigrants were accustomed to reaching their hands between the branches or into the soil, but others, working a strange land in dark European shoes and fraying suit coats, were overwhelmed. As a result, in 1948, Jewish farmers, who had depended on cheap Arab labor, struggled to make their harvest.

  Moshe Eshkenazi first worked for the Jewish Agency, delivering the iron bed frames to immigrant families. As he went from house to house, he would inquire about the families' welfare, speaking Hebrew when possible, using his high school German to converse in Yiddish to Eastern and Central European Jews, in Ladino with Jews from Turkey and the Balkans, or in Bulgarian with his countrymen. Later he would communicate in French with the Moroccan Jews.

  Job prospects for the immigrants of Ramla began to improve slightly, especially for the first to arrive, as they found ways to use the skills they brought with them from Europe as mechanics, electricians, plumbers, and shopkeepers. By July 1949, seven months after the first Israeli migrants arrived, 697 of the 2,093 families registered with the city had found work in town. There were 25 Jewish shoemakers, 15 carpenters, 10 seamstresses, 7 window framers, 7 bakers, 7 butchers, 4 watchmakers, 4 sausage makers, a sign maker, and an upholsterer. Seventeen cafes had opened along with 37 small groceries; there was a small factory for ice cream and 2 for making seltzer. Henry Pardo opened the first Jewish pharmacy in Ramla; David Abutbul hung a sign for his law office; Shlomo Scheffler sold newspapers.