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

by Sandy Tolan

"And I had a sense that they were walking in a temple, in silence," Dalia would remember many years later. "And that every step meant so much to them."

  Bashir stopped in front of the open door to a small bedroom in the corner of the house, near the backyard. He could hear Dalia's voice behind him. "This is my bedroom," she said.

  "Yes," Bashir said. "And it was mine."

  Dalia looked up at the wall above her bed. On it she had tacked a picture of a beaming, blue-eyed Israeli soldier from a cover of Life magazine—the archetype of the Israeli Sabra. The soldier was standing chest high in the Suez Canal, his Uzi thrust above his head at the end of the Six Day War. To Dalia the image stood for liberation, for warding off a threat, and for survival. Standing with Bashir in the doorway to the bedroom, she suddenly realized, for the first time, that Bashir might see that poster differently.

  Bashir would recall Dalia saying, "I think you left the house when you were very young. Maybe the same year we came."

  Bashir wanted to explode, to yell, We didn't "leave" the house! You forced us out! Instead he said, "We haven't been properly introduced. My name is Bashir Khairi. And these are my cousins Ghiath and Yasser."

  Dalia introduced herself and told them she was on summer vacation from Tel Aviv University. She took care not to tell them she was in the officers' training corps for the Israel Defense Forces. This was partly because they were Arabs and she was a Jew; it was also because she had felt, welling up from within her, a surge of akhrayut responsibility, or, literally, an ability to respond to the other. Questions from her childhood returned: What was an Arab house? Who had lived here before? Why did they leave? She realized that these men would have answers. She thought: Finally I have opened a door that has so long been closed. Dalia would recall this moment as the beginning of her quest toward understanding.

  "And now," Dalia said, "will you allow me to treat you as guests? May I offer you something to drink?"

  As guests, Bashir thought. Should a person be a guest in his own house? "I don't mind at all," he said quickly to Dalia. "Yes, thank you."

  "Let's sit in the garden," Dalia said, pointing toward the backyard. "It's very beautiful. What would you like? Lemonade? Turkish coffee?"

  The three cousins sat in the sun in the garden. Bashir's eyes were like the lens of a camera, taking in exterior walls, window frames, roofline. He recorded soil, sand, branches, leaves, fruit. He even recorded the blades of grass growing out between the layers of stone on the house. Now his eyes rested on the lemon tree, standing in the corner of the garden.

  "I don't think they changed anything in the house," Yasser said.

  "Only the furniture," Bashir replied.

  Dalia came with drinks—Bashir would remember small cups of Turkish coffee; Dalia is certain she served lemonade. "I hope that this visit gave you some rest," she said, placing small china cups and saucers—or perhaps it was the glasses of lemonade—before each cousin.

  "Of course, of course," Bashir said.

  They made quiet small talk and listened to one another sip. After a few minutes, Yasser stood up. "I think it's time to go," he said. Bashir, however, wasn't quite ready.

  "Could you give me permission to have another look at the house?" he asked Dalia.

  She answered with a smile. "Of course! Feel at home."

  Bashir looked at Yasser. "I'm going to go for just a minute," he said.

  A few minutes later, Dalia and Bashir were facing each other again at the gate. "I hope we will meet again," said Dalia.

  "Yes, of course, Dalia," Bashir said. "I hope to see you again. And one day you must come to visit us in Ramallah."

  "How will I know where to find you?"

  "When you arrive in Ramallah, ask anyone," said Bashir. "They will show you to my home."

  The cousins climbed onto the Israeli bus and sat as before, one behind the other. They rode east in silence, exhausted. They had seen their houses; now what? On the way home, there were no surprises and everything looked more familiar. Bashir gazed out the window at nothing, aware of a new burden resting like stones on his chest.

  Bashir climbed the concrete steps to the house in Ramallah. He opened the door and found his sisters and brothers, Ahmad, and Zakia all waiting for the returning traveler. In the middle, in a chair at the kitchen table, sat Ahmad. Bashir couldn't bear it. "I am very tired," he said. "The way was long and the story is longer. Let me rest first, and tomorrow I will tell you everything." It was only 6:00 P.M.

  "Sleep, my son," Ahmad said, his eyes watering. "Sleep, habibi, my dear son."

  In the morning the family was waiting. Bashir took his time, recounting every moment of the journey with his cousins. Everyone pumped Bashir with questions—everyone, that is, except Ahmad, who remained quiet while the others demanded a replay of Bashir's every step, his every touch of stone. Did the light still stream in through the south windows in the afternoon? Were the pillars on the gate still standing straight? Was the front gate still painted olive green? Was the paint chipping? "If it still is," Zakia said, "when you go back you can bring a can of paint to make it new again, Bashir; you can bring shears and cut the grass growing up along the stone path. How is the lemon tree, does it look nice? Did you bring the fruit?. . . You didn't? Did you rub the leaves and smell them, did your fingers smell like fresh-cut lemons? How were the stones of the house, were they still cool and rough to the touch?. . . What else, Bashir, what else? Please don't leave anything out."

  Throughout the interrogation, Ahmad had been still as a mountain, his eyes watering. Abruptly he stood, pushing back his chair. Tears streaked his face as he left the kitchen and walked down the hallway. All eyes followed Ahmad, but no one dared call him back. He closed the bedroom door.

  "God forgive you, my son," Zakia said. "You have opened our wounds again."

  In the summer of 1967, conversations like that of the Khairis were taking place throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Palestinians had made pilgrimages across the Green Line to childhood homes. They came back burdened with bittersweet accounts of a garden in bloom, of a stone archway with the Arabic script scratched out, of a piano out of tune, of a key that still fit the lock, of wooden doors opened and iron doors slammed shut. It hardly mattered whether a refugee was old enough to remember his home; the landscape and the dream of return were imbibed with mother's milk, so that if there was no memory, there nevertheless seemed to be.

  Generations unborn in 1948 spoke the details of neighborhoods in villages destroyed before they were born. For these families there was only the earth itself, and occasionally the rubble of an old cornerstone, to visit and record; yet in Jaffa, Haifa, West Jerusalem, Lydda, and al-Ramla, where the old Arab houses still stood, Palestinians could retrieve tactile proof of their memories: a sprig from an olive tree, a stone from the garden, a handful of figs. Later that summer, Bashir and his younger brother Kamel returned from a second visit to Dalia and the house in al-Ramla; Kamel, despite being only a year old in 1948, swore he remembered the home. The younger brother had accepted a gift of four lemons from Dalia, which he delivered into the hands of his father. Ahmad placed one of them in a glass case in the living room.

  Such physical proof of loss only deepened the longing and made even more fervent the wish to go home. The Six Day War may have made the return of the refugees less likely than ever; but to Bashir, his family, and hundreds of thousands of refugees in the camps of the West Bank and Gaza, the sudden nearness of the lost gardens made exile even more intolerable. In the summer of 1967, the dream of return was as ferocious as ever.

  In late June 1967, Yasser Arafat and a small band of fellow self-styled revolutionaries snuck across the Jordan River into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Palestinian cadres, as the fighters were known, wore black and moved through the Jordan Valley at night, evading low-flying aircraft and the spotlights of Israel's patrolling helicopters. Many of the hundreds of cadres crossing the river that summer had been trained in Syria; they slung ol
d rifles, Swedish-made machine guns, and Russian-built Kalashnikovs over their shoulders and stuffed land mines, grenades, bullets, and explosive charges into their seventy-five-pound backpacks.

  Since New Year's Day 1965, Arafat, Abu Jihad, and other cadres from Fatah had been launching small raids into Israel, mostly at military and industrial targets. For the most part, the attacks had had little practical effect. Yet the raids were significant on a psychological level. For Israel, the attacks had rattled a population for whom safety and security were paramount; for Palestinians and the world, in the words of fellow revolutionary Bassam Abu-Sharif, the attacks demonstrated "that the Palestinian spirit was not crushed . . . that the Palestinian people would never give up, that they would fight with whatever came to hand, by whatever means they could, to recover their dignity and their lost lands, to get justice."

  Still, Arafat knew that a relative handful of young men waging cross-border hit-and-run raids with homemade explosives and old rifles could not actually change the status quo; he wanted to build an insurgency from within Palestine. He led his cadres to set up operations to relaunch armed struggle against Israel from the West Bank.

  In July 1967, around the time Bashir and his cousins rode the bus to al-Ramla, Arafat traveled in disguise from one West Bank town to another, organizing secret cells to attack across the Green Line. He and his men slept in a network of caves north of Ramallah, much as Sheikh Izzadin al-Qassam had done in the Great Arab Rebellion of the 1930s. Arafat had quickly realized how fast he needed to move. Already the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, had established a formidable network of Palestinian informants whose eyes and ears recorded every revolutionary movement. In exchange the collaborators received money, traveling papers, or leniency for a brother or a father in jail. Each of Arafat's moves was therefore carefully calculated to avoid arrest. The legend of Abu Amar, Arafat's nom de guerre, was built largely on the stories of his narrow escapes: of the time he crawled out a back window as soldiers came through the front door; or when he eluded capture by dressing as an old woman; or when Israeli soldiers arrived at Arafat's cave to find his coffee still steaming on the fire.

  Arafat was keenly aware of the power of symbolism. In photographs, the young revolutionary was always in military fatigues and dark glasses, his keffiyeh fashioned painstakingly into the shape of historic Palestine. The iconography and the actions of Arafat, his fellow Fatah leader Abu Jihad, and the other cadres invigorated a population disgusted by a second devastating defeat and subsequent occupation. They reinforced the conviction, held by Bashir and thousands of others, that the path to liberation could be determined only by the Palestinians themselves. The Soviet Union was rearming Egypt and Syria after their air forces were reduced to smoking ruins by the Israelis; Syria continued to aid Fatah; but it was increasingly clear to Palestinians that the Arab states would never again join forces to fight Israel. Even if they would, the rhetoric of the Arab leaders was taken as empty talk by Palestinians who felt they had been fooled by such promises of liberation in the past. Palestinians now understood that their painful longing for home would have to be answered from within. Arafat knew this instinctively; he captured his people's imagination with his slogans of "Revolution Until Victory," "In Soul and Blood We Sacrifice for Pales­tine," and "We Shall Return."

  As September arrived in Ramallah, the lawyers' strike showed no signs of waning. Bashir and his fellow attorneys dug in, using the strike to protest both the occupation of the West Bank and the recent annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel. For the Israelis, the annexation would unite both sides of Jerusalem and provide Jews with permanent access to holy sites, including the Temple Mount; for the Arabs of East Jerusalem, whose dream was to have the capital of a future Palestinian state in their midst, "unification" was a belligerent act by an occupying power. Soon they would see Israeli construction crews building massive "suburbs" on East Jerusalem lands.

  For Arab lawyers working in East Jerusalem, the Israeli annexation carried a huge professional and financial impact that threatened permanent loss of work or, at the very least, the necessity to learn Hebrew and pass the Israeli bar exam, which Bashir and the other lawyers had no intention of doing. Doing so would have implied an acceptance of the occupation and the annexation of East Jerusalem. At that point, though, Bashir believed the occupation of the remainder of the West Bank was temporary and that soon enough he and his fellow lawyers would all be getting back to work. Some signs suggested otherwise: Already, some Israelis, led by the National Religious Party, had begun building settlements in the West Bank, on land they considered part of Eretz Yisrael. Soon, the Israeli military governor would issue a decree that suggested the occupation might last much longer. Military Order 145 authorized Israeli lawyers to take the place of the striking Palestinians. Even before it was implemented, the Israelis began making arrests.

  Late on the evening of September 17, 1967, Bashir woke up to the sound of men yelling and fists pounding on the door. "The Israeli soldiers are surrounding the house!" someone was screaming. Bashir came out of his room and into the glare of floodlights through the windows. "Open! Open!" Bashir heard the soldiers yelling. He did as he was told. Ten soldiers in battle gear stood at the door. Bashir would recall their faces, black beneath their helmets, and their Uzis pointed at his chest.

  "All of you bring your identification," the one in charge shouted to no one in particular. Bashir brought his ID, and the soldier looked him over. "You're Bashir," he said. "Get dressed and come with me."

  Zakia ran after Bashir as he went to his room to change out of his nightclothes. "Put on your warm clothes, son," she said. "We are at the end of the summer season."

  Bashir spent one hundred days in a Ramallah jail. For much of that time, he was held at the Israel military headquarters, where officers interrogated him about his activism. "You are a leader," they would tell Bashir. They had been following his activities with the striking lawyers and assumed he knew much more. "Give us details about the resistance." Each time, his reply would be the same: "I believe in one thing: Palestine. And I hate one thing: occupation. And if you want to punish me, do it."

  Bashir's arrest was part of a much wider counterinsurgency designed to root out dissidents, guerrillas, and others suspected of plotting attacks on Israeli soil. In late August, Fatah had launched combat operations against Israel. Some rebels were organized into secret armed cells; others operated as roaming bands of guerrillas, or "fugitive patrols." Arafat and his cadres were attempting to seize the mantle of Palestinian nationalism and had timed their actions to put pressure on Arab states not to signal any compromise on the right of return with Israel. At their summit meeting in Khartoum in late August, the Arab leaders indeed declared that "there would be no reconciliation with Israel."

  Yet signs of accommodation with Israel were already emerging from the Arab states. In mid-October 1967, as Bashir sat in jail, a close associate of Egyptian president Nasser wrote a series of highly influential articles advocating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza—suggesting that the return to old Palestine would not happen. The next month, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" in exchange for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."

  The resolution called for Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza. Some hoped the withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza would lead to an independent Palestinian state; others assumed the land would revert to Jordanian control. In either case, the boundaries would be far different from those outlined by the 1947 UN partition plan. Israel would retain control of 78 percent of historic Palestine, including al-Ramla an
d Lydda.

  Some Arab leaders, including Nasser and King Hussein of Jordan, sent signals suggesting they could support Resolution 242—Nasser would get the Sinai back, and Hussein hoped that a comprehensive peace could bring calm to his restive kingdom. For most Palestinians in 1967, however, 242 didn't go nearly far enough; their dream still lay in the fight to return to their homes in Palestine. Yet by December 1967, it was becoming clear that Arafat's goal of a mass insurgency was not going to catch fire in the occupied territories. Already, more than a thousand men had been jailed by the Israelis, reducing the ranks of Fatah. Soon Arafat, Abu Jihad, and other leaders would be discussing the need to shift tactics.

  On December 11, a few miles from the house in Ramla, Palestinian rebels attacked Israel's national airport. The action was a failure tactically, but it marked the arrival of a new faction in the would-be independence movement: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Its leader was George Habash, the refugee from Lydda who had marched through the hills in the punishing heat in July 1948. Habash, who would soon become a permanent fixture on the list of Israel's top enemies, would spark revulsion in Dalia for years to come. For many Palestinians at the time, Habash was a courageous rebel, willing to fight for his people's fundamental rights by any means necessary.

  At the end of 1967, Bashir was released from jail. He would report days of interrogation; no formal charges were filed. As he walked free, he would remember later, "I loved Palestine more than before, and I hated occupation more than ever."

  One clammy gray morning in January 1968, Dalia awoke in Ramla with Bashir and his family on her mind. For months she had been thinking about Bashir's invitation to visit in Ramallah; today, she hoped, would be the day. Dalia didn't have Bashir's address or telephone number, so she had no choice but to show up in person to accept his invitation. She remembered that Bashir had told her, "When you get to Ramallah, just ask for the house of Bashir Khairi. Everyone will know."