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

by Sandy Tolan

  In some areas, Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank met with little Palestinian resistance. Occasionally resistance was peaceful: In Ramallah, doctors at the Arab Care hospital sat down in front of Israeli tanks approaching the casualty ward. When Israel attacked Jenin in April, however, gunmen from the Jenin refugee camp fired back, and a major battle ensued. Israeli soldiers abandoned their armored vehicles and chased the gunmen down the narrow alleys of the Jenin refugee camp, where Palestinian fighters hid, waiting to ambush them. In response, armored IDF bulldozers plowed into the camp, demolishing more than 130 homes, shops, and refugee offices and burying some people alive under the rubble. At least fifty-two Palestinians were killed, twenty-two of them civilians. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers died in the fighting. The uprising was crushed, but in the process the fighters from Jenin became heroes among Palestinians. In Ramallah, where resistance to the reoccupation had been light, a joke circulated: A Muslim woman walks past a group of men on the street. Her head scarf is tied loosely, and her hair is exposed. "Fix your hijab," one of the men admonishes. "There are men here."

  "Oh, is that so?" she replies. "Why, did the Israelis lift the curfew in Jenin?"

  In the summer of 2002, Sharon intensified a policy of demolishing Palestinian houses in the occupied territories—a policy initiated by the British during the Great Arab Rebellion of the 1930s. The Israeli policy was carried out against families of suicide bombers and other militants; for "military purposes," primarily in Gaza; and against Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem who had built without the permits Israel required of them. Human rights groups estimated that between ten thousand and twenty-two thousand Palestinians lost their homes as a result of the policy and hundreds of acres of their olive groves and other crops were uprooted as part of a military strategy to improve the nation's security.

  A growing number of voices in Israel rose in protest. One of the most prominent belonged to a young Israeli sergeant, Yishai Rosen-Zvi, an observant Orthodox Jew and son of the late dean of Tel Aviv University Law School. "I won't take part in a siege enforced against hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children," Sergeant Rosen-Zvi declared in a letter to a superior officer. "I won't starve entire villages and prevent their residents from getting to work each day or to medical checkups; I won't turn them into hostages of political decisions. A siege against cities, like bombing raids from helicopters, does not stop terror. It is a sop to placate Israel's public, which demands 'Let the IDF win.'" Israel's policies, the young "refusenik" declared, were creating "nurseries of terror."

  Just before 7:00 A.M. on November 21, 2002, Nael Abu Hilail crept through tall grass and up a hillside toward the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Menachem. Abu Hilail was twenty-three, from the West Bank village of Al, Khader, near Bethlehem. He wore a bulky coat, which, if pulled tight, would have revealed a large bulge around his midsection.

  A few blocks away, Raphael Landau was leaving the fourth-floor apartment where he lived with his parents, Dalia and Yehezkel. It was a school day; Raphael, fourteen years old, slung his heavy book bag over his shoulder and trotted down the stairway and toward his bus stop.

  Nael Abu Hilail boarded the number 20 bus at about 7:00 A.M.. It was filled with commuters, mostly working-class Jews and immigrants, and children traveling to school. At 7:10 A.M., the bus rolled to a halt at the Mexico Street stop in Kiryat Menachem. The doors opened, and more workers and students began to board. At that moment, Abu Hilail reached under his coat and detonated the bomb he had strapped to himself. The explosion ripped the bus apart, sending human limbs flying through the gaps where the windows had been. A man's torso toppled out of the bus and onto the street, where it lay amid shattered glass and the hot screws released by the detonated bomb. Children's schoolbooks and sandwiches were scattered about.

  At 7:20, the phone rang in the Landaus' apartment. Dalia and Yehezkel were asleep; Yehezkel had just returned from a trip to the States and was still contending with jet lag. Yehezkel answered to hear the worried voice of his friend Daniel, calling from his home just west of Jerusalem.

  "I just wanted to make sure you're all right," Daniel said. "I heard on the radio that a bus had exploded near your home, on Mexico Street."

  Raphael's bus, Yehezkel knew, had just passed through the neighborhood. He hung up and rushed to the television, where he learned that the explosion occurred on a municipal bus, the number 20 line, not on the school bus Raphael rode. As he watched the live scene on Israeli television, his immense relief turned to horror. A dead man's blood-smeared arms hung outside the bus window. Rescue workers in white masks and gloves were lining up bodies in a row of black plastic bags along Mexico Street. Someone had covered the torso with a blue-and-white-checkered blanket. Eleven people were dead, Yehezkel would learn; four of them were children. Ambulances were rushing most of the forty-nine injured Israelis to the hospital.

  Reporters in Bethlehem found Abu Hilail's father, Azmi, who told them he considered his son a martyr. "This is a challenge to the Zionist enemies," he said.

  The next day, Prime Minister Sharon ordered Israeli troops back into Bethlehem, where they reoccupied the city, imposed a military lockdown, conducted house-to-house arrests, and blew up five homes, including the house where Nael Abu Hilail had lived with his parents and siblings. Since Sharon had come to power less than two years earlier on a pledge to increase Israelis' security, bombers had struck Israel nearly sixty times; this was nearly twice the number of attacks of the previous seven years. Sharon's spokesman blamed Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for the attacks, saying that "all our efforts to hand over areas, and all the talk about a possible cease-fire, that was all window dressing because on the ground there was a continuous effort to carry out as many terrorist activities as possible."

  Arafat condemned the suicide bombing, saying civilians "are normal people who are living their daily lives, and targeting them is a condemned act ethically and politically." The bombings, he added, make even "legitimate resistance" to the occupation look like "blind terrorism."

  With the Israeli incursion into Bethlehem, the military reoccupation of all major West Bank towns except Jericho was complete.

  The bus had exploded during the Jewish celebration of Chanukah, which is marked by the lighting of candles on eight consecutive nights. One night after the bombing, Dalia visited the bus stop at Kiryat Menachem and met a neighbor, a teenager whose eight-year-old brother and grandmother had been killed in the explosion. The old woman had been accompanying her grandson to school. "His friends were with him," Dalia remembered of the teenager. "All very silent. Just being." They struck a flame and repeated the Chanukah prayer: "Blessed are You, our God, master of the universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light the candle of Chanukah."

  In the coming days, Dalia and Yehezkel made regular trips to the bus stop, where residents and visitors had erected a shrine of candles, wreaths, newspaper clippings, photos of the dead, prayer books, handwritten poems, and letters. Alongside the expressions of grief were signs promising to avenge the killings: "No Arabs, No Terror"; "O People of Israel! This will not end until we cry out a great cry!!! And only then, God will hear and answer us"; "The way to true peace: If someone comes to kills you, thwart him by killing him first!"

  The day after the attack, an Arab resident living near the Landaus was stabbed in the back by three Jewish youths. A Palestinian bakery down the road was stoned by an angry mob and its glass cases smashed. For several nights, police were called in for protection, and Yehezkel came to the baker's family to show his solidarity and to try to reason with the group's leaders. They insulted him and questioned his Jewishness. "I could share their anger over the incessant terror attacks," Yehezkel wrote later in the Jewish magazine Tikkun, "but I vehemently rejected their racist and hateful attitudes. . . . My heart has broken many times as I confronted the deeply painful reality of my fellow Israelis, including my Jerusalem neighbors, being overwhelmed by f
ear, anger, and grief."

  The "toxic atmosphere" of the intifada and the suicide attacks propelled Yehezkel toward a new kind of reconciliation work. Especially in the wake of 9/11, he believed his calling was in addressing what he considered a "global spiritual crisis." Healing, he said, "has to come from within and without, and my leverage point is from without." He began spending more time in the States and eventually took a position at the Hartford Seminary, where he continued his interfaith work. "It was increasingly clear," he said, "that I was meant to be here, at Hartford, and Dalia was meant to be there," in Jerusalem.

  Dalia watched as other families left Israel, seeking safe haven in Europe, the United States, or Australia. "Many people are leaving Israel to find a place of safety elsewhere, to protect their children," Dalia wrote in her journal in the late fall of 2002. "But isn't that what our enemies want? Yet, on the other hand, Raphael too could have been on that bus. What is the responsible thing to do under the circumstances? There are many people in Israel who have no family or friends in other parts of the world. They do not have the luxury of the choices that I have here. Am I going to abandon them?"

  Dalia made her decision. "My choice is to stay here," she wrote. "I will not be able to look myself in the face if I leave when it gets difficult. I am going to stay present for the pain, and for the hope. I am an integral part of it all. I am part and parcel of this complexity. I am part of the problem because I came from Europe, because I lived in an Arab house. I am part of the solution, because I love."

  Thirteen

  HOMELAND

  ELAL FLIGHT 551 approached Sofia airport from the south, swooped low over the Balkan Mountains, and set down in the Bulgarian capital. It was twilight on July 14, 2004. Jews of Bulgarian descent peered out through the airliner windows. Most were residents of Israel returning to their birthplace or that of their parents. Many were children. Some were coming back for the first time.

  Dalia Eshkenazi Landau stepped slowly down the portable stairway, grasping the handrail and adjusting the large red bag slung over her shoulder. She walked in the fading light to the small terminal building, built during Communist times. Dalia had not stood on Bulgarian soil since October 26, 1948, nearly fifty-six years earlier. On that day, Moshe's brother, Jacques, and his wife, Virginia, had come to the Sofia railway station to bid farewell to the family as they set off for the new state of Israel.

  Dalia pulled her suitcase off the belt, rolled it past the Bulgarian customs officers, and scanned the line of faces in the waiting hall just beyond. She was looking for a man about her age whom she had never met: Maxim, the son of Jacques and Virginia. During Communist times, Jacques, despite his high rank in the Party, was always required to leave his children at home when visiting his brother in Israel. Consequently Maxim, though a fierce defender of the Jewish state, had never been there and didn't know what his cousin looked like. He had come dressed all in white and held a sign in Bulgarian bearing Dalia's name. Virginia, now eighty-three years old and widowed, was at home, awaiting the reunion.

  Three days later, after emotional meetings with Virginia, Maxim, and other relatives she had never met, Dalia rode in a taxi leaving Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city, toward a monastery in the Rhodope Mountains. In the backseat beside her sat Susannah Behar, whose father had been the rabbi of Plovdiv in March 1943 and who had waited out the hours with hundreds of other Jewish families in the Plovdiv school yard. At that same moment six decades earlier, Dalia's parents were in Sliven, several hours to the east. "My mother thought, This is the end," Dalia told Susannah.

  The yellow Fiat snaked up the two-lane road and along the Chepelare River through thick pine forest. Susannah, eighty-three years old, looked out the window, telling Dalia she had nearly escaped the school yard on that March morning to join the Partizan fighters roaming these same hills. If she had, Dalia suggested, perhaps she would have met Uncle Jacques Eshkenazi, who had escaped the work camps to join the Partizans fighting the pro-Fascist government of King Boris.

  The taxi arrived at Bachkovo, the Bulgarian Orthodox monastery built in the late twelfth century, burned to the ground by the Ottomans, and rebuilt again in subsequent decades. Dalia and Susannah got out and walked past the stalls of vendors selling rugs, buffalo yogurt, and religious trinkets. They passed under the broad eaves of a two-hundred-year-old lotus tree and toward their destination.

  Inside, Dalia and Susannah walked under a low arch and into a room adorned with flowers, chandeliers, and centuries-old Christian frescoes painted on the walls. Hundreds of candles burned from every corner of the room. At first they couldn't see what they had come for. Then Dalia realized she was standing right beside them: the marble tombs of Kiril and Stephan, the Orthodox bishops who had vigorously fought Bulgaria's attempts to deliver the nation's Jews to the Nazis in 1943. Recently, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, had declared the two Christian bishops "Righteous among the Nations for saving Jews during the Holocaust." Trees, in memory of the two bishops, were planted in the "Forest of the Righteous."

  Dalia touched her fingertips to the marble, first of Stephan's tomb, then of Kiril's. Her lips were moving silently. Later she would try to find the words in English for her feeling of hityakhadoot: being alone and intimate with the soul of another and making space in your heart for that soul.

  Dalia approached a bearded priest, who smiled and handed her candles. She lit them and prayed some more. Susannah stood in the center of the room, holding her unlit candles and gazing upward at the slowly rotating crystals of an antique chandelier.

  Near the end of her pilgrimage, a few days before she returned to Israel, Dalia sat on a wooden bench in the back of the Sofia synagogue. Considered one of the most beautiful in the Balkans, it was unlike any synagogue Dalia had been in. Moorish arches rose to domed ceilings of dusky blue, with stars of painted gold. A magnificent chandelier, imported a century ago by train from Vienna, hung by heavy chains from wooden beams high overhead; it was said to weigh eighteen thousand pounds. Dalia gazed at a spot in the front of the synagogue, just before the ark, where Theodor Herzl had addressed fervent Zionists in 1896 and where her own parents had stood for their marriage forty-four years later. Dalia imagined the moment: her mother in white, ravishing, with raven hair flowing over her shoulders; her father, stiff and nervous in his suit, a future life of responsibility weighing heavily on his shoulders.

  Sixty-four years later, their daughter sat quiet and still on the synagogue bench, thinking of the possibilities.

  Bashir was struggling with the propane heater he had rolled in to warm his guests. Repeatedly he clicked the button to ignite the pilot light, but every time he released it, the flame went out. It was an early winter's day in 2004. Bashir kept pressing the button with his right index finger, until finally, after many clicks, the fire ignited; tiny waves of heat began to fill the room. He flashed a momentary, toothy smile and rose to offer his guests cookies and sweet Arabic tea.

  The previous year, Bashir had been released from the Ramallah jail where he had spent more than a year beginning in August 2001. He had lost count of the number of times he'd been imprisoned, but it was safe to say that Bashir, now sixty-two years old, had spent at least a quarter of his life in a cell. This time, Bashir said, he was not convicted of anything, or charged, or even questioned. He had spent most of his "administrative detention" playing chess and trying to keep warm in the outdoor tent prison.

  A friend had told a story of the day Bashir left jail. Israeli prison officials required that he sign a pledge not to commit any future acts of terror. What Israel called terror, however, Bashir often saw as legitimate resistance. He did not accept the legitimacy of the Israeli justice system, and he had never been told why he was in jail; consequently he refused to sign the document. "If you don't sign," the guard said, "we will send you back." Bashir told the guard to send him back. It was then, according to Bashir's friend, that the Israeli guard asked Bashir for a favor: Could he wait there a few minutes to m
ake it appear to the other guards that he was cooperating? This could solve both men's problems. Bashir, suppressing a smile, agreed, and a few minutes later he was released.

  Or so the story went; Bashir would not talk about it. "Whenever I go into the prison I feel as though I'll never leave," he would say. "And every time I leave I feel as though I've never been there."

  Bashir's reluctance to confirm the story of his release was not simply a matter of refusing to humanize his Israeli jailer; it was instead part of a broader reticence to evoke memories or feelings. There were times when a visitor could detect emotion—in the hardening of his expression, the arching of his eyebrows, and the flush of his face when he talked about the Palestinian resistance; in the softness of his voice when he spoke about the fitna or lemon trees in the garden of the house in al-Ramla; in his smile or the narrowing of his eyes, when he talked about Dalia. But he was uncomfortable discussing politics in detail, or personal relations with his family, or memories from his childhood. The one memory that seemed most powerful, and least discussed, involved the loss of his hand. His thumb was forever hooked over his pocket, making the hand look normal; visitors or friends might go for months, or even years, before they learned that his hand was missing, and invariably they would learn of the tragedy from someone else. "Bashir, why don't you get an artificial hand?" his cousin Ghiath once said when the two young men were studying law in Cairo. "His face turned this color," Ghiath said, grabbing his purple shirt. "The incident made him complicated."