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

by Sandy Tolan

  Suichmezov's actions in Sofia are described in his memoir (excerpted in Fragility, pp. 134-36). The initial meeting between Suichmezov and Peshev is also described by Peshev in Fragility, p. 160. Peshev describes the earlier pleas of a fellow MP, about the "defeated, desperate, powerless people," on p. 158 of Fragility, and on p. 159 he describes his moment of decision, perhaps the single most important moment in the entire story of the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews. The tense moments in the parliament building are described in both men's memoirs {Fragility, pp. 136 and 161-62), by Chary (pp. 94-96) and Bar-Zohar (pp. 113-24). Suichmezov's memoir is the source for the quotes from Peshev and Colonel Tadger.

  The moment in the school yard when the Jews were set free was described by Susannah Behar and the other eyewitnesses mentioned earlier. The late notice, confirmed by printed accounts, provides insight into the state of communications in 1940s Bulgaria as well as, perhaps, into the reluctance of some members of the Commissariat for Jewish Questions to swiftly carry out Gabrovski's orders.

  Metropolitan Stefan's letter imploring the king is part of his memoir, excerpted in Fragility, p. 127. The letter by Peshev and his fellow deputies appears in its entirety in Fragility, pp. 78-80. The deportation plans along the Danube is documented on p. 143 of The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution.

  To this day, there remains a fierce debate about the role of King Boris in the "saving" of the Bulgarian Jews. Did the king stop the deportation of Bulgaria's Jews to Poland out of concern for his Jewish citizens? Or did the foxlike ally of Hitler, after the Nazi devastation at the battle of Stalingrad, sense that the end was coming and keep the Bulgarian Jewry intact to avoid charges of genocide?

  The fact that the Germans believed the order to suspend the deportations came from the "highest place" has led many to believe that Boris himself approved this, but Chary, who has probably spent more time studying this issue than anyone, disagrees. "It is very unlikely that Gabrovski would have talked to the king," Chary wrote me. "The king did not like him and furthermore had removed himself from the issue of deporting the Jews at this point." Bar-Zohar, on the other hand, states flatly that "the king had acted at the eleventh hour, and the deportation had been thwarted" (p. 128, Beyond Hitler's Grasp). He argues the king reversed his policy in March 1943 and essentially decided to stand with the Jews of Bulgaria. Many others are skeptical of this, including Jacky Comforty, producer with Lisa Comforty of the acclaimed documentary The Optimists: The Story of the Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust, and Todorov, who writes in Fragility, pp. 19 and 23:

  It is impossible to take the king's words at face value. . . . His actions were guided by self-interest, or rather, by what he saw as Bulgaria's interests. . . . What motivated him was national interest as he understood it, not humanitarian principles. Small countries have to come to terms with great ones. Hitler had the power; thus some of his demands had to be accepted.

  The quote about "ideological enlightenment" comes from Saving of the Jews in Bulgaria, chapter 10, p. 16.

  The idea behind Tzevtan Todorov's title, Fragility of Goodness, is that if one event had transpired differently, if one person had not acted or had acted in some other way—even, indeed, if King Boris had not joined the Axis powers, thus prompting the Germans into a brutal occupation of Bulgaria—the outcome for the Bulgarian Jews could have been completely different. I agree.

  Chapter 4

  This chapter is grounded in dozens of documents, books, and firsthand accounts, including multiple interviews with Dalia's and Bashir's families; interviews with numerous eyewitnesses to events in Ramla, Lydda (Lod), and Jerusalem in 1947 and 1948; published accounts from historical figures of the day and other eyewitnesses; original documents from the Central Zionist Archives and the archives at Kibbutz Na'an; and numerous secondary sources, including books by Israeli and Arab scholars who base their work in the archives.

  The aqiqa ceremony was described by Khanom Khairi, Bashir's older sister, who was an eyewitness to the event. Details of the ceremony were verified by Islamic scholar Hatem Bazian of UC-Berkeley. The young Bashir was recalled by Khanom and Nuha Khairi in 2004 interviews in Berkeley and Amman, respectively. The "sweeten your teeth" saying is a familiar one in Palestinian culture. It was translated by my colleague Nidal Rafa.

  Sheikh Mustafa's worries are chronicled in the British high commissioner's monthly telegram, which is printed in Political Diaries of the Arab World, Vol. 6, 1941—1942, pp. 437-40.

  Discussion of the Jewish refugees from the DP camps, and the debate over Britain's acceptance of additional refugees to Palestine, is in Morris {Righteous Victims, pp. 18084); Neff {Fallen Fillers, pp. 30-34); Cohen {Palestine and the Great Powers, pp. 113—14); and Hirst (pp. 238-39). The story of the Exodus is told by Hirst (p. 239), Morris (p. 183), and Cohen (pp. 254-57).

  The internal politics in the Jewish community of Palestine (known as the Yishuv) immediately after World War II is described in Righteous Victims, pp. 173-84; One Palestine Complete, pp. 468-86; Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall, pp. 22-27; and Ehud Sprinzak's Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination, pp. 38-40. The King David explosion is mentioned in The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews, where Benny Morris puts the death toll at eighty; Segev, in One Palestine Complete, p. 476, says there were "more than ninety" deaths; the Jewish Virtual Library (www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ History/King_David.html) and Walid Khalidi's Before Their Diaspora both cite a death toll of ninety-one. An insight into the British view of the Jewish military capacity can be found in Palestine and Transjordan Administrative Reports, Vol 16, p. 496.

  British troop strength and the accompanying quote are taken from p. 498 of Palestine and Transjordan Administrative Reports, Vol. 16. The "wholesale terrorism" quote comes from the same volume, p. 496.

  The pressures on Britain at the end of the colonial era and how this contributed to their quitting Palestine a year after quitting India were pointed out to me by Tom Segev in his comments on an early draft of my manuscript. The arrival of the UN fact-finding team, known as the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine, or UNSCOP, is mentioned in Righteous Victims, pp. 180-84, and in Segev, pp. 495-96.

  Palestinians' concerns about the potential fate of Arabs in a Jewish state and their desire for a one-state solution come from several sources, including an interview with the Palestinian scholar Naseer Aruri. The fractured nature of Palestinian society in 1947, particularly in the wake of the Arab Rebellion, is discussed in Rashid Khalidi's Palestinian Identity, pp. 190—92; Yoav Gelber's Palestine 1948, pp. 31-33; and Ilan Pappe's A History of Modern Palestine, pp. 119-20. Further corroboration of Palestinian- Arab disunity on the eve of war was provided by Hillel Cohen, author of Shadow Army: Palestinian Collaborators in the Service of Zionism: 1917-1948 (in Hebrew), and Michael J. Cohen, professor at Bar-Ilan University, in Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945—1948. "It was never easy for the outsider," wrote former Israeli intelligence officer David Kimche and his brother Jon in their 1960 book, Clash of Destinies (p. 42), "and especially for the governments of Europe and the United States, to be sure which was the valid expression of the Arab mood: the publicly voiced determination to fight against the Jewish aspirations in Palestine, or the privately uttered assurance that some kind of amicable arrangement was quite possible. . . ."

  A more recent source for the disconnection between the Arab states' words and their private interests is Rogan and Shlaim's The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, a collection of essays by Arab, Israeli, and Western scholars. Shlaim, an Israeli scholar and Oxford professor, also details Abdullah's November meeting with Golda Meir, representative for the Jewish Agency, in his book, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. Shlaim writes (p. 30):

  Abdullah began by outlining his plan to preempt the mufti, to capture the Arab part of Palestine, and to attach it to his kingdom, and he asked about the Jewish response to this plan. Mr
s. Meir replied that the Jews would view such an attempt in a favourable light, especially if Abdullah did not interfere with the establishment of a Jewish state, avoided a military confrontation, and appeared to go along with the United Nations.

  Jon and David Kimche essentially confirm this account.

  The text of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, better known as the "partition resolution," is printed in its entirety in volume 37 of The Rise of Israel, a thirty-nine-volume collection of original documents edited by Michael J. Cohen. The UN minority report, completed on November 11, 1947, is printed in From Haven to Conquest, pp. 645-95, with the key provisions on pp. 694-95. The map for this proposed federal state can be found on the interleaf between pp. 204 and 205 in Report on Palestine: Report to the General Assembly by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.

  The British intent to quit Palestine on May 15, 1948, is confirmed in Palestine and Transjordan Administration Reports, Vol. 16, p. 490.

  Many accounts, citing the 44 percent of historic Palestine that was set aside for an Arab state, calculate that therefore the remaining 56 percent was for the Jewish state. However, 1.5 percent of the land would have been set aside for the city of Jerusalem and the immediate surrounding area, including Bethlehem, under a demilitarized international trusteeship administered by the UN. (See Report on Palestine, pp. 187-91, for the Jerusalem proposal.)

  The citrus and grain percentages were calculated by Harvard scholar Walid Khalidi and printed in Before Their Diaspora, p. 305. The figures on Jewish population and land ownership come from John Chappie, Jewish Land Settlement in Palestine, referenced in From Haven to Conquest, p. 843. Population figures for Arabs and Jews in the proposed states are listed in Report on Palestine, p. 181.

  The UN vote was the result in part of an intense lobbying effort by Zionists from the United States and Palestine to secure the necessary support. In a memo to his Foreign Office (The Rise of Israel, Vol. 37, p. 213), British diplomat Harold Beeley describes the "active" Zionist lobbyists who persuaded the United States to "use its influence with Governments which were for one reason or another dependent on it, and which if left to themselves would either vote against partition or abstain," including Haiti, the Philippines, and Liberia, all of which voted for partition after previously announcing their intention to oppose it.

  According to a secret U.S. State Department memo dated December 15, 1947, Gabriel Dennis, the Liberian secretary of state and UN delegate, complained of a "high-pressure electioneering job, in which . . . the Liberian Minister at Washington had received a warning that unless Liberia voted with the American Delegation in favor of partition, the minister could expect no further favors for his country from Congress" {Rise of Israel, Vol. 37, p. 197). The UN representative of the Philippines reported receiving a radiogram from his president instructing a vote in favor of partition. The diplomat found the incident "exceedingly unpleasant," especially in light of the public stance against partition that he had already taken {From Haven to Conquest, pp. 723-26).

  The chief advocate for the Arab side was Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, who was described admiringly by Michael Comay, a prominent Zionist leader, as "a powerful champion . . . undoubtedly one of the ablest and most impressive delegates present from any country." Comay, head of the New York office of the Jewish Agency and later Israel's UN delegate, wrote in a "strictly confidential" letter that Khan "and some of the other Arab spokesmen were badly hampered by the refusal of the Palestine Arabs to consider making any concessions or talking in conciliatory terms. But for this we may have had an even more difficult time as many delegations supported the partition scheme with the greatest reluctance. . . ."

  A crucial factor in swaying the reluctant parties toward partition, Comay wrote, had been a delay in the vote over the Thanksgiving holiday, during which time "an avalanche descended upon the White House" (The Rise of Israel, Vol 37, pp. 185-192). President Harry Truman would write later in his memoirs: "I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance" {Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945, p. 50).

  Rejection of the plan by the Arab states is mentioned in numerous sources, including on p. 8 of Maan Abu Nowar's The Jordan-Israeli War, 1948-1951. Walid Khalidi, the Palestinian scholar, writes on pp. 305-06 of Before Their Diaspora:

  The Palestinians failed to see why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust . . . why it was not fair for the Jews to be a minority in a unitary Palestinian state, while it was fair for almost half of the Palestinian population—the indigenous majority on its ancestral soil—to be converted overnight into a minority under alien rule in the envisaged Jewish state according to partition.

  To Jews around the world, on the other hand, the vote "was Western civilization's gesture of repentance for the Holocaust, that the establishment of the state of Israel in some way represented the repayment of a debt owed by those nations that realized they might have done more to prevent or at least limit the scale of Jewish tragedy during World War II" {Palestine and the Great Powers, p. 292). The celebrations of Dalia's relatives following the UN vote are described by her cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki. Victor Shemtov, a Bulgarian Jew who would later become a member of the Israeli Knesset, recalls dancing in the streets of Haifa, even though his political party, the leftist Mapam, had professed its support for a single binational state.

  The proposal for a "Jewish commonwealth," known as the "Biltmore Program," had called for "the establishment after the war of a Jewish state in Palestine that would stretch from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean" {Palestine and the Great Powers, p. 8). However, Benny Morris writes in Righteous Victims (pp. 168-69) that with Biltmore "the possibility that the state would be established in only part of Palestine was implicit."

  Ben-Gurion's "stable basis" quote comes from his War Diary, Vol. 1, p. 22, and is cited in Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 176.

  Ben-Gurion's remarks may appear to some as a precursor to a policy of expulsions. One could also argue that he simply meant that many more Jews would have to be brought into the new Jewish state to increase the percentage of the Jewish majority; indeed, the Zionist leader promoted the aliyah of millions of European and later Middle Eastern Jews after World War II. Expulsion and aliyah are not mutually exclusive concepts, however, and Ben-Gurion's own support for forced "transfer" is perhaps most clearly understood in his memorandum "Outlines of Zionist Policy" from October 1941, when he wrote: "Complete transfer without compulsion—and ruthless compulsion at that—is hardly imaginable" {Righteous Victims, pp. 168-69).

  Yitzhak Yitzhaki, the cousin of Dalia's mother, Solia, recalled the events of November 29 and 30, 1947, in an interview. The bus attacks in Ramla and the three-day strike are mentioned in Yoav Gelber's Palestine 1948, p. 17; Walid Khalidi's chronology of events in 1947 and 1948 from Before Their Diaspora, p. 315, includes the strike as well as Arab plans to mobilize troops. Khalidi's chronology can be searched onlineatwww.qudsway.com/Links/English_Neda/PalestinianFacts/Html_Palestinian/ hpf8.htm.

  Egypt's boast about occupying Tel Aviv is from The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, p. 155. The book outlines other prewar promises, including the Iraqi prime minister's call for a coordinated Arab military campaign and the specter of an oil embargo against the Western powers (p. 131), which the Saudis opposed {Clash of Destinies, pp. 79-80).

  The Kimche brothers describe the arrival of recruits fresh from the DP camps and their determination to fight for a new state {Clash, pp. 13-14) and refer to a "new Zionism emotionally supercharged by catastrophe" (p. 20) as an underrated factor in the war to come. The Haganah battle plans, including the establishment of regional field commands and mobile brigades, coalesced in Plan Dalet (Hebrew for the letter D), which is described in detail in Chaim Herzog's The Arab-Israeli Wars, pp. 32-34. Israeli historian Uri Milstein, in his multivolume History of Israel's War of Independence, writes that an objective of Plan D "was control ov
er Jewish settlement blocs beyond the borders. This constituted one stage in the execution of the secret plan, the final phase of which would be all of Eretz-Yisra'el [including at least all of historic Palestine] as a Jewish state" {Vol. IV, p. 185). Part of Plan D stated:

  These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in the debris). . . . In case of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.

  [This is printed in Y. Slutzky's 1972 book, The Book of Hagana (Hebrew), vol. 3, pp. 1955-559, and is cited in Israeli "new historian" Ilan Pappe's article "Were They Expelled?" and on the pages of MideastWeb.org, an Israeli organization promoting coexistence between Arabs and Jews: www.mideastweb.organization promoting coexistence between Arabs and Jews: www.mideastweborg/pland.htm.]

  Ben-Gurion's quote on the boundaries of the state comes from his memoirs. The violence described in the "early 1948" paragraph is chronicled in Michael J. Cohen's Palestine and the Great Powers, pp. 300-10, and Khalidi's Before Their Diaspora, pp. 316-18. During this same time, Zionist leaders continued to fight on the political front in Washington. Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, met with President Truman in the days following the vote when U.S. support for implementing the partition plan appeared to be wavering; indeed, Zionist leaders thought Truman was preparing to reverse U.S. policy. Weizmann said, "The choice for our people, Mr. President, is between statehood and extermination" {From Haven to Conquest, pp. 737-43).