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

by Sandy Tolan

  Around this time, a bomb went off at the Wednesday market while Ahmad was there. His sister rushed there to find that he wasn't hurt, but the incident rattled the family. Ahmad moved Zakia and the children out of the house and in with relatives near Sheikh Mustafa, in the family compound. Bashir, six years old, would remember taking refuge near Sheikh Mustafa's house, in the home his uncle, Dr. Rasem Khairi, had converted into an emergency medical clinic. Rasem was tending to the wounded fighters. "I used to call it the shelter," Bashir remembered. "There were a lot of explosions and shooting. I couldn't tell where they were coming from. I was afraid. I was trying to understand. You're not in your house, your room, your bed. There was no freedom of movement. I remember so many bodies, too many to collect." Sheikh Mustafa had begun convening meetings with town leaders at his house nearby, urging the people of al-Ramla not to abandon the city.

  By the morning of May 19, al-Ramla's fighters had pushed back the Irgun. The Jewish militia would count thirty men dead and twenty missing. "The people are in very low spirits," read an Israeli intelligence report issued a few days later, "due to the heavy losses and lack of success."

  The city's defenders had prevailed. It appeared to be an unambiguous victory for the ex-mufti's forces, the barefoot brigade, and the civilian volunteer fighters of al-Ramla. Ahmad, however, had had enough. It was too dangerous to let Zakia and the children stay in the city. Despite Sheikh Mustafa's pleas that no one should abandon al-Ramla, Ahmad would take no more chances. He hired two cars to take the family east, through the hills of Palestine to Ramallah. That trip in itself would be dangerous, Ahmad knew; though Ramallah was only twenty miles away, the roads were bad and pockets of fighting were erupting in unpredictable places. But staying would be more risky than leaving. In Ramallah it was relatively calm. The family could remain there until the fighting subsided.

  Bashir, Nuha, Khanom, and their siblings rode northeast in the two large sedans. "When we first heard we were going to Ramallah, we were happy," Khanom said. "For me, Ramallah was something beautiful. Quiet, small, green, nice weather, nice food, nice people. We thought we would go there for a nice time. Only later did we realize."

  A week after the victory over the Irgun, Hassan Salameh, commander of the only regular force defending al-Ramla, was critically wounded by mortar fire during a battle north of the city. A few days later, he died at a local hospital. His death cast a pall over the city and neighboring Lydda. To Firdaws Taji, the second cousin of the Khairis, Salameh's death was an ominous prelude. "He was a hero," she recalled. "Of course it was a bad sign."

  As Jewish and Arab forces battled on several fronts across Palestine, the United Nations increased diplomatic pressure for a truce. Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN mediator, had arrived in Amman, capital of Transjordan, to meet with King Abdullah and press the issue of a cease-fire. He still hoped the warring parties could implement something close to the partition plan the UN member states had approved the previous November. As the diplomatic efforts continued and a truce appeared more imminent, Israeli and Arab forces worked feverishly to gain the advantage before their supplies and positions were frozen in place during the truce.

  Glubb, meanwhile, sent a small detachment of troops to al-Ramla. These would not be sufficient to hold the town, he again stressed to Abdullah, but perhaps they would deter any further attacks before the truce began. However, he proposed another measure that could help ensure al-Ramla's safety. In the final hours before the truce, Arab Legion forces could easily take Ben Shemen, the nearby Jewish outpost that could be used by the Haganah to launch a strike. "But the mayor of Lydda had begged us not to do so," Glubb later wrote. Lydda and Ben Shemen were only a mile apart and a few miles from al-Ramla. Lydda's mayor "alleged that he was on good terms with the Jews and proposed to defend the town by diplomacy." Glubb's British deputy, Captain T. N. Bromage, also pushed for a takeover of Ben Shemen: "If there had been any hope of defending Lydda from the Israelis," Bromage wrote, "that colony would have needed to have been captured as a first step. I had enough force to have taken it by storm. . . ." Bromage's request was refused. The attack on Ben Shemen never took place.

  The truce went into effect on June 11. All materiel and supplies were to remain frozen in place, with a strict UN arms embargo ostensibly imposed on all parties. In the intervening few weeks, the Israelis managed to break the embargo with shipments of rifles, machine guns, armored cars, artillery, tanks, Messerschmitt planes, and millions of rounds of ammunition from Czechoslovakia. The British, however, exerted pressure on Transjordan to comply with the embargo; the Arab Legion would therefore face any resumption of the war with severe shortages of weapons and ammunition. "Allies who let one become involved in a war and then cut off our essential supplies," King Abdullah complained to the British representative in Amman, "are not very desirable friends." In early July, Glubb began to urge an extension of the truce.

  King Abdullah was now in possession of much of the West Bank. He appeared content with the status quo and was quietly lobbying for an armistice with Israel. UN mediator Bernadotte agreed, proposing the partition of Palestine between Israel and Transjordan. Under this plan, the people of al-Ramla and Lydda would become not citizens of an independent Arab state, but subjects of Abdullah in his kingdom of Transjordan.

  Israel rejected Count Bernadotte's proposal. Israelis had narrowly avoided their own civil war in late June when Ben-Gurion ordered Haganah forces to blow up an Irgun ship, the Altalena, under the command of Menachem Begin. The ship was carrying arms for Irgun militia members, but Ben-Gurion insisted all military direction come under the command of the Haganah and its successor, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). With the military consolidation in progress and the new shipments of arms in hand, Israel had grown stronger during the truce.

  Member states of the Arab League, having no wish to see Palestine divided between Israel and King Abdullah, voted on July 6 to resume the fight for a single independent Arab-majority state. The king, ironically, had been chosen by his fellow Arab heads of state as the supreme commander of all the Arab forces in Palestine, which were ostensibly to fight for the independent Palestinian state. Given the king's own territorial ambitions, this was a figurehead position at best, and an ironic one at that. Nevertheless, when the other Arab states voted to continue the fight, Abdullah had little choice but to agree and stand in solidarity with the other Arabs. The war would resume.

  "But how are we to fight without ammunition?" Glubb asked Abdullah's prime minister, Tawfiq Abul Huda.

  "Don't shoot," Glubb recalled the response, "unless the Jews shoot first."

  A few days later, in the early afternoon of July 11, 1948, Lieutenant Israel Gefen crept forward in his jeep, the last vehicle in a long convoy belonging to Commando Battalion Eighty-nine, Eighth Brigade, Israel Defense Forces. As the line of the Eighty-ninth edged slowly along an asphalt track between cactus hedges, Gefen could see his battalion's armored trucks, American-made troop carriers known as half-tracks, an armored car captured a day earlier from the Arab Legion, and twenty-odd more jeeps. The jeeps were mounted with stretchers and Czech- and German-made machine guns, each with the capacity of firing at least eight hundred rounds per minute. In all, the force was made up of about 150 men. They were at the edge of Lydda, a few miles from al-Ramla and the Khairi family.

  At twenty-six, Lieutenant Gefen was already a ten-year veteran of Middle Eastern conflicts. In 1941, he had fought against Rommel with the British army during the siege of the Libyan port city of Tobruk. Earlier, he had fought in Palestine for the Haganah during the Arab Rebellion. His career began in a kibbutz. Under the nose of the British, Gefen and other young Zionists, sworn to secrecy, helped test weapons invented by an agricultural instructor in his metal workshop. Lieutenant Gefen could see one such invention, the armored "sandwich truck"—two layers of steel fortified by an inch of hardwood in the middle—in the long column before him.

  The battalion was coming from Ben Shemen, the Jewish settlement just to
the north. For weeks the open community with access to its Arab neighbors in Lydda had been transformed into a fortress surrounded by barbed wire and concrete pillboxes. Earlier, Dr. Ziegfried Lehman, the Ben Shemen leader, had objected to the militarization of his community. The people of Ben Shemen had purchased cows and even bullets from their Arab neighbors as recently as May. But Lehman's opposition was in vain, and he had left Ben Shemen in frustration.

  Lieutenant Gefen's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Dayan, sat in the third jeep from the front. Dayan's battalion formed part of the northern flank of Operation Dani, a plan to secure the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and prevent an attack on Israeli forces from the Arab Legion to the east. The single-file convoy of Battalion Eighty-nine neared the main road to Lydda. Their primary task would be to stun the enemy with overwhelming firepower. Dayan's plan emphasized shock tactics in military assaults, relying on a strategy of "mobility and fire." To Lieutenant Gefen, Dayan's plan in action would feel like "a rocket going through space." To eyewitnesses, it would look as though they were shooting anything that moved.

  In the late afternoon, the main line of the convoy turned left and roared toward Lydda and al-Ramla.

  At the edge of Lydda, the streets remained quiet. Then, Gefen recalls, heavy fire came from the direction of a police building. Some of Gefen's fellow soldiers were hit; he would later recount nineteen or twenty dead. The Eighty-ninth Battalion, with machine guns mounted on every jeep, opened fire. In a few minutes at most, tens of thousands of bullets had been fired.

  "Practically everything in their way died," wrote the Chicago Sun Times correspondent in a report headlined BLITZ TACTICS WON LYDDA. The reporter from the New York Times, writing from Tel Aviv, recounted that "armored cars swept through the town, spraying it with machine-gun fire. They were met with heavy resistance, but the [Arab] soldiers were taken by surprise and could not reach shelter fast enough." The New York Herald Tribunes reporter observed "the corpses of Arab men, women, and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge." Many of the dead were refugees who had flooded Lydda and al-Ramla from nearby Arab villages and from the recently fallen city of Jaffa. The Herald Tribune reporter described "a Jewish column which raced through [Lydda's] main districts with machine guns blazing at dusk. . . . Apparently stunned by the audacity of the Jewish thrust from the village of Ben Shemen, Lydda's populace did not resist when infantry units swept in after dark behind an armored spearhead."

  The shock battalion was followed quickly into Lydda by the infantry of Israel's regular army, then known as the Palmach, which rumbled down the narrow streets, firing from jeeps. Lieutenant Gefen and the Eighty-ninth moved on toward al-Ramla. There at the edge of town he saw families moving east on foot, carrying bundles in their arms, their donkeys loaded with belongings. Most reports suggest the convoy turned around without firing heavily on al-Ramla. Within hours the Eighty-ninth left the area, moving south into the Negev desert to face the Egyptians.

  That morning in al-Ramla, Dr. Rasem Khairi walked under a stone archway and moved quickly toward the wounded. Jewish forces had been attacking the town from the air, strafing neighborhoods and dropping both bombs and leaflets over al-Ramla and Lydda, demanding that the Arabs "Surrender" and "Go to Abdullah." One leaflet showed Arab heads of state in a sinking ship; another demanded that the residents give up. For days the city had been without electricity or running water; rubbish filled the streets and alleys, and food and medical supplies were running out. Bashir's uncle Rasem was forced to work quickly, under increasingly crude conditions.

  Sheikh Mustafa had recently returned from an emergency trip to Transjordan. He'd been sent by the townspeople, who had pooled their gold to buy bullets. He brought the ammunition stacked carefully in boxes, but in the face of the current assault it appeared the gold might have been wasted.

  At sixteen years old, Firdaws Taji, second cousin of the Khairis, was a "Girl Guide," which in a more normal time would have been an Arab equivalent to the Girl Scouts. In war, Firdaws became more like a nurse, part of the support network for the town's defenders. She had learned to discern the kinds of weapon fire coming from the Arab fighters or their Jewish enemies. "This is a Tommy gun," she would say quietly to herself. "This is a Sten gun." She had watched the town's defenders set up crude rocket launchers on tree branches, adjusting the trajectory with a string before lighting the fuse.

  For days, Firdaws stood near the front lines with the Arab volunteer fighters. She would bring them food. She would knit them crude sweaters. As the fighting escalated, however, she spent most of her time tearing bedsheets into long strips and rolling them into bandages for Dr. Rasem Khairi to take to his clinic.

  By early June, after Hassan Salameh had died in battle, his troops had drifted away, leaderless. Six weeks later, with al-Ramla and Lydda vulnerable to collapse, there was talk of a full withdrawal by Glubb's Arab Legion troops to defend other positions. If that happened, Firdaws had no idea who could defend the town. The only fighters left would be townsfolk and the Bedouin "barefoot soldiers" against a full-scale army.

  Sheikh Mustafa still wanted the residents of al-Ramla to stay put. Firdaws would recall his poise during these hours. He wore a maroon fez with a white imami cloth wrapped around it—the sign of a religious scholar. Sheikh Mustafa had been mayor of this town for twenty-nine years. He had recently ended his long reign, and now the town was governed by the head of another prominent family, but Sheikh Mustafa's influence was still felt throughout al-Ramla. All week, the sheikh had been meeting with concerned townspeople on the large outdoor veranda of his villa. He sat in a cane rocker beside his garden. Some meetings were small; in others, twenty of the town's notables would sit to discuss strategy. Sheikh Mustafa's message was consistent: Stay in your houses. No one will leave. Our family will stay. Some townspeople, however, including Mustafa's nephew Ahmad, had already sent their families away.

  At his clinic, Rasem Khairi continued to dress the wounded. All morning people kept coming through the shelter's doorway. Some had just come from Lydda and were seeking protection in al-Ramla. Others were leaving al-Ramla, searching for safety in Lydda. Bodies lay on the road between the towns. Leaders in Lydda were sending urgent telegrams to Arab Legion commanders in Beit Nabala six miles to the northeast, requesting help and reinforcements. "Keep your morale up," the response came. "A flood of gold will be reaching you soon."

  Reinforcements never materialized. The two towns were falling to the Israelis. Word had come that King Abdullah's Arab Legion would be pulling out its sparse troops, leaving a few civilian defenders, a meager supply of weapons, and the bullets Sheikh Mustafa had brought back from Transjordan. This would be no match for the army of Israel.

  Soon more people arrived in the shelters with news from Lydda. Jewish soldiers were pulling people out of their homes, marching them to the mosques or St. George's Church. Others were leaving town to the east, to undertermined destinations. A few resisters were holding out from the police fort, but no one expected them to last much longer. After all their preparations—digging trenches, opening a medical clinic, buying an ambulance, stockpiling months of food, even robbing a train with provisions earmarked for the Haganah—it had come down to a word no one had dared speak: surrender.

  On the evening of July 11, shortly after Beethoven's First Symphony played on Radio Jerusalem, the Bedouin soldiers slipped out of town to the south, disappearing into the plain.

  At the Khairi compound, the remaining family shuttered the windows and closed all the doors. For as long as they could, they would close themselves in, delaying the inevitable. Their world was coming apart, but perhaps they could hold out a bit longer. There was flour in the storehouse, and they could live on bread for a few more days.

  In time it became clear, even to Sheikh Mustafa, that defeat was at hand. On the same evening of July 11, he sent his son Husam, along with the new mayor of al-Ramla, to carry the white flag to the Jews. They went by car to Na'an, the kibbutz
near the now abandoned Arab village of Na'ani. Na'an was the home of Khawaja Shlomo, the man who two months earlier had galloped into Na'ani on horseback, frantically warning the villagers.

  When the Arab delegation arrived, Israeli soldiers woke up the region's civilian security chief, a man named Yisrael Galili B. (The B was to distinguish him from the other Yisrael Galili, the longtime chief of the national staff of the Haganah.) Galili B greeted the men and proceeded with Palmach troops to a small meetinghouse on the kibbutz. There they ironed out the terms of surrender: The Arabs would hand over all their weapons and accept Israeli sovereignty. "Foreigners"—Arab fighters from outside Palestine—would be turned over to the Israelis. All residents not of army age and unable to bear arms would be allowed to leave the city, "if they want to." Implicit in the agreement was that the residents could also choose to stay.

  Galili B would soon learn that other plans were in the works for the residents of al-Ramla: "The Military Governor told me," Galili B wrote, "that he had different orders from Ben-Gurion: to evacuate Ramla." Orders to expel the residents of al-Ramla and Lydda were given in the early afternoon of July 12. The Lydda order, stating, "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age," was given at 1:30 P.M. by Lieutenant Colonel Yitzhak Rabin.

  Firdaws heard Israeli soldiers shouting through bullhorns outside: " Yallah Abdullah! Go to King Abdullah, go to Ramallahr Soldiers were going house to house, in some cases pounding on doors with the butts of their guns, yelling at people to leave. Firdaws could hear them announcing the arrival of buses to take residents of al-Ramla to the front lines of the Arab Legion. No matter what the terms of surrender or what Sheikh Mustafa said, it looked as if they wouldn't have any choice. The Arab residents of al-Ramla were being forced to leave their homes.

  On the afternoon of July 12, Bechor Shalom Shitrit, the Israeli minister of minority affairs, arrived at a junction of roads between al-Ramla and Lydda, where he was greeted by the sight of throngs of people walking east. He was outraged. As the man responsible for Arabs in the new Israeli state, he protested the expulsions in a conversation with the foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. Like Israel Galili B, like the men of al-Ramla who signed the surrender, Bechor Shalom Shitrit had thought the Arabs in the newly conquered towns would be allowed to stay.