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

by Sandy Tolan

  Shitrit tried to put a stop to the expulsions. But he was unaware of an earlier meeting between Ben-Gurion, Major Yitzhak Rabin, and Yigal Allon, the commander of the Palmach. Rabin, the future prime minister, would recall later that Ben-Gurion, when asked by Allon what they should do with the civilian population of al-Ramla and Lydda, "waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out!'"

  Not only was Shitrit apparently unaware of these meetings and orders; he also did not know that Allon had already considered the military advantages of expulsion. Driving out the citizens of al-Ramla and Lydda, Allon believed, would alleviate the pressure from an armed and hostile population. It would clog the roads toward the Arab Legion front, seriously hampering any effort to retake the towns. And the sudden arrival of thousands of destitute refugees in the West Bank and Transjordan would place a great financial burden on King Abdullah—who by now, the Israeli military was convinced, was an avowed enemy of the Jewish state.

  "Regrettably, our forces have committed criminal acts that may stain the Zionist movement's good name," Shitrit would say later. "The finest of us have given a bad example to the masses."

  The victorious Israeli troops had been accompanied to al-Ramla by a few American reporters. Bilby, from the Herald Tribune, noted that "outdoor prison cages were jammed with young Arabs, whose listless demeanor showed that they had no stomach for a fight." According to Gene Currivan, the reporter from the New York Times, "It seemed as if most were of military age, but apparently they had no interest in fighting for Ramie [alRamla], or for that matter, for Palestine."

  A short time later, Currivan noted, "There was much excitement as Arab troops [civilian defenders] marched in, their hands high, to give themselves up, and others by the hundred, already prisoners, squatted behind barbed-wire fences in front of the fortress-like police station." Some men of fighting age had managed to escape scrutiny: wearing dark glasses and long cloth coats, they leaned on their walking sticks and limped about in the heat. Family members stared at one another through the barbed wire, and when the women or elderly tried to approach the fence, Jewish soldiers would fire over their heads. Later that day, nine or ten buses pulled up and soldiers ordered the prisoners to board them. One by one the buses drove off; men who rode on them would recall whispering to one another, "Where are they taking us?" The men were destined for a POW camp, and the Israeli soldiers directed other townspeople onto separate buses leaving town to the east.

  The morning of July 14 was cloudless and extremely hot. It was the middle of July, the seventh day of Ramadan. Thousands of people had already been expelled from al-Ramla by bus and truck. Some, like Bashir and his siblings, had left well before the Jewish soldiers arrived, taking temporary refuge in Ramallah. Others in the Khairi clan had remained in al-Ramla.

  Firdaws and her cousins, aunts, and uncles sat waiting at al-Ramla's bus terminal. There were perhaps thirty-five in all, the Khairis and their relatives, the Tajis. Sheikh Mustafa was among them.

  With them they carried a few suitcases, bundles of clothes, and gold strapped to their bodies. Firdaws, the Girl Guide, had also packed her uniform and brought along her knife and her whistle. They had planned for a short trip, in miles and in days; they were certain they would be coming back soon, when the Arab armies recaptured al-Ramla.

  At home the Khairis, the Tajis, and the rest of the people of al-Ramla had left behind their couches and tables, rugs, libraries, framed family pictures, and their blankets, dishes, and cups. They left their fezzes and gallabiyas, balloon pants, spare keffiyehs, sashes, and belts. They left their spices for makloubeh, grape leaves in brine, and the flour for the dough of their date pastries. They left their fields of wild peas and jasmine, passiflora and dried scarlet anemone, mountain lilies that grew between the barley and the wheat. They left their olives and oranges, lemons and apricots, spinach and okra and peppers. They left their silk and linen, silver bracelets and chokers, amber, coral, and necklaces with Austrian coins. They left their pottery and soaps, leather and oils, Swedish ovens and copper pots, and drinking goblets from Bohemia. They left their silver trays filled with sugared almonds and sweet dried chickpeas; their dolls, made with glued-together wood chips; their sumac; their indigo.

  The bus came; the Khairis and the Tajis boarded it. So did the village idiot. He was carrying two watermelons. Firdaws saw her aunt give two sacks to her mother: one with vitamins for the baby, another with a glass water pipe and tobacco. With all the things left behind, Firdaws wondered, why would it occur to anyone to bring a water pipe?

  The bus rolled out of al-Ramla toward the front lines of the Arab Legion at Latrun. There, they were ordered off the bus and told to march north, toward Salbit. It was only four kilometers, but by now it was one hundred degrees. There was no shade and no road, just a steep rise across cactus and Christ's thorn. This is what the people would later call "the donkey road"—if the donkey can make it, perhaps people can, too.

  The earth was baked hard. Firdaws looked ahead: A line of humanity moved slowly up the hills in the waves of heat. For many of the people of al-Ramla, it was their first glimpse of Khairi women, who had almost never left the family compound. Some of the women were pregnant, and there, in the heat, a woman's water broke. She had her baby on the ground.

  The families climbed out of Latrun and back toward Salbit, where there was word the Arab Legion would drive people in trucks to Ramallah. The refugees bent forward under the sun, stumbling over rocks, thorns, and sharp wheat stalks cut short from the recent harvest.

  Firdaws caught sight of the village idiot carrying his two watermelons. Wordlessly she took one from him and with her Girl Guide knife sliced into the red flesh. The Khairi families and their neighbors gathered impatiently. The melon was gone quickly, save for the small piece Firdaws held back for herself; but then a young mother came to her, begging the last piece for her son.

  White crusts formed around everyone's mouths. How far was Salbit? Were they still going in the right direction? They were always looking for shade and water. They crossed fields of corn, where they plucked ripe ears and sucked the moisture out of the kernels. Firdaws saw a boy peeing into a can and then watched his grandmother drink from it. A man had slung his father over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and Firdaws, for a time, carried someone's baby in her arms.

  It was late afternoon, and they had been walking for hours over rocky terrain with no clear idea anymore how to find the village of Salbit. Their rambling journey would turn out to be much longer than four kilometers. Some would say twelve; others would swear it was twenty.

  The Khairis and the Tajis began to shed their belongings. Some had actually begun the walk with suitcases; these had been discarded long ago. After a time someone found a well, but the rope was broken. Women removed their dresses, lowered them into the stagnant water, and lifted them back up, placing the fabric to their children's lips so they could suck on the wet cloth.

  Perhaps thirty thousand people from al-Ramla and Lydda staggered through the hills that day.

  John Bagot Glubb heard the reports. The British commander of the Arab Legion knew it was "a blazing day in the coastal plains, the temperature about a hundred degrees in the shade." He knew that the refugees were crossing "stony fallow covered with thorn bushes" and that, in the end, "nobody will ever know how many children died." Still, Glubb would insist until his death that he didn't have sufficient forces to defend al-Ramla and Lydda; that to do so would have required pulling his troops from the front lines at Latrun and possibly losing everything: Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarm, East Jerusalem, Abdullah's entire prize of the West Bank—an act that "would have been madness."

  On July 15, before the march from al-Ramla and Lydda was over, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: "The Arab Legion has wired that there are 30,000 refugees moving along the road between Lydda and Ramla, who are infuriated with the Legion. They're demanding bread. They should be taken across the Jordan River"—into Abdullah's kingdom and away from the new state o
f Israel.

  In the evening, the Tajis and Khairis came to a grove of fig trees in the village of Salbit. The village was nearly abandoned, except for the hundreds of refugee families resting in the orchards.

  Firdaws and her family took shelter under the trees. Someone brought water. She noticed that her mother had one of the two cloth sacks—the vitamins, Firdaws assumed. But it was the water pipe.

  That night, the family sat under the fig trees, smoking quietly, the bubbles gurgling in the glass canister.

  The next morning, trucks from the Arab Legion took the Khairis and the Tajis to Ramallah. They reached the crest of a hill just west of the city. Below them lay a vast bowl: the valley of Ramallah. The city had long been a Christian hill town and cool summer haven for Arabs from the Levant to the Gulf.

  Now tens of thousands of refugees milled about, stunned and humiliated, looking for food and determined to return home.

  Five

  EMIGRATION

  SUNLIGHT FILTERED THROUGH the narrow windowpanes of Sofia's central rail station, casting a hazy glow on the hundreds of Jewish passengers packed inside the waiting hall. It was October 1948, three months after Israeli forces entered al-Ramla. As the Khairis waited in Ramallah a thousand miles to the south, listening for news in the ongoing war for Palestine, Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi inched forward in the long line of Bulgarian Jews in the train station. Solia wore a long skirt and a tailored jacket to match, and her dark hair spilled over her shoulders from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Many passengers wore dark coats and heavy shoes and stood surrounded by boxes and suitcases. Moshe held the family's identity papers. He was short and square, with the dark olive skin, high cheekbones, and black, deep-set eyes of many Sephardic Jews. Beside them lay their infant, Dalia, asleep in her straw basket.

  Moshe and Solia had met eight years earlier, just before Bulgaria entered its alliance with the Nazis. Moshe liked to tell Solia, and later Dalia, that when he'd first seen his future bride at a party, she was ravishing and vibrant, in a ballroom dress, ready to dance. He'd thought, Now here is someone for my friend Melamed, the doctor. Moshe had approached the young beauty, but after a few minutes of conversation, he'd thought, What about me? Within days they were on their first date, and Moshe wasted no time: He informed Solia of his intention to marry her. She dismissed the remark with a laugh, but Moshe was undaunted. "It will take as long as it takes," he vowed, "but I will marry you."

  At long tables at the front of the lines sat uniformed Bulgarian immigration police. One by one, 3,694 Jews prepared to show their papers and open their suitcases for inspection for hidden cash or gold. They were allowed to take nothing of value, but some travelers had sewn jewels inside their underwear, or strapped French gold coins, known as napoleons, to their bodies. They were not planning to return: When they reached the immigration tables, they would sign documents saying that from this day forward, they would no longer be citizens of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Later that day, they would board two long trains and ride to the coast of Yugoslavia, where a ship, the Pan York, would be waiting to take them to the new state of Israel.

  Moshe and Solia were part of a history unlike any other in Europe. They knew that, like nearly everyone else in the railway station, they were lucky just to be alive. Solia believed that were it not for the decency of so many Gentiles in Bulgaria—and particularly of a handful of people who chose to act in early 1943—she and Moshe could have been on a train to Treblinka, not waiting to board a ship with their infant daughter for a new life in the Jewish state.

  The Pan York would sail on October 28, 1948—three days hence, and after years of deliberation that had brought them to this moment of departure.

  More than five years had passed since the night in March 1943 when Moshe and Solia waited in Sliven for the deportation that never came. King Boris died later that year, and in the summer of 1944, with the arrival of the Soviet Red Army, Bulgaria's alliance with the Nazis crumbled. Bulgaria's Partizan fighters, including Moshe's brother, Jacques, and many of Susannah Behar's friends, came down from the Rhodope and Balkan Mountains, and soon Bulgaria's anti-Fascist parties forged a left-Democratic governing coalition, the Fatherland Front. Moshe and Solia returned to Sofia and began to organize their lives. Some Jews dreamed of the new Bulgarian state they would help build after Fascism, but others were already thinking about Palestine.

  Zionism, the political movement devoted to the emigration of European Jews to the Holy Land, had taken hold in Bulgaria in the early 1880s, just as the nation freed itself from the Ottoman "yoke." In 1895, an early Zionist paper published in Plovdiv broached the idea that Jews could "arrange their life in Syria and Palestine by settling in the field for agricultural work." The next year, Bulgarian Jews established Har Tuv, one of the earliest Zionist settlements in Palestine. That same June, Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader, stopped in Sofia en route to Istanbul on the Orient Express, to a triumphant reception at the train station. Herzl, whose book The Jewish State laid out the vision of a "Promised Land" where "we can live as free men on our own soil," was already a hero to Jews in Bulgaria. "I was hailed as Leader, as the Heart of Israel, etc. in extravagant terms," Herzl wrote in his diary. "I stood there, I believe, altogether dumbfounded, and the passengers of the Orient Express stared at the unusual spectacle with astonishment."

  Herzl believed Europe did not want the Jews, and he argued for a Jewish state "where we can have hooked noses, black or red beards, and bandy legs, without being despised for it . . . where we can die tranquilly in our homeland . . . where we shall live at peace with all the world. . . . So that the derisive cry of 'Jew!' may become an honorable appellation, like German, Englishman, Frenchman—in short, like that of all civilized peoples." In much of Europe, including among Jewish intellectuals and even some rabbis, Herzl's ideas were dismissed as Utopian or dangerous; he was called "the Jewish Jules Verne" and a "crazy careerist." In Bulgaria, however, Herzl was praised as "the new apostle of the new Jewish nationalism."

  On his way back from Istanbul, where he had sought support from the Ottoman Empire to establish a Jewish state, Herzl stopped in Sofia again. "Sensation throughout the town," he wrote. "Hats and caps thrown in the air. I had to request that a parade be dispensed with. . . . Later I had to go to the synagogue, where hundreds were awaiting me. . . . I stood in the pulpit before the Holy Ark. When I hesitated for a moment as to how to face the congregation without turning my back to the Ark, someone exclaimed: 'You may turn your back even to the Ark. You are holier than the Torah.' Several wanted to kiss my hand." An amazed Herzl warned against demonstrations "and advised a calm demeanor lest popular passions be aroused against the Jews."

  Talk of a return to Zion went on for several decades in the pages of prewar Zionist newspapers in Bulgaria. Arabs already living on the land did not figure in these discussions, and some Bulgarian Jews would recall reading about the "land without people for a people without land." Debates in these pages centered on whether Jews should learn Hebrew in preparation for emigration to Palestine or stay with Ladino, the Judeo Spanish mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews. Moshe became fluent in Hebrew through a Socialist-Zionist organization called Hashomer Hatza'ir (the Young Guard). Solia was content with her Ladino and its proverbs learned at the hearth and in the kitchen.

  The Zionist papers were shut down after the 1941 anti-Jewish Law for the Defense of the Nation. By October 1944, however, less than a month after the liberation from the pro-Fascist regime, Bulgarian Zionists had already begun to regroup. Organizers of local committees sent official greetings to the Fatherland Front; then they established the Palestinski Komitet, which advocated aliyah, or Jewish emigration to Palestine. Their goal was to make aliyah a mass movement among Bulgarian Jews.

  For Moshe and Solia and many of their neighbors, the prospect of emigration had at first seemed remote. Their families lived here; their work was here; even after what happened in 1943, they were still Bulgarian. For many Bulgarians, Jews included, the defeat of
the Nazis meant that the sacrifice of the Partizans in the Rhodope and Balkan Mountains had not been for naught. Moshe's brother, Jacques, believed that with the Communists in power for the first time in Bulgaria, an egalitarian society could finally be built. Moshe wasn't so sure; for one thing, the country was still suffering from the recent war.

  Bulgaria was a devastated landscape. American bombings in late 1943 and early 1944 had flattened much of Sofia, including the parliament building. The relentless blitzes killed many and drove residents into the countryside. Villages were overrun with refugees. Crop failures brought food shortages and hunger, and runaway inflation deepened the crisis. By the late fall of 1944, the new, impoverished government had begun to look beyond its borders for help.

  On December 2, less than three months after the country's liberation, David Ben-Gurion arrived in the Bulgarian capital. The leader of the Zionists in Palestine was received by the Bulgarian prime minister, the foreign, interior, and propaganda ministers, and Metropolitan Stefan, the Bulgarian Orthodox bishop, who at substantial personal risk had stood up for the nation's Jews during the war. The central goal of his meeting was to win their agreement to allow Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Rehabilitating the Jews of Bulgaria would be impossible, he told the officials; they had to be allowed to leave. Establishing a Jewish state, Ben-Gurion told the Jews and state dignitaries packed into the Balkan Theatre in Sofia, was "the task of the moment." "Aliyah!" came cries from the audience. By the end of the year, more than 1,300 Jews had left Bulgaria en route to Palestine. One of them, Solia's cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, was the first in the family to leave.