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

by Sandy Tolan

  At noon on Tuesday, June 6, General Riad, the Egyptian in charge of the eastern front forces, sent an urgent message from Amman to his counterparts in Cairo. "The situation in the West Bank is rapidly deteriorating," Riad warned. "A concentrated attack has been launched on all [points], together with heavy fire, day and night. Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi air forces in position H3 have been virtually destroyed." Riad had been consulting with King Hussein. The general posed a series of terrible choices to the command headquarters in Cairo: cease-fire, retreat, or fighting for one more day in the West Bank, "resulting in the isolation and destruction of the entire Jordanian Army." The cable requested an immediate reply.

  Half an hour later, an answer came from Cairo, advising the Jordanians to withdraw from the West Bank and arm the general population. As this reply was coming in, the king sent a telegram to Nasser, underscoring the unfolding calamity on the Jordanian front and asking the Egyptian president for his advice. Nasser replied that evening, repeating the counsel of his men in uniform. The Jordanian army, Nasser urged, should vacate the West Bank while Arab leaders pressed for a cease-fire.

  In the light of the early evening of June 6, Bashir stood on the roof of an apartment building in Ramallah, facing south. It was warm and clear but for the dark pillars of smoke rising from the direction of Jerusalem and the haze around the Mount of Olives just to the east. Bashir squinted through the smoke, out past the Amari refugee camp that had grown after 1948 and toward the tower at the Qalandia airstrip, where he had landed from Gaza with his father ten years earlier. There he could see a line of tanks and jeeps moving north. As news of the approaching troops reached the streets below, some Palestinians joyfully began preparing to greet them. They assumed these would be the Iraqi reinforcements. Bashir remained on the roof, his left hand characteristically in his pocket, and fixed his gaze on the road to the south. Slowly, as the tanks came closer, he surmised that they were not Iraqi.

  Ramallah fell on the night of June 6 as Israeli ground forces moved in from the south and west. There was little resistance; eyewitnesses would later say many Jordanian troops had retreated well before the Israelis ever arrived. In some cases, the departing Arab soldiers forgot to leave keys for the weapons storehouses, ostensibly stocked with English rifles for the people of Ramallah to repel the invading Israelis. The Jordanian army's main accomplishment in Ramallah, Bashir would remember wryly, was in urging people to get out of the line of fire. "The Jordanian army was asking people to go inside their houses," he said. "That was the extent of their contribution. We didn't feel that they were really fighting."

  In fact, from Jenin in the northern West Bank to Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Hebron farther south, the Jordanian army was without air cover or radar and defenseless to repeated bombings of its ground troops from Israel's French-built fighter jets. The Jordanians had suffered devastating losses, and because of the constant air attacks they were unable to send supplies or reinforcements to the front lines. By late on June 6, as Israeli troops penetrated the West Bank and stood poised at the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, King Hussein's forces were in retreat across the Jordan River, to what was left of his kingdom.

  By late on June 6, Dalia knew that the war was won. She experienced it not with elation—not yet, since the fighting was still going on—but rather with a sense that a miracle was taking place in Israel. How could this have happened? she thought again and again. Did God save us? How can this be?

  With the news the previous day that Israel had destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces, Dalia felt a profound relief such as she had never experienced, just as before the war she had never felt such horror. For Moshe and Solia, the feeling tapped something old, from twenty-four years earlier: the moment when they learned that the Bulgarian authorities had suspended the deportation orders for the Jews and that they would not be boarding train cars for Poland.

  On the morning of Wednesday, June 7, Bashir and his family woke up to a city under military occupation. Israeli soldiers in jeeps were shouting through bullhorns, demanding that white flags be hung outside houses, shops, and apartment buildings; already balconies and windows fluttered with T-shirts and handkerchiefs.

  Bashir was in shock from the surreal and the familiar. Another retreating Jordanian army had been replaced by another occupying Israeli force. In 1948, Bashir thought, we lost 78 percent of our land. And now all of Palestine is under occupation. The taste was bitter and humiliating. Not only did the Israelis capture and occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they now held the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Perhaps most shocking of all was that East Jerusalem, and the Old City with its holy sites, was now in the hands of the Israelis.

  On the evening of June 10, Solia was visiting with Dora and Stella in the addition that had been built onto the house for the two aunts. The women sat at the kitchen table, eating their traditional supper of garlic and Bulgarian cheese, when Dalia burst into the room.

  "Get up, get up!" she shouted to her mother and her aunts. "The war is over!" Moshe heard the commotion and joined them. In the final phase of the war, Israel had captured the Golan Heights from Syria. At 6:30 that evening, the United Nations imposed a cease-fire; the shooting and shelling had stopped. Everyone began jumping wildly, laughing and hugging and kissing one another.

  In the evening, Dalia gathered her family and began to dance: slowly at first, arms extended, neck tilted, head back, eyes half-open, loose skirt shifting softly around her. She spun slowly between the walls of Jerusalem stone. Gradually the other women of the family joined Dalia, and they formed a circle, hands on one another's shoulders, moving to the hora, the Israeli national dance. Solia and Dora and Stella and Dalia swayed through the open house, out to the yard, past the jacaranda tree and the lemon tree, laughing and weeping.

  As they circled through the yard, Dalia looked up at the night sky and sang: "David the king of Israel is alive. Alive and present. David is alive . . . " She would always remember this night and its abiding sense of miracle and liberation.

  Within a week, refugees began arriving in Ramallah from villages near Latrun. Every villager from Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalo had been ordered out of their homes and sent north toward Ramallah; those who tried to return were blocked by a line of tanks and soldiers shooting in the air. Nineteen years earlier, Israeli soldiers commandeering buses had dumped the people of al-Ramla at the edges of these villages as they began their march in the punishing sun to Salbit. Now the villages themselves were emptied and several thousand of the ten thousand residents had taken refuge in Ramallah—a small portion of the more than two hundred thousand Palestinians who would be displaced by the 1967 war.

  In Ramallah, life was transformed. The summer theater festival and countless other plans were canceled abruptly. Israeli soldiers took the place of Jordanian police, and the prisons began to fill with young Palestinian men. Within weeks, the authorities announced a new justice system to be administered by occupation judges sitting in the West Bank. But the Israelis had a problem: Almost no Arab lawyers would come to court. A general strike had rendered the new Israeli courts virtually silent and empty. The strike had been organized, the Israeli authorities would soon learn, by a young West Bank lawyer named Bashir Khairi.

  Bashir and dozens of other Ramallah lawyers had begun meeting secretly with clients in private homes. The occupation authorities threatened him and the other organizers with jail time and enticed them with reduced sentences for clients already in prison. "As long as there's an Israeli flag behind the judge in the courthouse," Bashir told an Israeli colonel, "I won't be representing my people." An Israeli judge told Bashir he would release fifteen Palestinians accused of illegal demonstrations if Bashir simply showed up in court to represent them. Bashir refused, as did almost every other lawyer in similar circumstances: Of the eighty lawyers in Ramallah, Bashir would recount, only five took part in the new system. Now nearly anytime a new trial would be called, the court would be vacant except for the accused and his acc
users. Civil matters went underground entirely. People began to resolve their disputes in private, creating an alternative system in the face of a collective enemy.

  As the occupation wore on, a sense of calm and clarity began to settle over Bashir. The loss was devastating, but it made one thing clear: Palestinians could rely only on themselves to deliver their own justice. It was clear that the right of return, guaranteed by United Nations Resolution 194, would never be delivered by the UN or the international community. Return was subsequently promised by the Arab states whose armed forces instead were crushed and humiliated. The Arab states still put up a rhetorical front—in the days after the war, they would publicly declare "no reconciliation, no negotiation, and no recognition" regarding Israel—but these were increasingly taken as empty words by Palestinians.

  Strangely, though, in the midst of occupation and the utter failure of the Arab regimes, a sense of freedom was emerging: a notion that the Palestinians were suddenly free to think and act for themselves. In the weeks after the occupation, Bashir began to believe that his people would go back to their homeland only through the sweat and blood of Palestinian armed struggle. He was far from alone in this assessment.

  In the wake of the June 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, the pan-Arab movement was in shreds, but the spirit of a Palestinian national liberation struggle was surging. Thousands of young men signed up to become fedayeen—freedom fighters, or, literally, "those who sacrifice." Their goal was to "liberate Palestine" and guarantee the right of return by any means necessary. The ranks of Fatah, led by Arafat and Abu Jihad, swelled, and soon a new organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), would be born from an alliance with the pro-Nasser Arab Nationalist Movement. Its leader was Dr. George Habash, the refugee from Lydda.

  Across the West Bank and in exile, young men confronted their parents with their plans. Fathers demanded their sons seek the safety of higher education in Cairo or London; one son, a young man named Bassam Abu-Sharif, asked his father, "What is a PhD when we have no country?" He did not want to be "an eternal foreigner, a landless, homeless, stateless, shamed, despised Palestinian refugee." Bassam, after joining the PFLP, would recall telling his angry father, "I would rather be in prison in my own country than be a free man in exile. I would rather be dead."

  For now, though, Palestinians would find themselves returning to their homes not in triumph, but simply to ask permission to peer inside.

  The great paradox of the occupation was that suddenly historic Palestine was easier to reach than at any time since 1948. Within days of Israel's capture and annexation of East Jerusalem, the boundary that had separated Hussein's Hashemite kingdom from Israel and West Jerusalem became nearly invisible. At the same time, all along the old West Bank-Israel border—also known as the Green Line—Israeli soldiers had been redeployed to other fronts to patrol the vastly expanded occupied territories. Therefore, there were far fewer Israeli soldiers along the Green Line. By late June, it had become easier for Palestinian families to cross into their old homeland and touch the soil and stones of earlier days.

  This is how Bashir and his cousins found themselves in the West Jerusalem bus station in the summer of 1967, where they climbed onto the 1965 Royal Tiger and rolled west, past the ruins of old Arab villages, past the husks of burned-out Israeli jeeps covered with bouquets, down the hill to the Latrun Valley, past the cement factory, across the railroad tracks, and into al-Ramla, where a young woman named Dalia was sitting in her yard, staring into the leaves of a jacaranda tree.

  Nine

  ENCOUNTER

  THE BELL RANG, and Dalia, jolted from her contemplation, got up from the veranda and walked through the house to the front door. She picked up a large key and trotted lightly down the path to the green metal gate. "Rak rega—just a moment!" Dalia called out, using both hands to raise the heavy key to the lock. She opened the gate partway and looked out from the open space between gate and pillar.

  Three men were standing there stiffly in their coats and ties, in the middle of the stifling Israeli summer heat. It was July 1967, a few weeks after the end of the Six Day War. The men appeared to be in their twenties. Dalia knew immediately that they were Arabs.

  "Ken?" Dalia said. "Yes?"

  The men looked uncomfortable, as if they didn't know what to say now that Dalia had asked them their business. For a moment they remained quiet, but Dalia knew why they had come.

  "As soon as I saw them," she remembered, "I felt, Wow, it's them. It was as if I'd always been waiting for them."

  Now the youngest one, the one with a thin face and large brown eyes, opened his mouth.

  "This was my father's house," said the young man in his halting English. "And I lived here, too."

  Dalia was ready for what came next.

  "Would it be possible," the young man asked, "for us to come in and see the house?"

  Dalia Eshkenazi knew she had very little time to process this question and respond. Logic dictated she tell the men to come back when her parents were home. If she allowed them to come in, what would that be inviting?

  Bashir gazed at the woman. She hadn't responded to his question. Fresh in his mind was the terrible reception Yasser had received at his childhood home only an hour earlier. At least Ghiath, his other cousin, had seen his old house, now converted to a school for Israeli children. This young woman, whoever she was, seemed to be taking her time.

  Dalia looked at the three young men. They were quiet and apprehensive. She knew that if she told them to come back later, she might never see them again. Yet if she opened the door, she might not be able to close it. So many thoughts were rushing through her head. She needed to integrate them quickly into a response.

  "Yes," Dalia Eshkenazi said finally to the three Arab men at her gate. She smiled broadly. "Please, come in."

  Bashir looked at the striking young woman with short dark hair. She was smiling at him, holding open his father's metal gate.

  "Please come in," Bashir thought he heard the woman say. He watched as she turned to walk up the stone path toward the house.

  Was this possible? Bashir looked at his cousins. Had the Israeli woman really said to follow her? He stood at the gate, frozen, doubting everything. The men remained planted as the woman disappeared into the house. Bashir looked at Yasser. "I am sure she said, 'You are welcome,' " he told his cousin. A moment later, the woman's head appeared again in the doorway.

  She was looking at them quizzically.

  "Are you sure we can come in?" Bashir managed in his stiff English.

  "Yes." The woman laughed. "Please, come up the path."

  Bashir would recall stepping gingerly, one stone to the next, taking care not to step on the grass growing between them. He turned back to his cousins, who were still immobile at the gate. "Follow me," he said to Yasser and Ghiath. "Come," he said. "Come into my house."

  Dalia stood in the doorway, still smiling as the men came up the path. She knew it was not advisable in the wake of war for a young Israeli woman to invite three Arab men inside her house. This prospect, however, did not unnerve her in the least. Dalia had sensed a vulnerability in these young men, and she was certain they had no intention of harming her. She felt safe.

  "Please, give me five minutes," Dalia told the men. "Only five minutes." She wanted the inside of the place to look nice, so that her visitors would have a good image of the house and the people living in it.

  Bashir barely heard her. He was taking in the garden: purple and yellow flowers shaped like candles and closed against the sun; the flowering fitna tree his mother had told him about, exploding from the branches in brilliant white and yellow; thick, deep red roses from abundant bushes.

  Behind the house stood a palm tree, its gray tufts rising into broad green leaves far above the roof. In the backyard, he hoped, the lemon tree would still be standing.

  Bashir fixed his gaze upon the wooden front door, the one his father had always knocked on when he came home
from work, before July 1948, announcing his arrival and bursting through the door as Bashir raced toward him.

  What was taking her so long? It had seemed much longer than five minutes. What was she doing? Could she be calling the police? The cousins grew increasingly wary.

  Bashir could see the white Jerusalem stone his father had laid with his own hands thirty-one years earlier. If he were standing a bit closer, Bashir could run his fingertips along its cratered surface, its miniature hills and valleys like the landscape of Palestine itself.

  "You can come inside now," the young woman was saying. She had reappeared in the doorway. "You are welcome. Come in, feel at home." It was a universal welcome—Make yourself at home; Mi casa es su casa; Ahlan wa-sahlan; Baruch habah—yet these particular words seemed especially strange to Bashir as he approached the front door: Feel at home.

  The cousins crossed the threshold: Bashir first, followed by Yasser and Ghiath. Bashir took a few careful steps and looked around, standing in silence, breathing in the large open room, exhaling, breathing it in again. It was much as he had pictured it: spare and clean. He would recall feeling as if he were in a mosque; as if he, Bashir, were a holy man.

  Dalia would recall leading the cousins through each room, wanting them to feel welcome and comfortable. After the initial tour, she told them to take their time and experience the house as they wished to. She withdrew, watching them with fascination.

  Bashir looked like a man in a trance. He floated down hallways and in and out of doorways, touching tile, glass, wood, painted plaster wall, absorbing the tactile feel of every surface.

  "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."