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

by Sandy Tolan

  They set out in late morning, and as they rode east, the Judean Hills, as Dalia knew them, came into sharper relief. The hills were cast in multiple hues of purple; shadows were dappled with thin fingers of light. Dalia recalled the time when she was five, at home with her mother, when she pointed to these same hills, saying, "Ima, let's go to these mountains." When Solia told her that the mountains were far away, Dalia took her mother by the hand, saying, "No, no, if you really want to we can get there. One day, I will get there." As she approached the mountains of the West Bank, riding toward new ground with the quiet, tense Englishman, Dalia felt a sense of belonging.

  The Englishman's car splashed through potholes on the unpaved winter roads of the West Bank. Dalia knew that somewhere on these roads Israeli tanks and jeeps were on patrol, but she and Richard saw mostly a terrain of stony hills, olive groves, and ancient villages growing out of the landscape. They neared Ramallah, driving northeast from Latrun and the empty Arab village of Imwas. Somewhere on the maze of roads north of Beit Sira, they became lost. Children from a nearby village surrounded the car. Dalia felt apprehensive listening to children speaking rapidly in Arabic.

  They drove on, traveling down strange and deserted roads in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, still unsure of where they were going.

  Six months earlier, in only six days, Israelis had engineered a stunning reversal of their image across the world: from victim to victor and also to occupier. The exhilaration of victory and the public exaltation in Israel and internationally had given way in some quarters to reflections on the brutality of war and the morality of the occupation. One young Israeli writer, Amos Oz, was already calling for a full withdrawal from the occupied territories on ethical grounds. Oz was also part of a team of young kibbutzniks who sought to chronicle the mixed emotions of Sabras, the native-born Ashkenazi Israelis, who were "dazed by the magnitude of their victory and, no less, shocked by the revelation of what war really is."

  These were Dalia's contemporaries in the Israeli army, and they had been telling Oz and the other chroniclers of their moral ambivalence. On the one hand, almost every soldier saw the war as just—a defense against "Armageddon . . . of all the things we talked about years ago, when we were kids—about loving our country, about the continuation of Jewish life here in the Land of our Fathers." On the other hand, many soldiers returned to the kibbutz disturbed by the feeling of having become, in the words of one Sabra, "just machines for killing. Everyone's face is set in a snarl and there's a deep growl coming from your belly. You want to kill and kill. You've got to understand what things like that did to us. We hated and hated."

  This was a new self-image for the heroic Sabra, whose role had been to show resilience and strength for all of Israeli society. Now, in the wake of the Six Day War, Israelis had a new role—occupier—and it was one few of the kibbutznik soldiers wanted. "It's an absolutely lousy feeling being in a conquering army," one soldier told Oz. "It's a horrible job, really horrible. I'm a kibbutznik. It's not for us. We haven't been brought up to it. We haven't been trained for it."

  Israelis had increasingly seen themselves as a nation of victims, especially since the 1963 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem had pulled the Holocaust from the shadows. Now the Sabras, many of whom were children of Holocaust survivors, found themselves confronting an occupied civilian population: mothers pleading with soldiers for the release of their sons; wives, for their husbands; old men bent over sticks, looking with confusion at a battalion passing by and yelling in a language they couldn't understand.

  In Ramallah it was just as Bashir had said: As soon as Dalia and Richard pulled up near Manara Square in the heart of the town, they asked a man on the street for the house of Bashir Khairi. The man knew who Bashir was and where he lived. Within minutes, Dalia and Richard were standing at the base of a concrete stairway as a neighbor went up to notify Bashir of his arriving guests.

  Bashir, a few weeks removed from an Israeli jail, was in his room when his younger brother Kamel burst in. "Guess who's here?" Kamel asked excitedly. Bashir knew immediately. He bounded down the stairway to the street. There was Dalia, looking a little nervous, standing beside a tall, stocky, pale fellow who looked even more uncomfortable.

  It was cold, and dark skies threatened more rain, but Bashir made no move to invite his guests upstairs. "I don't know if it's safe for you to come and visit," he told her. "Because I've just come out of prison."

  "Why were you in prison?" Dalia asked.

  "Because I love my country," Bashir replied.

  Funny, Dalia thought. / also love my country, and I haven't been imprisoned. She realized, however, that Bashir's recounting of his incarceration was not meant to display his Palestinian nationalist credentials; rather, he was trying to protect her. Bashir was being watched, and if Dalia came upstairs, she, too, would risk surveillance. The irony was that Bashir was trying to shield Dalia from the eyes of her own army, of which she was now a part. She was faced with a decision, and she came to it quickly: She would not allow anyone to tell her whom she could or could not see. She looked at Bashir's thin, clean-shaven face and his large brown eyes. "Please," she said. "Let us have a visit."

  Upstairs, Bashir led Dalia and Richard to an overstuffed couch in a cold, darkened living room. She was greeted by quiet bustling. Someone rolled in a kerosene heater, and someone else turned on the lamps. Bashir's sisters were darting about, preparing the sitting room for the surprise guests. This was the first time Dalia had seen West Bank women, just as she imagined it was their first look at an Israeli not in uniform.

  Bashir introduced his mother, Zakia, who greeted Dalia warmly, and within moments, Dalia would remember, "things suddenly began appearing on the table: teas, cakes, date pastries, Arabic sweets, Turkish coffee . . . " It was Dalia's first encounter with Arab hospitality, and as more trays and dishes appeared, Dalia was overwhelmed by the generosity.

  As warm as the family was, Dalia was struck by how temporary their home felt. She looked around at the couches, the tile floor, and the framed photographs on the wall. Yet something central was missing. Dalia couldn't identify it precisely, but she felt as if the whole family was sitting on its suitcases.

  "So," Bashir began in his hesitant English, "how are you, Dalia? How is your family? How are you doing at school?"

  "I am fine," Dalia said. "Fine."

  There was a pause.

  Bashir regarded Dalia. He was content to let her determine the course of their conversation. After all, she was his guest. "You are welcome here, Dalia," he said. "I hope you will spend a nice day with us. You are generous and very nice to us."

  Dalia noticed Bashir's sisters whispering and peering at her from around a doorway. These faces held the most beautiful eyes Dalia had ever seen. They seemed to Dalia like the eyes of deer—enei ayala in Hebrew, powerful emblems of beauty. Eventually all the family would come out to greet Dalia, except for Bashir's father, Ahmad; apparently, he wasn't home.

  Dalia took another deep breath; she had hesitated before posing the question but reminded herself that she had come to Ramallah for the opportunity to learn their story. "Bashir," Dalia said, leaning forward, "I know this is a sensitive issue." She hesitated. "It must be very difficult that someone now is living in your house."

  Bashir would have been content to let the conversation remain on the level of "How are you?" His sense of Arab hospitality dictated that he not challenge a visitor. This, however, was extraordinary. Dalia needed and deserved to be engaged.

  "Listen, Dalia," Bashir said slowly. "How would you feel to leave your home, all your belongings, your entire spirit, in one place? Would you not fight to get it back with everything you have?"

  There were many more details Bashir could have conveyed. He could have told Dalia what the collective Palestinian narrative had taught him: about the Israeli army attacking Lydda and occupying al-Ramla on July 12, 1948; about the soldiers' rifle butts pounding on the doors the next day; about the forced exile of tens of
thousands of people from al-Ramla and Lydda; about the nineteen years of an inconsolable longing for home; about the willingness to fight, with your fingernails if necessary, to return. Instead, he stood up suddenly.

  "Come, Dalia," Bashir would remember saying. "Let me show you something." Dalia had been trying to engage Richard in the conversation, but the Englishman, looking bored, sighed deeply as Bashir walked toward a glass cabinet in the dining room. Dalia followed Bashir, and the two stood looking through the glass.

  "Look at the cabinet and tell me what you see," Bashir said.

  "Is this a test?"

  "It is a test. Please tell me what you see in the cabinet."

  "Books, vases, a picture of Abdel Nasser. Maybe some things hiding behind. And a lemon."

  "You won," Bashir said. "Do you remember the lemon?"

  "What about it? Is there a story?"

  "Do you remember when me and my brother came to visit?. . . Yes? Do you remember that Kamel asked you for something as we left? And what you gave him as a gift?"

  Dalia was silent for a moment, Bashir would recall. "Oh, my God. It's one of the lemons from that visit. But why did you keep it? It has been almost four months now."

  They walked from the cabinet and took their seats in the living room.

  "To us this lemon is more than fruit, Dalia," Bashir said slowly. "It is land and history. It is the window that we open to look at our history. A few days after we brought the lemons home, it was night, and I heard a movement in the house. I was asleep. I got up, and I was listening. We were so nervous when the occupation started. Even the movement of the trees used to wake us. And left us worried. I heard the noise, and I got up. The noise was coming from this room right here. Do you know what I saw? My father, who is nearly blind."

  "Yes," said Dalia. She was listening intently.

  "Dalia, I saw him holding the lemon with both hands. And he was pacing back and forth in the room, and the tears were running down his cheeks."

  "What did you do?"

  "I went back to my room, sat in my bed, and I started thinking. Then I started talking to myself until the morning. And I understood why I love him so much."

  Dalia was on the verge of tears herself. She looked at her English friend and tried again to involve him in the conversation. He had begun tapping his feet and looking at his watch. It seemed this would be their only date.

  "What would happen if your father came to the house in Ramla?" she asked Bashir.

  "He might have a breakdown. He always says he'd have a heart attack before he got to the door."

  "And your mother?"

  "And my mother, too. You know what a house means to a wife. She entered the house when she was a bride. And she gave birth in it, too." Bashir himself was born in that house, nearly twenty-six years earlier.

  "We can see ourselves in you, Bashir," Dalia said. "We can remember our own history of exile over thousands of years. I can understand your longing for home because of our own experience of exile." Dalia began considering her notion of Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel) alongside Bashir's love of Arde Falastin (Land of Palestine).

  "And I started expressing my understanding of their sense of exile," Dalia recalled. "And that I could understand their longing for their home. I could understand their longing for Falastin through my longing to Zion, to Israel. And their exile I could understand from my own exile. I had something in my collective experience and through which I could understand their recent experience."

  She told Bashir, "What you have gone through, it must have been a terrible experience." Dalia was deeply moved and believed she was connecting with her new friend.

  Bashir had never been able to understand how another people's ancient longing—their wish to return home from a millennial exile—could somehow be equated with the actual life of generations of Palestinians who lived and breathed in this land, who grew food from it, who buried their parents and grandparents in it. He was skeptical that this longing for Zion had much to do with Israel's creation. "Israel first came to the imagination of the Western occupying powers for two reasons," he told Dalia.

  "And what are they?" she asked in reply, now feeling her own skepticism grow.

  "First, to get rid of you in Europe. Second, to rule the East through this government and to keep down the whole Arab world. And then the leaders started remembering the Torah and started to talk about the land of the milk and the honey, and the Promised Land."

  "But there is good reason for this," Dalia objected. "And the reason is to protect us from being persecuted in other countries. To protect us from being slaughtered in cold blood just because we are Jews. I know the truth, Bashir." Now Dalia was no longer trying to involve her English friend in the conversation. "I know that my people were killed, slaughtered, put in gas ovens. Israel was the only safe place for us. It was the place where the Jews could finally feel that being a Jew is not a shame!"

  "But you are saying that the whole world did this, Dalia. It is not true. The Nazis killed the Jews. And we hate them. But why should we pay for what they did? Our people welcomed the Jewish people during the Ottoman Empire. They came to us running away from the Europeans and we welcomed them with all that we had. We took care of them. But now because you want to live in a safe place, other people live in pain. If we take your family, for example. You come running from another place. Where should you stay? In a house that is owned by someone else? Will you take the house from them? And the owners—us—should leave the house and go to another place? Is it justice that we should be expelled from our cities, our villages, our streets? We have history here—Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramla. Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land. Their civilization, their history, their heritage, their culture. And now we are strangers. Strangers in every place. Why did this happen, Dalia? The Zionism did this to you, not just to the Palestinians."

  For Dalia, the love of Zion was not something she felt she could explain quickly to her Palestinian friend. "For two thousand years we were praying three times a day to return to this land," she told Bashir. "We tried to live in other places. But we realized we were not wanted in other places. We had to come back home."

  The two young people stared at each other in silence.

  "Okay, Bashir, I live in your home," Dalia said finally. "And this is also my home. It is the only home I know. So, what shall we do?"

  "You can go back where you came from," Bashir said calmly.

  Dalia felt as if Bashir had dropped a bomb. She wanted to scream, though as his guest she knew she couldn't. She forced herself to listen.

  "We believe that only those who came here before 1917"—the year of the Balfour Declaration and the beginning of the British Mandate in Palestine—"have a right to be here. But anyone who came after 1917," Bashir said, "cannot stay."

  Dalia was astounded at the audacity of Bashir's solution. "Well, since I was born and came here after 1917, that is no solution for me!" she said with an incredulous laugh. She was struck by the total contradiction of her situation: complete disagreement across a seemingly unbridgeable gulf, combined with the establishment of a bond through a common history, in a house where she felt utterly protected and welcomed. At the base of it all, Dalia felt the depth of the Khairis' gratitude for her having simply opened the door to the house in Ramla. "And this was an amazing situation to be in," she remembered. "That everybody could feel the warmth and the reality of our people meeting, meeting the other, and it was real, it was happening, and we were admiring each other's being, so to speak. And it was so tangible. And on the other hand, we were conversing of things that seemed totally mutually exclusive. That my life here is at their expense, and if they want to realize their dream, it's at my expense."

  Dalia looked straight at Bashir. "I have nowhere else to go, Bashir," she said. "I am staying here. The best thing is for you to live and leave us to live, too," she said. "We have to live
together. To accept each other."

  Bashir stared calmly at his new friend. "You are living in a place that does not belong to you, Dalia. Do you remember that the Crusaders were in this land for almost two hundred years? But finally they had to leave. This is my country. We were driven out of it."

  "Well, you realize it's also my country," Dalia insisted.

  "No, it's not. It's not your country, Dalia. You stole it from us."

  The word stole Dalia experienced as a slap; somehow it was made worse by Bashir's utterly placid demeanor. She sat on the couch, silent, feeling insulted and aggravated.

  "You are leaving us in the sea," Dalia finally said. "So what do you propose for us? Where shall we go?"

  "I'm very sorry, but this is not my problem," Bashir said quietly. "You stole our land from us. The solution, Dalia, is very hard. When you plant a tree and it's not the place for it to live, it's not going to grow. We are talking about the future of millions of people." Bashir then repeated his idea, still prevalent among many Palestinians in the wake of the Six Day War, that Jews born after 1917, or born outside of what was now Israel, would go back to their homeland of origin.

  Dalia could hardly believe this was a serious idea. "No, Bashir, no, we don't have anywhere to go back to."

  "Yes, you can, you can; it can be arranged. You'd be welcomed back."

  "Bashir," Dalia pleaded, leaning forward, "don't try to fix one wrong with another wrong! You want to turn us, again, into refugees?" What am I doing here? she thought. What is the point of continuing this conversation?

  Still, she had noticed something: Bashir had never repeated the threats of the Palestinian nationalists to one day take all of Palestine by force. He had never said, We will take your house from you—and Dalia had avoided asking him his intentions or his political affiliations. Each had chosen to reside within the contradiction: They were enemies, and they were friends. Therefore, Dalia believed, they had reason to keep talking; the conversation itself was worth protecting. Dalia stood up; Richard seemed immensely relieved as he reached for his coat. "I think I have stayed here long enough," she said to Bashir. "My father must be worried. I have to go."