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

by Sandy Tolan

  Dalia reached for Bashir's hand. "Really, I enjoyed spending time with you. And I feel that every time I understand more and more than before."

  Bashir's mother and sisters came. Dalia thanked them, and everyone said good-bye. "You are not a guest in this house, Dalia," Bashir said. "It means you have to come again and again, and we're going to do this, too."

  Dalia turned as she reached the door. "I'm only one person searching for the truth," she said. "And I found the thread that's going to take me there."

  Ten

  EXPLOSION

  THE MORNING OF February 21, 1969, was dry and cold in Jerusalem. A light wind blew down the cobblestone walkway of Ben Yehuda, south across a winter landscape of bare trees and brown grass and down Agron Street, where it swirled around the streetlights on the corner of King George Boulevard. Israel Gefen, veteran of World War II and three Arab-Israeli wars, was running an errand for his wife, a Canadian journalist. Gefen walked into the Supersol market on the corner of Agron and King George just after 10:30 A.M. AS he strode past the checkout counters and toward the coolers in the back, Gefen noticed two young men speaking English with what seemed to be South African accents. That was the last thing his mind recorded before the boom.

  Gefen was experienced in booms. In the late 1930s, he had joined a secret Jewish resistance on a kibbutz, manufacturing experimental weapons during the Great Arab Rebellion. In 1941, he'd fought in the British army against Rommel in the Libyan desert. His service as an Israeli soldier included the recent Six Day War, the Suez conflict, and what Israelis knew as their War of Independence, when Gefen was part of Moshe Dayan's Battalion Eighty-nine, which stormed Ramla and Lydda in July 1948.

  The boom sounded just as Gefen passed the South Africans on his way to pick up a container of frozen lemon juice. As he was thrown upward, as the force of the blast catapulted him back-first through the false ceiling and into the light fixtures overhead, Gefen knew the explosion had come from a bomb.

  He slammed hard onto the supermarket floor and looked up to see the two South Africans—it would later turn out that one was actually an Uruguayan—lifeless on the floor. Beside them a woman lay near death; Gefen gazed for a moment into her wide eyes and open mouth. A fourth victim lay on the floor with one eye hanging out of its socket. Gefen thought she, too, was dead; he would later learn the woman had survived.

  Gefen looked down at his left leg to see blood spurting from an artery in his ankle. A seeping red patch, the sign of another wound, was growing larger, oozing from his trousers. As he struggled to stand up, he glanced down at his arms and chest and saw that his coat—light brown suede, he would recall—was shredded beyond repair. Gefen glanced at his ankle again and saw the blood coming out as if from a fountain. He pressed his fingers into his groin, putting firm pressure on the femoral artery at the top of his left leg, to stop the flow of blood. He removed his hand; the blood began to spurt again. He stared at his ankle and saw it was nearly severed at the foot.

  "On the spot I decided, I don't want to live," Gefen would remember decades later. "I felt my ankle was cut off, and after one war and another war, I didn't want to go back to the hospital. I just didn't want to."

  The old soldier looked around. Smoke and dust were settling, the false ceiling dangled crazily from above, and light fixtures, metal tins, and shattered plastic bottles lay amid pools of blood in a chaos on the floor. As the screams of Israeli civilians filled the market, Gefen noticed the familiar wartime smell of gunpowder—mixed, incongruously, with the unmistakable aroma of paprika.

  Israel Gefen reconsidered: He didn't want to die anymore. Pressing one hand into the left side of his crotch, he hopped on his right foot toward the exit. Two men emerged through the smoke and hurried him outside and into a barber's chair next door. They told him to wait. After perhaps two or three minutes—it seemed much longer—one of the men reappeared and helped Gefen into the cab of his pickup truck.

  "Talk to me," Israel Gefen told the terrified driver as he raced through the streets of West Jerusalem. The truck darted through red lights, dodging buses, cars, and pedestrians as the driver honked constantly. Gefen wanted the man to keep him awake with conversation; if he passed out, his hand would slip from his groin and the loss of blood would probably kill him. The two men made small talk. A few minutes later, they arrived at the entrance of Jerusalem's Sha'are Tzedek (Gates of Righteousness) hospital. Medics quickly surrounded Gefen and wheeled him toward the emergency ward. It was strange, Gefen thought before passing out: He hadn't been inside this hospital in forty-five years—not since that week in early summer 1922, when he was born.

  One day after work, near the end of February 1969, Moshe Eshkenazi walked into the backyard of the house in Ramla, where Dalia was watering the flowers. He had his evening paper, Ma'ariv, in his hands. "Look what's in the papers," Moshe told his daughter. "They've been investigating the Supersol bombing in Jerusalem. It says here that your friend Bashir is accused of taking part in this." He raised his eyebrows.

  "Bashir?" Dalia asked incredulously. "Bashir Khairi of Ramallah?" She walked slowly toward her father, who gazed at her steadily. She would recall the moment vividly thirty-six years later. The operation, the article said, was conducted by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group committed to "armed struggle," which Israelis considered another name for terrorism. The PFLP and its leader, the Lydda refugee George Habash, had boasted that their attacks were designed to deprive Israelis of their sense of "reassurance and security."

  Bashir Khairi in the PFLP? Dalia stood there, the watering can still in her hands. She had opened her home to Bashir and his family, welcoming them whenever they came for a tour of the house and a visit to the garden and the lemon tree. In return she had received warmth and an Arab hospitality she had never experienced before; the family's gratitude to Dalia for simply opening the door came from depths she was only beginning to understand. As the visits had progressed, Dalia had learned more of the history of Bashir's family, especially of the expulsions from Ramla and Lod (Lydda), and Bashir had begun to see that every Israeli was not the enemy. It had seemed to Dalia that a conversation based on common history and mutual interest was not so impossible after all.

  Now Dalia came to read the paper over her father's shoulder. Bashir Khairi was accused of involvement in the supermarket bombing and of belonging to an outlawed organization in the West Bank: the Popular Front. The previous July, PFLP guerrillas had commandeered an El Al flight bound to Tel Aviv from Rome, forcing it down in Algiers and holding the mostly Israeli passengers hostage for nearly six weeks before Israel finally capitulated and released sixteen Palestinian prisoners. Six months later, in December 1968, PFLP operatives attacked another El Al airliner in Athens, killing one passenger. And only two days after the Supersol bombing, a PFLP operation targeted an El Al plane at the Zurich airport, killing one person and wounding four. Dalia had watched the spectacles with burning anger; she had heard the PFLP claims that it wanted to liberate Palestine, which to Dalia simply meant the destruction of Israel and the only home she knew.

  Bashir Khairi in the PFLP? Could this be true? The article said Bashir would be tried in an Israeli military court; maybe then the truth would come out. Dalia would try to reserve judgment until the trial. But already she was contemplating a disturbing question: Had she befriended a terrorist?

  Bashir Khairi sat in a three-by-five-foot cell with stone walls, iron bars, and a low-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. He slept on the cement floor, and for six nights he lay in the dark, shivering without bedcovers. Since his incarceration at Sarafand prison—the old British lockup close to al-Ramla—Bashir had developed a high fever and chills; on the seventh day, Bashir remembered decades later, his Israeli jailers brought him a blanket.

  "In the interrogation room at Sarafand," Bashir recounted, "there was a chair and a table, and on the table was a black shabbah," a hood. "You put the hood over your head, and they beat you. They beat me on the hands, th
ey choked me with the hood on. Other times they would chain my hands and legs, blindfold me, and unleash the dogs. The dogs would jump on me and pin me back against the wall. I could feel their breath on my neck." Bashir believed the interrogations were conducted by agents of the General Security Services, or Shin Bet. He would recall the men with a precision and seeming calm of someone remembering a trip to the store the day before. "Their faces," Bashir would say quietly. "To this day I remember exactly their faces."

  After the interrogations came psychological operations. "In my cell," he said, "I would hear shots, and then someone screaming. Then the guards would arrive and bring me outside and show me a hole, and say, 'If you don't cooperate, this is where you'll end up.' Then I would be back in my cell, hearing shooting and screaming. You'd think: They're killing the people who don't confess." The Israeli interrogators wanted Bashir to admit to having played a role in the supermarket bombing and to describe the internal operations of the PFLP so they could put an end to the El Al hijackings. The young lawyer admitted nothing. He refused to confirm any association with the Popular Front. Consequently, he said, the beatings, dog attacks, and psy-ops continued.

  This kind of treatment was not exceptional. In 1969, the year Bashir was arrested, little was known outside of the Shin Bet about Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners. In 1974, the Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer published a memoir, With My Own Eyes, detailing her interviews with prisoners who had endured an "ordeal of beatings and humiliation." She described prisoners who showed evidence of blows to the head, hands, and legs; who told of being punched in the face while blindfolded; who arrived for jailhouse interviews in bloodstained shirts; who described hanging from a wall by handcuffs tied to iron bars; who reported interrogations with "electricity and sticks"; whose feet and hands were bound until they bled.

  In one case, Langer wrote, a fifty-two-year-old man with a respiratory disease was interrogated naked, and "his hands were tied behind his back; a rope was tied to his hands too, and he was lifted in the air thus. His interrogators beat him also now, and after each beating they ordered him to talk, and since he had nothing to say they went on beating him." Langer also described one prisoner, "blue from the beatings," who died, the authorities claimed, after "he had stumbled and fell down a staircase."

  On one of her jailhouse visits, probably in the spring of 1969, Felicia Langer met Bashir. She would remember a pale man with large eyes who seemed "barely alive." "They beat me very badly," Langer recalls Bashir telling her, "until I was barely able to stand up."

  Langer's accounts of abuse and torture would be supported by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, whose director, Israel Shahak, wrote in the foreword to With My Own Eyes that "nobody . . . whatever his political or philosophical opinions, can deny that the cases of persecution, oppression and torture described in this book are not only true in themselves, but are also characteristic of Israeli rule in the occupied territories."

  Three years later, in 1977, the Sunday Times of London would publish a detailed investigation of "allegations of systematic torture by Israel of Arab prisoners." The Times concluded, "Torture is organized so methodically that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders. It is systematic. It appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy." One of the subjects of the investigation was Rasmiah Odeh, who along with Bashir was jailed in connection with the Supersol bombing. Odeh's father, Josef, whose house was demolished about three weeks after the bombing, described being taken to the prison to witness his daughter's interrogation:

  When they took me back . . . Rasmiah couldn't stand on her own feet. She was lying on the floor and there were bloodstains on her clothes. Her face was blue and she had a black eye. . . . They were beating me and beating her, and we were both screaming. Rasmiah was still saying: "I know nothing" And they spread her legs and shoved the stick into her. She was bleeding from her mouth and from her face and from her end. Then I became unconscious."

  Israel denied the Times s allegations. But the newspaper's five-month investigation concluded that interrogation techniques included "prolonged beatings" and "electric shock torture and confinement in specially-constructed cells," a method that "removes Israel's practice from the lesser realms of brutality and places it firmly in the category of torture." The Times charged that torture was overseen by all of Israel's security services, including the Shin Bet, military intelligence, and Israel's Department of Special Missions.

  The reasons for the torture, the Sunday Times reported, were threefold: to extract information; to "induce people to confess to 'security' offenses, of which they may, or may not, be guilty," so that officials could use those confessions to obtain convictions; and to "persuade Arabs in the occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively. . . ."

  The newspaper found that much of the torture took place "at a special military intelligence centre whose whereabouts are uncertain, but which testimony suggests is somewhere inside the vast military supply base at Sarafand. . . ."

  Bashir was at Sarafand, and his family hadn't heard from him in a week. Nuha, his older sister, would recall the day he left with acute clarity thirty-six years later. It was 6:00 in the evening. Nuha had just finished cleaning the house. She was fixing her hair when she heard a loud pounding on the door. An Israeli captain demanded to see Bashir. She told him that he wasn't home. When he comes back, the Israeli captain demanded, he must report to the Muqata—the Israeli military compound in Ramallah. Bashir had done as ordered, and the family hadn't heard from him since. Their efforts to obtain any information had yielded nothing.

  A week later, there was another knock on the door. It was the captain again, this time with Bashir. He looked pale and weak. Zakia came from the living room, where she had been entertaining guests. The captain told Bashir not to say a word to anyone. "His clothes are dirty," Zakia told the captain. She went quickly to his room and emerged with clean clothes stuffed in a bag.

  The soldiers told Nuha to come with them. She got into the jeep with Bashir and drove south; Nuha wasn't sure what they wanted.

  "You look tired," Nuha told Bashir on the road to Jerusalem. "Did they beat you?"

  "Stop!" the captain screamed at Nuha. "You can't talk to him!"

  They arrived at the Muscobia, the Russian compound that served as an Israeli military interrogation center in Jerusalem. The soldiers brought Nuha into a small room and Bashir into the room next door. Shortly afterward, Nuha would recall, she could hear Bashir's screams. After listening for what seemed an interminable time, she couldn't bear to hear any more and fainted.

  Three hours later, the jailers brought her a cup of water. They called her to the next room and opened the door. She saw Bashir, his head bowed, clad only in his underpants. Two men stood on either side of him, wielding sticks.

  "Brother," Nuha said. "Oh, my brother." The interrogators then dragged Bashir away and told Nuha to find her way back to Ramallah on her own.

  Bashir, by his own account, never admitted any connection to the supermarket bombing. "I endured the beatings, the hoods, and the dogs. They did not break me." He denied membership in the PFLP and disavowed any knowledge of its operations.

  By now the world knew of the PFLP and the headline-grabbing operations that had terrorized the Israelis. Many Palestinians, still in shock from the defeat and occupation following the Six Day War, had begun to realize that small guerrilla operations alone would not achieve their long-awaited liberation of Palestine. They came to embrace the PFLP's strategy of "spectacular operations" to reverse years of humiliation and failure and to focus the world's attention on the Palestinian plight. These attacks, combined with the operations of Fatah and other groups, were immensely popular among Arabs, who still saw Israel as illegally occupying Palestine.

  "In 1968 a Palestinian fedayi could travel right across the Arab world with nothing more than his organisation card and be welcome everywhere," Bassam Abu-Sharif, then a member of
the PFLP, would recall in his memoir. "No passport—just the card. Nobody, nobody, in the Arab world then dared raise a voice against a fedayi. . . . " In the aftermath of the Six Day War, "the fedayi was god." Many of the guerrilla attacks against Israel were launched from Jordan, and this sharply raised tensions between King Hussein and Israeli leaders and consequently between the king and the guerrilla groups.

  In March 1968, in response to the guerrilla incursions, Israeli infantry, tanks, paratroopers, and armored brigades crossed the Jordan River and attacked Fatah positions in the Jordanian town of Karama. The Israeli force, fifteen thousand strong, drew heavy fire from Jordanian and Fatah artillery. Twenty-eight Israeli soldiers died, and the Jordanians captured several Israeli tanks, which would soon be paraded through the streets of Amman. Israel had inflicted more casualties, and it achieved most of its military objectives, but to an Arab world starved for signs of strength, the courage of the guerrillas demonstrated that the Palestinian resistance was genuine. The heroic image of Yasser Arafat, who by most accounts stood under fire to direct his fighters at Karama, grew larger still. The battle of Karama, though in many ways a military defeat, would go down as one of the great symbolic victories in the history of the Palestinian resistance, further enhancing Fatah's image within Jordan. Now King Hussein would find it even more difficult to pressure the guerrillas. On the contrary, in the aftermath of Karama he declared, "We are all fedayeen."