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

by Sandy Tolan

  Dalia would recall hours of contemplation about the Khairi family and about the house she lived in, "which my father bought as 'abandoned property from the state.' But this house did not belong to the state; it belonged to the family that had built it, that had put its resources into it, that had hoped to raise its children and grow old in this house. I could imagine myself in the Khairis' place."

  Is it either us or them? Dalia thought. Either I live in their house while they are refugees, or they live in my house while I become a fugitive? There must be another possibility. But what is it?

  Moshe and Solia were growing old. "I knew that one day," Dalia said, "I would inherit that house."

  In the years Bashir spent in one Israeli prison after another—by his count, he moved seventeen times in fifteen years—he would from time to time talk about a young Israeli woman and the door she had opened for his family. "I told my friends in prison about my visits to the house," he would recall. "And what I saw in Dalia. It seemed she was someone different. I would say, 'She's open-minded, she's different compared with the other Israelis that I met.'

  "I hope," Bashir would say, "she is not a lonely candle in a darkened room."

  Yet Bashir would never write the letter Dalia so wanted. He did not confess to his Israeli interrogators, and he was not going to confess to Dalia. Indeed, he maintained his innocence but added, years later: "We have suffered many massacres. Dawayma. Kufr Qassam. Deir Yassin. In the face of these massacres and dispossessions, if anyone thought that the Palestinians would react as Jesus Christ would have, he is wrong. If I didn't have this deep conviction to the bone marrow in the necessity of hating the occupation, I wouldn't deserve to be a Palestinian."

  In September 1984, having served fifteen years for his conviction in the Supersol market bombing, Bashir Khairi was released from prison. It was one of two truly happy moments Khanom would remember about her brother. The other, she recalled, was when he was born.

  Bashir's family was waiting in Ramallah. Brothers and sisters had returned from across the Arab world; they came from Amman, from Qatar, from Kuwait. "It was like a wedding," Nuha would recall. "We prepared the best foods, sweets, flowers, Palestinian flags."

  Israeli officials were adamant that there be no celebration outside the prison walls. "They said only two or three people should come," Khanom remembered. "I made bows for the flowers with the colors of the Palestinian flag, which was illegal at the time. The Israelis did not notice it. But so many people had heard that Bashir was to be released, they gathered around the prison walls to welcome him. When the Israelis saw this, they said we will not let him out. We were there at eight A.M.—they made us wait till after one o'clock. My father and mother were very old and were waiting at home anxiously."

  When Bashir emerged from prison, he was not ready to go home. He went directly to the cemetery. He stood at the grave of Khalil Abu-Khadiji, his co-defendant in the Supersol trial, who had died in prison. Bashir paid respects with Khalil's family in a quiet, private ceremony. "Then," Nuha said, "he came home."

  The house was full of well-wishers. Relatives from Gaza sent large bags of oranges for the celebration. So many people wanted to see Bashir—schoolchildren, town leaders, family, political activists—that friends had to volunteer to direct traffic in front of the house. "They did it for Bashir," Khanom said. "Mom is cooking, everybody is welcoming." At first Bashir downplayed the event. "He did not like the idea of a celebration. 'I am not a hero,' he said. 'I served my time—I did nothing special. No need to celebrate.' " But eventually he relented, and the family saw him "happy, glad, smiling all the time. It was the most beautiful time of my life."

  At home, Bashir had to adjust to life outside of prison. "He slept on the floor, and he was not used to a bed anymore," Khanom said. "He couldn't wear regular shoes, either, because after fifteen years without shoes the size and shape of his feet changed." More disturbing were the marks of what his family believed was torture. "When he got out of prison, he had a lot of cigarette burns on his body," Khanom said. "When we asked him what they were, he said it was an allergy."

  In December 1984, three months after Bashir's release from prison and forty-eight years after he built the family home in al-Ramla, Ahmad Khairi died. He was seventy-seven years old and had lived nearly half his life in exile.

  Later that year, Bashir married his cousin Scheherazade. When asked, he would say little about the union, except that he knew "she was the person who would most understand me." In 1985, their first child was born. In the Arabic tradition, they would name the boy after his grandfather, Ahmad.

  That same year, Moshe Eshkenazi died. Solia had died eight years earlier, and now no one lived in the house. "It was sad," Dalia remembered. "All your history is there, it's an empty house, your parents are dead. It was mine now."

  The house was Dalia's, legally. Nevertheless, "I could not deny that I lived in the house for all those years, while the family that built it had been expelled. How do you balance such realities? How do you confront them and respond to them?

  "It was in my hands to do something," she said. "It was like the house was telling me a story. More than one story. I had to respond." She always thought of the crime that had led to Bashir's long sentence. How, she wondered, could she respond in the light of that? Eventually she decided, "His reaction will not determine mine. I have free choice to think, I have free choice to act, in accordance with my understanding and my conscience."

  Dalia had been thinking of the time when, as a little girl, she had wrenched the star and crescent, the symbol of Islam, from the top of the gate in the house in Ramla and thrown it away. "It was so beautiful," she said. "I wished I could put it back. I was ashamed of what I did."

  One night, as she continued to mull over what to do with the house, the angel Gabriel came to Dalia in a dream. "He was perched, hovering just there at the top of the gate where the crescent had been," Dalia said. "And he was looking at where the symbol was, and he was smiling. He was blessing the house, he was blessing me, and he was giving a blessing for what I wanted to do with the house."

  A year after his release from prison, in the spring of 1985, Bashir received a message from a Palestinian Anglican priest in Ramallah. His name was Audeh Rantisi. He was originally from Lydda, and he had his own vivid memories of being driven out by force from his home in July 1948.

  Rantisi told Bashir that he had just received a phone call from Jerusalem. It was from Yehezkel Landau, Dalia's husband. Yehezkel had explained that Dalia's father, Moshe Eshkenazi, had died and that now, eight years after Solia's death, the house in Ramla was empty. Dalia wanted to meet with Bashir to talk about the future of the house. Would he be willing to meet?

  Dalia had been thinking of what she could do. She knew she wanted to act on the basis of two histories. "I had to acknowledge that this is my childhood home, my parents lived here until they died, my memories are all here, but that this house was built by another family, and their memories are here. I had to acknowledge absolutely all of it."

  Within a month, Dalia and Yehezkel found themselves driving north into the occupied West Bank. They met in the home of Rantisi and his wife, Patricia, next door to the Ramallah Evangelical School for Boys, which Rantisi directed. Bashir was waiting there.

  Dalia and Bashir sat facing each other in comfortable chairs in the Rantisi living room. How long had it been? Sixteen years? Eighteen? Dalia was now thirty-seven, with a wedding ring on her finger, and Bashir, forty-three, was also newly married. A tuft of gray hair fell over his forehead. Dalia noticed that his left hand was in his pocket; it always seemed to be.

  They exchanged small talk. Was Bashir healthy? How did it feel to walk freely? What were his plans?

  Dalia came to the point of their meeting. She had not been able to stop thinking about the house and its history, she explained. This home involved two families, two peoples, two histories. And now, barely a month after Moshe's death, the home was empty. She had been thinking, too, abo
ut the endless cycle of pain, retaliation, pain, retaliation. She wondered if there was something she could do to address that and to honor the families' two histories. This was a gesture not just to Bashir, but to the entire Khairi family. How does one acknowledge the collective wound? she had asked herself again and again. The heart wants to do something The heart wants to move toward the healing of that wound.

  Dalia understood that she could not share ownership of the house with the Khairis, or even transfer the title to their name. Another solution was needed.

  "We are open," Dalia said. "We are ready to pay reparations for the loss of your property." She raised the possibility that she sell the house and give the proceeds to the Khairis.

  "No, no, no," Bashir said quickly. "No selling. Our patrimony cannot be for sale."

  "Then how do you see it, Bashir?" Dalia asked him. "What shall we do?"

  For Bashir, the solution had to be consistent with his rights and his lifelong struggle as a Palestinian. "This house is my homeland," he told Dalia. "I lost my childhood there. I would like the house to provide a very nice time for the Arab children of al-Ramla. I want them to have joy there. I want them to have the childhood that I never had. What I lost there, I want to give them."

  Dalia and Yehezkel agreed readily to Bashir's suggestion: The house in Ramla would become a preschool for the Arab children of Israel. They had other ideas as well, but this was a good start. They would honor Bashir's wishes, though perhaps not the name he suggested for the house his father had built: "Dalia's Kindergarten for the Arab Children of Ramla."

  "Excuse me," Patricia Rantisi interrupted gently from the edge of the living room. "The food is ready."

  Bashir, Dalia, Yehezkel, and Audeh Rantisi rose from their seats to join Patricia at the dinner table. The conversation would continue over the midday feast.

  As they prepared to break bread, Dalia and Yehezkel looked across the table at their Arab neighbors and offered a prayer in Hebrew:

  Blessed are You, the eternal One,

  our God, Ruler of the universe,

  Who brings forth bread from the earth.

  Eleven

  DEPORTATION

  BASHIR LAY BLINDFOLDED and face down in an Israeli military van rolling south from the West Bank town of Nablus. His hands were cuffed behind him, his legs shackled and attached by chains to three other prisoners.

  His freedom hadn't lasted. Three years after his release from prison, Bashir Khairi was in custody again.

  That morning—January 13, 1988—Bashir and three other men had been taken from their cells at Jneid prison in Nablus and led along the concrete floor toward the prison exit. The action would come as no surprise to the international diplomatic community, the press, human rights lawyers, the Arab world, and the eight hundred Palestinians behind bars at Jneid. The arrest of the four men was part of a broader Israeli crackdown on the suspected organizers of the ongoing disturbances in Gaza and the West Bank, known to Israelis as riots and to the Arab world as the uprising—in Arabic, the intifada.

  Five weeks earlier, Gaza and then the West Bank had exploded in demonstrations against Israel's rule. For twenty years, Palestinians living in the Israeli-controlled territories had seen nearly every aspect of public life dictated by an occupying force. Israelis determined school curriculum, ran the civil and military courts, oversaw health care and social services, established occupation taxes, and decided which proposed businesses would receive operating permits. Though the Israelis had allowed the formation of some civil institutions, including trade unions and charities, by the mid1980s the 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza seethed under occupation. Israelis controlled the land the Palestinians lived on and guarded access to the streams and aquifers running through and beneath it. They could arrest and imprison Gazans or West Bankers under shifting laws and military regulations not subject to public review. For twenty years, resentment and resistance had built up, and by late 1987, it had reached a point of explosion.

  On December 8, 1987, an Israeli vehicle—some accounts claim it was an agricultural truck, others insist it was a tank—veered into a long line of cars carrying Palestinian men returning to Gaza from low-paying day labor in Israel. Four Arabs were killed. The same day, rumors spread that the corpses of the four men had been seized from the Jabalya refugee camp by Israeli troops attempting to cover up evidence that the men had been murdered.

  Later, in the Jabalya camp, several thousand people gathered for the funeral, and clashes broke out. The next day, boys and young men began hurling stones at the Israeli soldiers. Hundreds of stones were falling on the troops, and they responded with live fire. A twenty-year-old man, Hatem al-Sisi, was killed; he would be known as the first martyr of the intifada. Quickly the demonstrations spread, first to the rest of Gaza and then to the West Bank, as young men, teenagers, and even boys as young as eight years old hurled stones at the Israeli tanks and troops. Across the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians declared a general strike, boycotting Israeli goods and calling on "brother doctors and pharmacists" and "brother businessmen and grocers" to shutter their shops—out of solidarity with the demonstrators and to make clear that life in the occupied territories would not go on as before. The intifada was born.

  Now the image of the Palestinians that splashed across the world's television screens was not of hijackers blowing up airliners or masked men kidnapping and murdering Olympic athletes, but of young people throwing stones at occupiers who responded with bullets. Israel, long portrayed in the West as a David in a hostile Arab sea, was suddenly cast as Goliath.

  The intifada, dismissed at first by Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Rabin as an insignificant series of local disturbances, would change the dynamics of Middle Eastern politics. Palestinians would call it the "Stone Revolution." One prominent Israeli historian compared it with "an anticolonial war of liberation"; another called it "the Palestinian War of Independence." The question—What kind of independence?—would come to divide the Palestinians in the years to come.

  For years the PLO, a coalition of nationalist resistance groups, with Arafat's Fatah at its center, had dominated Palestinian political discourse. Five days into the intifada, however, a new group emerged from the same Gaza refugee camp that had spawned the uprising. It would be called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. Its leader, a crippled, bearded, middle-aged man named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had fled with his family from the village of al-Jora in 1948; the village was later destroyed and the Israeli city of Ashkelon built on its rubble.

  Hamas favored no recognition of Israel and no compromise on the right of return. The organization sought an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine. Its charter described Jews as conspiring "to rule the world" and declared that the elimination of Israel would be a historic parallel to the victory of Saladin over the Crusaders eight centuries earlier. Hamas's uncompromising stance on the right of the refugees to return to their homes, and the group's growing role in social welfare programs in the occupied territories, would prove popular. The group was immediately seen as an on-the-ground rival to the PLO, whose leaders, including Yasser Arafat, were in exile in Tunis.

  Israel, wanting to weaken Arafat, had initially encouraged the growth of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, whose members had established Hamas. Now Hamas issued fervent denunciations of the "Zionist entity" and its repression of the intifada.

  Palestinian resistance in the intifada went far beyond Hamas or the limited ability of PLO leaders to direct events from Tunis. Much of the resistance was spontaneous, especially in the early months. Local committees sprang up from the grass roots to coordinate demonstrations, plan hit-and-run operations against Israeli platoons, conduct secret classes when the Israeli authorities closed local schools, protest Israeli taxes, remove Israeli products from the shelves of local markets, and form bread, poultry, and sewing cooperatives to replace income when the men could no longer work in Israel. Many families grew "victory gardens" to replace
Israeli supplies of produce, hatched chickens in the shells of old refrigerators, and poured milk into old animal skins, shaking the skins until the milk turned to butter. The stone was at the heart of the uprising, but some communities engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience. In Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, thousands of Palestinians, part of a tax revolt against the Israelis, turned in their Israeli-issued ID cards and sat in silent protest at the municipality. Israeli troops dispersed them with tear gas.

  At the height of the tax revolt, Dalia rode toward Beit Sahour with a large group of religious Jews. "They had no representation, and they were being taxed," Dalia recalled of the Palestinians. Israeli soldiers stopped the group at the checkpoint. They stood before the soldiers, reciting a sura from the Koran about punishment and innocence, reading the Prayer of St. Francis about sowing love where there is hatred, and singing the Hassidic Prayer for Peace:

  May it be Thy will to put an end to war and bloodshed on earth, and to spread a great and wonderful peace over the whole world, so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. . . .

  Let us never shame any person on earth, great or small. . . .

  And let it come to pass in our time as it is written, "And I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down and none shall make you afraid. I will drive the wild beasts from the land, and neither shall the sword go through your land."

  God who is peace, bless us with peace!

  In the first three weeks of the uprising, twenty-nine Palestinians would die in demonstrations as the Israeli army continued its policy of using live ammunition; soon, facing growing international criticism, Yitzhak Rabin, now defense minister, would shift IDF policy to "force, might, and beatings," as soldiers began deliberately breaking the hands and arms of stone throwers. Still, the death toll rose; in the first year of the intifada, at least 230 Palestinians would be shot dead by Israeli troops and more than 20,000 were arrested. Thousands were captured in predawn raids in the refugee camps, as soldiers broke down doors, hauled young stone throwers out of their homes, and loaded them onto buses. Many of the young men and boys would be jailed without charge under "administrative detention." Israeli officials closed nine hundred West Bank and Gaza schools; imposed broad curfews that prevented workers from getting to their jobs in Israel; and, despite an international outcry, began to deport to Lebanon the men, including Bashir, who were suspected of organizing the intifada.