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

by Sandy Tolan

  "You, Dalia, remember thirty-seven years ago, when we first met; when I came to visit you," Bashir said finally. "And since then there have been more settlements, land confiscations, and now this wall—how can there be any solution? How can there be any Palestinian state? How can I open my heart, as you say?" For Bashir, of course, the solution was not simply dismantling the wall and making a Palestinian state on 22 percent of old Palestine; it remained "having one state, and all the people who live in this one state are equal, without any consideration of religion, nationality, culture, language. Everyone is equal, has equal rights, has the right to vote and choose his own leadership." At the core of this solution was return.

  Bashir's views were supported by many Palestinians, but they stood on one side of a divide that had grown since Oslo. He was among those considered unrealistic and fixated on what his cousin Ghiath would consider an impractical dream. In recent years, however, a movement based on return had grown up in the Palestinian diaspora, from the refugee camps to young, more affluent Palestinians in Europe and the United States, who had been raised with the stories of villages long since destroyed. Bashir believed the right of return was both sacred are practical. Like an increasing number of Palestinians opposed to Oslo-type solutions, he believed that without return, the conflict will be eternal. "And it will be a tragedy for both people," he told Dalia.

  Bashir believed "it's the strong who create history," but his years in prison and in exile had helped forge a longer-range view. "We are weak today," he said. "But we won't stay this way. Palestinians are stones in a riverbed. We won't be washed away. The Palestinians are not the Indians. It is the opposite: Our numbers are increasing."

  The children's voices seemed loud through the open window. "Dalia," Bashir said, "I really wanted to welcome you properly, in my house. I really didn't want to open this subject. This tragedy."

  Dalia's chin rested in her palm, and she was squinting intently at Bashir. "If you say everything is all Palestine and I say everything is the whole land of Israel, I don't think we'll get anywhere," she said. "We share a common destiny here. I truly believe that we are so deeply and closely related—culturally, historically, religiously, psychologically. And it's so clear to me that you and your people are holding the key to our true freedom. And I think we could also say, Bashir, that we hold the key to your freedom. It's a deep interdependence. How can we free the heart, for our own healing? Is this possible?

  "Where I live is very close to the Green Line," Dalia continued. "On the other side is the West Bank, and I can see the mountains from my window. And I love these mountains, it's like I feel that these mountains are in my heart. My ancestors lived on the Judean Hills. I'm not saying it's the same thing, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying there needs to be a compromise."

  Dalia had long believed in Einstein's words—that "no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." For Dalia, the key to coexistence lay in what she called "the three A's": acknowledgment of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948, apology for it, and amends. Acknowledgment was, in part, to "see and own the pain that I or my people have inflicted on the Other." But she believed this must be mutual—that Bashir must also see the Israeli Other—lest "one perpetuate the righteous victim syndrome and not take responsibility for one's own part in the fray." Through this acknowledgment, she and Bashir could act "as mirrors through which our own redemption can eventually grow." As for amends: "It means that we do the best we can under the circumstances towards those we have wronged." But for Dalia this could not involve a mass return of refugees. Yes, she believed, the Palestinians have the right of return, but it is not a right that can be fully implemented, because the return of millions of Palestinians would effectively mean the end of Israel.

  For Bashir, as for many Palestinians who still believed in the right of return, this reasoning made little sense: How could you have a right, but not be able to exercise it? Perhaps after more than half a century, many refugees, in the end, would choose not to return to the site of their old villages, or move back into their old homes, but Bashir believed this should be their choice, not anyone else's. "Our right of return is a natural human right," Bashir said. "The Israelis created this problem, and they can't place more burdens on us to solve it."

  For Dalia, the solution lay in two states, side by side—much as they had existed prior to the Six Day War in 1967, except that now alongside Israel would rise a peaceful, independent, Palestinian state. The Palestinians would have their right of return, but it would be limited to only a part of old Palestine.

  Bashir believed the solution lay rather in 1948 and the long-held dream of return to a single, secular, democratic state. Bashir had always understood Dalia's gesture of sharing the house in al-Ramla, and making it into a kindergarten or Open House for the town's Arab children, as an acknowledgment of his right of return, and, by extension, of the rights of all Palestinian people, as enshrined by the UN, to go back to their homeland. Dalia, on the contrary, saw Open House, with its programs of encounter between Arabs and Jews, as the result of one choice made by one individual. "It's not an overall solution and it's not a political statement," she would say. "It was something that destiny had in store for me. I simply feel that, yes, as a member of the Jewish people I have the right to assume some responsibility for our history in this land . . . and also for the injustice we caused another people." This was her personal decision, Dalia would make clear, and not one that should be required of other Israelis.

  Dalia leaned toward Bashir. "I also feel the whole land is in my heart, and I know the whole land is in your heart," she told him. "But this mountain will be Palestine. I know it will, I can feel it. And I want to come and visit. As a respectful visitor. To visit the people of that mountain that I love so much."

  "It's touching what you are saying, Dalia," Bashir said. "That you look at this mountain and have this feeling. And you in this case are unique. But when you see the reality on the ground, and the Israeli politicians and how they deal with things, and when they see such a mountain, or such a land, they think of house confiscation, they think of settlements, they think of more settlers to come and to live. . . . That is the reality today. And this is what is very difficult to understand. I wish more people were like you." / wish, Bashir had written Dalia sixteen years earlier, there had been a forest of Dalias.

  Dalia had always resisted being singled out as the "good Israeli" among the "bad"; she pleaded for Bashir to show her "that you really care and you really feel for my people. I have this need personally from you. From you, Bashir, who was born in my home. In your home. In our home. Not just for me, not just for Dalia. Because I know you care for me. And you know I care for you. Right? For you and your family . . . and you know that I care for the Palestinian people. And I also need to know that you care for my people. Because that would make me feel so much safer. Then we could move on. We could create a reality together."

  Bashir looked again at his watch; he was late for an appointment. "We couldn't find two people who could disagree more on how to visualize the viability of this land," Dalia said, standing and slipping on her sandals. "And yet we are so deeply connected. And what connects us? The same thing that separates us. This land."

  Bashir was standing now, and he took Dalia's hand again. "I was afraid for you to come here," Bashir said.

  "I wanted to come," Dalia replied.

  They stood between the padded office chairs and looked at each other, shaking hands and smiling.

  "Expect me any day, Dalia," Bashir said, still grasping her hand. "I am forbidden to go to Jerusalem. But expect that one day, I will show up at your door."

  Bashir released Dalia's hand, waved good-bye from the landing, and went back into his office. Dalia walked slowly down the single flight of stairs toward the street in Ramallah.

  "Our enemy," she said softly, "is the only partner we have."

  Fourteen

  THE LEMON TREE

  IN
1998, the fiftieth anniversary of the War of Independence and the Catastrophe, the lemon tree died. It had been bearing fewer lemons in the years leading up to its death, and by the spring of 1998, two shriveled, hard-shelled lemons lay on the ground, the only physical evidence the tree had ever borne fruit.

  "This is the nature of things; things just die on this planet," Dalia said at the time. "Trees die standing." For a couple of years, the teachers of the Arab kindergarten at Open House would hang balloons and ribbons on the branches to help the children discern one color from another. The ribbons fluttered in the wind, and it appeared the lemon tree had been replaced by a Christmas tree. Eventually a storm came and blew the tree down, leaving only a thick, gnarled stump.

  Dalia hoped that one day Bashir, Khanom, Nuha, Ghiath, and other Khairis could return to the house in Ramla to plant another lemon tree, as a sign of renewal.

  On January 25, 2005, as a full moon rose over the coastal plain just east of the Mediterranean Sea, Dalia walked with a group of Arab and Jewish teenagers to a corner of the garden at the house in Ramla. In their hands was a sapling of a lemon tree. A cone of earth in the shape of a bucket clung to the sapling roots. "It looked so fragile," Dalia said.

  It was Tu B'shvat, the day the Jewish sages call the holiday of the new year for trees, and one of the Jewish teenagers has spontaneously suggested that this would be the perfect day to plant a new lemon tree.

  "For years I was postponing this to wait for the Khairis," Dalia said. "And at that moment, the holiday of the trees, it felt so right, and yes, it's a new generation. And now the children will plant their tree in their house." She said she did not want to stand in the way of the children who had chosen that day, the Jewish holiday, to plant a new lemon tree in the old garden of Ahmad Khairi.

  Dalia's hands, and the hands of the Arabs and Jews, lowered the sapling into a hole beside the old stump. They all went to the kitchen and brought a pail of water, and everyone gently tamped down the soil.

  "I felt that the Khairis were not there, so there was something missing," Dalia recalled. "But that empty space was filled up with all these children. The trunk was there, very beautiful. Just by it, we planted a new sapling. I couldn't just let the past stay like that. Like a commemoration stone, the kind you put in a graveyard. The pain of our history.

  "This dedication is without obliterating the memories. Something is growing out of the old history. Out of the pain, something new is growing.

  "I wonder how they will take it," Dalia said of the Khairis. "I felt it was right." Also, she said, "It meant moving on. It meant it's the next generation now that's going to create a reality. That we are entrusting something in their hands. We are entrusting both the old and the new."

  In the end, the decision of what to plant, and when, and where, was Dalia's. Bashir, when he heard about it by telephone from Ramallah, said he was pleased. Perhaps some day, he said, he would be back home in al-Ramla, and on that day, he would see the tree for himself.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE LEMON TREE would have never come to life without the support, insight, and generosity of eyewitnesses, scholars, archivists, journalists, and editors in the United States, Bulgaria, Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon.

  I am indebted to the archivists at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Queens, New York, and Jerusalem; the Central Zionist Archives and Israel State Archives in Jerusalem; the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut and Washington; the National Archives in Washington; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; and the National Archives of Bulgaria in Sofia, where Vanya Gazenko spent hours tracking down Jewish records from the 1940s.

  Portions of the manuscript were reviewed in various drafts by scholars, writers, editors, and other colleagues across a range of disciplines and perspectives. I am grateful for the insight and comments of Polia Alexan-drova, Nubar Alexanian, Lamis Andoni, Naseer Aruri, Hatem Bazian, Sophie Beal, George Bisharat, Matthew Brunwasser, Mimi Chakarova, Frederick Chary, Lydia Chavez, Hillel Cohen, Dan Connell, Beshara Doumani, Haim Gerber, Daphna Golan, Patricia Golan, Cynthia Gorney, Jan Gunnison, Rob Gunnison, Debra Gwartney, Debbie Hird, Adam Hochschild, Alon Kadish, Bashir Khairi, Dalia Landau, Vicki Lindsay, Nur Masalha, Benny Morris, Moshe Mossek, Nidal Rafa, Tom Segev, Elif Shafak, Hani Shukrallah, Nikki Silva, Sami Sockol, Allan Solomonow, Salim Tamari, John Tolan, Kathleen Tolan, Mary Tolan, Sally Tolan, Tom Tolan, Sarah Tuttle-Singer, Anthony Weller, and Gosia Wojniacka. Some readers commented on multiple drafts, and I am especially grateful to the Tolan readers and to Julian Foley, Erica Funkhouser, and Rosie Sultan for their dedication to word and narrative.

  Research and reporting for this book was conducted in six languages, only two of which—English and Spanish (close to Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews)—I speak. For the work in Arabic, including translations of texts and interpreting, I thank Lamis Andoni, Naseer Aruri, Raghda Azizieh, Mahmoud Barhoum, Hatem Bazian, Lama Habash, Senan Khairi, Nidal Rafa, and Mariam Shahin. For the Bulgarian, Polia Alexandrova and Matthew Brunwasser helped immensely. For the Hebrew texts and interviews, I was lucky to work with Ora Alcalay, Ian Dietz, Patricia Golan, Boaz Hachlili, and Sami Sockol. Among those colleagues, I want to especially thank my old friend Patti, who among other things found me old soldiers, old buses, and great old newspapers; Polia, whose work from Sofia to Kyustendil to Plovdiv to Varna was unfailingly generous, thorough, and professional; Nidal, whose enthusiasm, dedication, journalistic passion, and knowledge of the landscape transformed my experience in Jerusalem and the West Bank and whose work in Amman (along with that of Mariam Shahin) proved vital for enriching the book. To each of you, I'm more grateful than you know.

  In Boston, I learned of many initial contacts from the Bulgarian and Bulgarian-Jewish communities there. Thanks to Kiril Stefan Alexandrov, Iris Alkalay, Jennifer Bauerstam, Anne Freed, Roy Freed, Assya Nick, George Nick, Vladimir Zlatev, and Tanya Zlateva. Thanks also to Peter Vassilev for putting me in touch with his mother, Marie, in Sofia.

  In California, two people merit special mention. Julian Foley, who not so long ago was my student at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, was suddenly reviewing my writing, and her insights into early and subsequent drafts were unfailingly on the mark. At the National Archives, Julian also unearthed vital documents on the period immediately after July 1948. Sarah Tuttle-Singer did substantial book and periodicals research at the University of California and eventually took the job of lead fact-checker, tracing the source for literally thousands of quotes, historical events, and moments of family history. Sarah also provided comments on several drafts of the manuscript and assembled the book's bibliography. Her tasks were daunting, and she delivered thorough work with grace and goodwill. She was assisted by Sara Dosa, who came to us late in the process and proved a big help at a crucial time.

  I spoke with hundreds of people during the course of the research, and their names are too numerous to mention here. I would, however, like to single out a few whose generosity and clarity helped take the book into new territory. They include Susannah Behar in Plovdiv and Vela Dimitrova in Sofia and Kyustendil, Bulgaria; Sharif Kanaana, Firdaws Taji Khairi, Nuha Khairi, and Ghiath Khairi in Ramallah; Khanom Khairi Salah in Amman; Ora Alcalay, Moshe Melamed, Moshe Mossek, and Victor Shemtov in Jerusalem; Israel Gefen in Tel Aviv; Yehezkel Landau in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut; and most of all, Bashir Khairi in Ramallah and Dalia Eshkenazi Landau in Jerusalem. Dalia's willingness, to interview her cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, late in the process, and to translate and fax me those transcripts and other materials, added much to the book.

  This book began its life as a radio documentary, and I am grateful to Danny Miller, the executive producer of Fresh Air, for giving The Lemon Tree its first home outside of Israel and Palestine. The radio program generated more response than all of the many dozens of NPR programs I had done over the years combined, and this, along with the urging of friends like
Joe Garland, Anthony Weller, Dan Connell, and Alan Weisman, convinced me to transform the story into print.

  The book was written in multiple venues over a two-year period. My thanks go to the staff of the Mesa Refuge, a retreat in Pt. Reyes, California; to the people of the Villa Sagona at the Sea Gardens in Varna, Bulgaria; to Kevin Kelley, who provided a guest room, and great company, at his home in Canada's Gulf Islands; and to Nubar, Rebecca, and Abby Alexanian, whose support (including Abby's West Gloucester studio) was immeasurable, especially at the final days of writing.

  Toward the end of the writing, I began to refer to the book as a living, sentient being: at times a benign presence, at others a demanding taskmaster. Many could attest to my virtual disappearance for weeks at a go, and during these times I was lucky to have understanding friends and colleagues. To Alan Weisman, Jonathan Miller, and Melissa Robbins, my colleagues in Homelands Productions: Thank you for your patience. To Nubar Alexanian and Vicki Lindsay, friends always throughout the writing: You understand. To Dean Orville Schell and all my colleagues at the Graduate School of Journalism, who supported this work with their eyes, ears, and encouragement (none more so than Mimi Chakarova, Lydia Chavez, Cynthia Gorney, and Rob Gunnison): It's an honor to work with you.

  My agent, David Black, believed in me and the possibility of The Lemon Tree beyond the radio documentary; Karen Rinaldi of Bloomsbury brought passion to the book from the first moment and never wavered; Bloomsbury editor Kathy Belden was patient, clear-eyed, precise, and a pleasure to work with. It wouldn't be possible to have a better, more supportive team than these three. To the rest of the team at Bloomsbury, including many people I haven't even met—thank you.

  To the friends in Bulgaria, Israel, and the Arab world who fed me, found me places to rest, and provided a few laughs and rays of hope between the painful moments of history, big and small: I'm grateful.