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

by Sandy Tolan

  The Cizling quote is taken from an Israeli cabinet meeting of July 21, 1948, as cited by Segev in 1949, p. 31.

  The continuing refugee crisis in mid-September is described in a report from the American Officers Consul General and sent by telegram from Jerusalem on September 25, 1948. The amount and type of nations' contributions to the relief efforts is from the September 17 report cited earlier.

  Bernadotte's advocacy of a division of Palestine between Israel and Transjordan is documented in appendix C of Abu Nowar's The Jordan-Israeli War: 1948—1951, pp. 451-55.

  Bernadotte's assassination is described by Glubb on p. 182 of A Soldier with the Arabs and by Sprinzak in Brother Against Brother, pp. 40-48. Sprinzak also details Shamir's involvement and the planning of the operation, describing it (p. 42) as "the result of a long and careful plan." The Stern Gang detentions are described by Herzog on p. 88 of The Arab-Israeli Wars. See also Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism, p. 183. Accusations of truce violations are found in Herzog (p. 88) and Mohamed Heikal's Secret Channels, p. 97.

  The need for thousands of tents and blankets was mentioned in the September 25, 1948, telegram from the American consul. The story of refugees lighting fires in their tents comes from Yahya's Palestinian Refugees: 1948-1998 (An Oral History), p. 45.

  Recollections of the early Khairi abodes in Gaza come from interviews with Bashir and Nuha Khairi. The Gaza figures of population and density and the "hardly surprising" quote come from the September 28, 1951, "Report of the Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East" (General Assembly official records, sixth session, supplement no. 16, A/1905), available on the UNISPAL Web site (United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, online at domino.un.org/unispal.nsf).

  Recollections of "constant shelling" are from interviews with Bashir. Incursions are mentioned from an Israeli perspective by Gelber (Palestine 1948, pp. 212-13) and from an Arab point of view by Heikal (Secret Channels, p. 81). Yezid Sayigh's Armed Struggle and the Search for State examines the political rivalries among Arab states, especially between Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, on pp. 13-16. Sayigh mentions Abdullah's ambitions and his April 1950 "Act of Union" between Jordan and the West Bank (that is, annexation of the West Bank) on pp. 41-42; Heikal discusses this from an Egyptian perspective in Secret Channels, pp. 82-86.

  Sayigh discusses the formation of UNRWA on p. 4 and p. 43 of Armed Struggle and the Search for State. The materials of the camp structures as well as the rations are described in the "Report to the Director of the United Nations," cited previously. Ahmad's and Zakia's work was described by Nuha and Bashir, who recalled the work-for-rations barter arrangement.

  The time and manner of Sheikh Mustafa's death was recalled by Khanom Khairi and verified by Bashir. The preparation of his body under Islamic custom, and the difficulty of doing so in exile, is verified by Muslim scholar Hatem Bazian of UC-Berkeley, who adds:

  It is rather difficult for a family not to be able to directly be engaged in preparing the body for the funeral since it is part of Islamic practices that the men of the family are to oversee and participate in washing the dead body and then help in the process of wrapping. Also, the family can see the dead body before the washing takes place as well as offer prayers and recite Qur'an at that time. Also, immediate family members at this time might want to make sure that the body is sprayed with the favorite perfume, so much so that some people write in their wills what type to be used in keeping with the example of the Prophet. All these must have been a source of pain to the family.

  The armistice agreements are mentioned by Gelber, p. 298, and Sayigh, p. 4 and p. 58. Abdullah's assassination is mentioned in Heikal, pp. 85-86, and Glubb, pp. 27778.

  The "shabby and ragged" quoted comes from the previously mentioned UN "Report to the Director."

  The conditions and routines of the Gaza schools, and the schooling in shifts, were recalled by Bashir, Nuha, and Ghiath Khairi. The "Palestine is ours" poem appears in A. L. Tibawi's article, "Visions of the Return: The Palestine Arab Refugees in Arabic Poetry and Art," Middle East Journal, Vol. 17, no. 5. Late Autumn 1963, pp. 507-526. The reality of right of return transforming into a long-term dream was described by Bashir. The frustration of the refugees and the "irritable and unstable" quote are from the 1951 UN "Report to the Director." The Israeli "doing the refugees a disservice" quote is cited in Daniel Dishon, Middle East Record 5 (1969-1970): 399.

  The frustration of the Palestinians under Egyptian control is documented by Sayigh, pp. 14-15 and p. 44. The growth of banned political groups can be understood in Sayigh, pp. 49-51, and in Sara Roy's The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, p. 69. The 1951 UN "Report to the Director" is the source of the "demonstrations and small riots" quote. Roy (p. 69) is a source for the Sharon attack on el-Bureij refugee camp. Roy describes fifty killed; other accounts range from nineteen (Al-Ahram Weekly, August 21-31, 2005) to forty-three (Azmi Bishara in Arabic Media Internet Network, September 4, 2003 (http://www.amin.org/eng/azmi_bishara/2003/ sept04.html). Sharon describes the Bureij raid on p. 273 of Benny Morris's Israels Border Wars: 1949-1956. Sayigh (pp. 61-62) and Shlaim (TheIron Wall, pp. 123-29) cover general tensions between Egypt, Israel, and the Gaza Palestinians.

  The hope in Nasser was expressed by Bashir; Nasser's background, including his roots as the son of a postal worker, are discussed by Heikal on pp. 88-90. Nasser and pan-Arabism are discussed by Sayigh, pp. 29-33, and Heikal, pp. 110-11.

  Heikal, a close aide to Nasser, relays a fascinating and little-known part of the story: the near intervention of Albert Einstein. "Einstein felt sorry for Palestinians who had been dispossessed by the Jews, just as he had been by the Nazis," Heikal wrote.

  He asked me to convey a message to the Egyptian leadership [Nasser] expressing his wish to serve as a catalyst for peace. . . . The message was delivered as requested and discussed within Nasser's inner circle. Einstein's stature and the way he framed his approach made a negative reply difficult, but the taboo [against Arab leaders' recognition of Israel] was overwhelming in its power. The only solution was to make no reply, with all the discourtesy which silence implied. (Secret Channels, pp. 94-97)

  Chapter 7

  This chapter was built from interviews with the original Israeli inhabitants of Ramla; from founding documents of Israeli Ramla provided by city manager Yonatan Tubali; from the Israel Government Year Book for 1950 and its vast storehouse of state figures and official declarations; from 1948 and 1949 military reports housed in the Israeli State Archives; from secondary sources such as Meron Benvenisti's Sacred Landscapes, which rely on archival material; and from personal recollections and family oral histories, as conveyed in more than a dozen interviews with longtime residents of Ramla, especially Dalia.

  The date of November 14, 1948, is on a handwritten list of the first Jewish families to arrive in Ramla provided to me by Yonatan Tubali, Ramla city manager, and confirmed by Moshe Melamed, former Israeli ambassador to Mexico, who was twelve years old when he arrived in Ramla on November 14, 1948 with his family Melamed remembers being in one of "two or three" buses to arrive that day. However, there may have been more buses; Yablonka, on p. 24 of Survivors of the Holocaust, cites "Reports of Military Administration Ramlah and Lydda" in describing "the arrival in Ramlah of a group of 300 people" on November 14. The makeup of the early immigrants is listed by Yablonka on p. 24 and confirmed in an interview with Tubali. Dalia is certain that she and her parents were in that first group.

  The Jewish Agency's early presence in Ramla was recalled in numerous interviews, including with Melamed:

  [The Jewish Agency] told us, Here is Ramla. Every family gets one room in a house. My parents left me with the luggage next to the bus. And they said, We'll go to look for a house. I stayed on the street with the luggage, and my parents came back fifteen to twenty minutes later and they said, This is your room. . . .

  It is highly likely that Dalia's parents, arri
ving with the same group, underwent the same process, and Dalia confirmed this from family history.

  It is possible that Moshe and Sofia would have heard fighting between Israelis and Egyptians to the south of Ramla, according to Melamed; during this time, the Israelis were gaining the upper hand in fighting with the Egyptians over the Negev, and Egyptian forces were increasingly confined to defending a small slice of land known as the Gaza Strip. (See Gelber's Palestine 1948, pp. 199-219.)

  State supplies provided to the early immigrants were recalled in interviews with Tubali, Levy, Melamed, and others. A broader sense of the austerity measures can be found in the 1950 Israel Government Year Book (English-language edition), pp. 198 202. The "custodian" office responsibilities are described in the 1950 Year Book, p. 134. Dalia recalled living on "K.B. Street" and the fact that her parents had a signed agreement with the state; such agreements are confirmed on p. 134 of the 1950 Year Book. The role of "naming committees" is described in detail by Meron Benvenisti in Sacred Landscapes, pp. 11-27, and in correspondence from Melamed to me.

  The items hauled away in trucks are listed in Israeli State Archives document 15a/49/ 27/12. The quote about belongings of "absentee owners" being "liquidated" is from p. 134 of the 1950 Year Book.

  The children's experience was recalled by Moshe Melamed.

  Work in the early years of Israeli Ramla was described in numerous interviews in Ramla, including with Mati Braun, Labib Qulana, M. Levy, Esther Pardo, and Melamed, who would soon find work, at age fourteen, as a bank clerk. The difficulty of making the harvest is described by Benvenisti in Sacred Landscapes, p. 164.

  The figures on jobs and the kinds of work and businesses established by Jewish immigrants to Ramla come from handwritten records unearthed by Yonatan Tubali.

  One prominent Israeli writer who reviewed the manuscript cautioned me: "I would avoid [using] Arab ghetto and any other alluded comparison to the persecution of the Jews" during the Holocaust. However, the term sakne has been widely used in Ramla and elsewhere by Israelis since at least 1949 and understood to be interchangeable with the word ghetto, and thus I am using it here.

  Dalia vividly remembers the image of steaming bowls of soup being left behind by the fleeing Arabs.

  The laws and ministries forged during the first Knesset are listed in the Israel Government Year Book for 1950 on pp. 59-71.

  Ben-Gurion's "four-year plan" was announced in the July 12, 1949, edition of the Palestine Post. His "ingathering" quote comes from the 1950 Year Book, p. 29. The figures of Bulgarian Jews who emigrated and those who stayed vary slightly. Chary, one of the world's authorities on Bulgarian Jews, uses a total figure of forty-seven thousand; others say forty-eight thousand or even fifty thousand. Some figures suggest that only three thousand Jews remained in Bulgaria. Whatever the numbers, the speed and volume of the Jewish exodus from Bulgaria was astonishing even to those who planned and executed it. On April 11, 1949, Fred Baker, the JDC director for Bulgaria, wrote to European headquarters in Paris: "Over a six months period 35,000 persons emigrated plus 7,000 persons prior to Octover [sic] 1948. It would appear that the maximum of 4,000 Jews will remain in Bulgaria. I think that you will agree that it was impossible to foresee this gigantic emigration movement in a relatively short span of time."

  The pressure on Ramla for work was underscored to me by Avraham Shmil, longtime director of the Ramla office of the Histadrut labor federation. The demonstration in Tel Aviv is mentioned in Segev's 1949, p. 131. The criminal court and its first defendants are mentioned in a July 13, 1949, article in the Palestine Post. The Ministry of Police quote comes from the 1950 Year Book, p. 183.

  The changing of the street names was recalled by Mohammad Taji, a lifelong resident of Ramla and one of the few Muslims in the city whose family did not flee in 1948.

  The minutes of the first City Council meeting, which include the figure of 1,300 Arabs, were provided by Tubali. The POW status of the Arab men of Ramla and Lydda is described in interviews with Mohammad Taji, Labib Qulana, and Michail Fanous, all Arabs of Ramla, and is recalled in Fouzi el-Asmar's memoir, To Be an Arab in Israel, p. 23.

  The plowing under or other destruction of the Arab fields and groves is described in detail by Morris on pp. 239-56 of 1948 and After, and by Benvenisti, Sacred Landscapes, p. 165.

  The letter from "S. Zamir" comes from the Israeli State Archives (RL 5/297, September 15, 1948) and was translated by Ian Dietz. The Arabs' confinement under martial law has been previously sourced above; see Segev's 1949, pp. 47-51, and Nadia Hijab's Citizens Apart: A Portrait of Palestinians in Israel, pp. 30-33. The desire to "transfer" additional Arabs can be seen in a meeting of the secretariat of the ruling Mapai party (the precursor to the current-day Labor Party), quoted by Segev on pp. 46-47 of 1949, where the "fifth column" fears are also mentioned. For more on "transfer" as a political and military strategy, see "Yosef Weitz and the Transfer Committees, 1948-1949" in Morris's 1948 and After, pp. 103-58, and Nur Masalha's The Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882—1948. A leading figure was Weitz, who wrote in his diary in 1940, "It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. . . . After the Arabs are transferred, the country will be wide open for us" (Masalha, p. 131). Eight years later, as the powerful leader of a "Transfer Committee" and the head of the lands department for the Jewish National Fund, Weitz would advocate for additional "transfers." (See examples in the Galilee and Negev cited by Morris, p. 146.) Others in the government, however, argued against this, and many of the remaining Arabs were allowed to stay.

  The takeover of Arab lands is described in Morris's 1948 and After (see, for example, p. 143) and in Segev on pp. 77-78. On pp. 80-82, Segev mentions the concept of "present absentees."

  The three letters from Arab landowners come from the Central Zionist Archives. The details on rationing and the role of the Ministry of Supply and Rationing come from the Israel Government Year Book for 1950, pp. 198-203, and was corroborated by the Eshkenazis" experience. The Year Book (p. 199) describes "a severance from former sources of supply—the markets of the British Empire . . ."

  The Egyptian restrictions in the Suez are mentioned on p. 220 of J. C. Hurewitz's The Historical Context for Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences.

  Dalia's memory of her early education about Arabs is corroborated by a review of Israeli school curriculum in The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Israeli History Textbooks, 1948 2000, by Elie Podeh, pp. 102-10.

  Nasser's appeal as third world leader and a leader of the Arab Nation is discussed in Sayigh's Armed Struggle and the Search for State, pp. 27-33. The Suez conflict is described in Erskin Childers's The Road to Suez, especially pp. 125-280; Heikal's Secret Channels, pp. 100-14; and Shlaim's The Iron Wall, pp. 169-78, which analyzed the secret agreement between Israel, France, and Britain to attack Egypt and eliminate Nasser as a perceived threat to their various interests.

  The geopolitical background for the conflict, with its involvement in superpower politics and the fading imperial powers in Europe, is worth exploring in some detail:

  In 1955, Nasser had sought U.S. backing for his country's massive modernization project, the Aswan High Dam (Sayigh, p. 26). In the meantime, both Israel and Egypt had begun a race to arm themselves: Israel with weapons from France; Egypt from the Soviet Union's client state Czechoslovakia, after its request to the Americans was turned down (Sayigh, p. 19; Morris, Border Wars, p. 282), After Egypt formally recognized the People's Republic of China, the United States, led by the cold war secretary of state John Foster Dulles, withdrew its support for the Aswan Dam (Sayigh, p. 26; Heikal, pp. 108-13). Nasser had responded swiftly by nationalizing the British-built Suez Canal, the vital link carved between Africa and Asia, and declaring that revenues from the passage of ships would from now on be used to finance the dam (Heikal, Secret Channels, p. 110). Nasser also closed the Straits of Tiran, which represented Israel's only sea link to the Red Sea and Africa.


  The Israeli attack in October 1956 was part of a secret plan with leaders of Britain and France, which came to light many years later, to destabilize Nasser and destroy his pan-Arab ambitions; reassert colonial authority by seizing the canal and opening the Straits of Tiran; and, according to some analysts, expand Israel's territory across the Sinai all the way to the Gulf of Suez—in other words, to recarve the physical and political map of the Middle East (Shlaim, pp. 172-84; Sayigh, p. 26; Heikal, p. 112; Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars, pp. 117-24).

  The arrival of more "Oriental Jews" in 1956 was largely the result of political tensions and violence within Arab nations. An Arab representative, Heykal Pasha, warned the UN General Assembly in 1947 that the creation of a Jewish state "might endanger a million Jews living in the Moslem countries," and in fact such violence came to pass, resulting in subsequent flight to Israel. In some cases, however, the exodus was aided by Zionist operations in the Arab countries. For example, a series of bombings in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1954 involving an Israeli espionage operation and later dubbed the "Lavon affair" stirred outrage and in some cases mob attacks against Egyptian Jews. (See David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, pp. 290-96; Heikal, pp. 106-07; and "The Lavon Affair," by Doron Geller, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/History/lavon.html.) Especially after Suez, many Israelis preferred to see the flight of Jews from Arab lands, coupled with the flight of Palestinians in 1948, as an "exchange of populations" (Israel Gefen interview, June 2004). Some evidence suggests that Zionists staged events to encourage their flight. On January 14, 1951, a hand grenade exploded outside a Baghdad synagogue; later, U.S. intelligence sources and Iraqi Jews themselves would blame Zionists. See, for example, the article by Iraqi Jew Naeim Giladi ("The Jews of Iraq") in The Link 31, no. 2, 1998. Another source is former CIA officer Wilber Crane Eveland's Ropes of Sand, pp. 48-49.