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

by Sandy Tolan

  Usually Zakia would send the servants to buy the food, but sometimes she would do her own shopping. When she left the house to go to Wednesday market, she put on a jacket and dark cape and wore a veil over her face. Occasionally she would take her daughters along.

  At the market the girls would gaze up at the stalls of eggplants and peppers; tomatoes, cucumbers, and parsley; spices and herbs; and live chickens and squab. Village men rode to the oil presses perched atop sacks of olives in flatbed trucks. Horse-drawn carts creaked into market overburdened with produce. Village women would barter chicken and eggs—or, in hard times, silver bracelets and old Ottoman coins—for Syrian silk, Egyptian linen, and cotton from Gaza. The women chose dyes for their embroidery: indigo from the Jordan Valley, red from the sumac growing wild in the fields of Palestine, yellow muchra from the soil found near the Egyptian border.

  The Khairi girls could see how each villager's dress told a story. Some were embroidered with patterns of sesame branches; others with sunflowers or field tulips. In al-Ramla, a citrus-growing region near the sea, patterns of orange branches were woven into the embroidered bodices. These were surrounded by green triangles to represent the cypress trees used as windbreaks beside the orange groves. Below that, undulating lines of indigo stood for the waves of the nearby Mediterranean.

  At home, Zakia and her servants often cooked the girls' favorite, makloubeh, or "upside down," a lamb-and-eggplant casserole they would turn over and sprinkle with pine nuts just after it came out of the oven. The girls would gather around their mother in the kitchen as she sprinkled sugar and pistachios atop the kanafe. The main meals were served at midday in the dining room. Zakia would call the girls to the table; Ahmad would come home from his carpentry workshop to join them; and the family would dine around a short-legged table called a tablieh. When guests came the parents would retire to the salon, where they would sit on couches of engraved wood covered in dark blue velvet, on which the girls were never allowed to sit.

  After dinner Ahmad would return to work, where he had built a reputation as an accomplished furniture craftsman. His vision was bad, and reading therefore difficult, so instead of the university, Ahmad had attended the Schneller's School in Jerusalem, which turned out young men expert in the trades. Now, a decade later, Ahmad had enough work to hire assistants, and his business was prospering despite the Arab Rebellion. His trade, along with the income from the Khairi land, was enough to provide the family a comfortable life.

  Ahmad rarely socialized at home; instead, he would join the other Khairis to play cards, drink Arabic coffee, and smoke from the arguileh (water pipe) at the diwan, or social gathering place, in the family compound. There the talk of politics was unending.

  By the end of 1936, a relative calm had settled on Palestine. The Arab Higher Committee had suspended its general strike and rebellion in response to a British promise to investigate the underlying causes of the conflict. Lord Peel, the former secretary of state for colonial India, arrived from London dressed in a top hat and tails. The British lord was to direct the parliamentary commission of inquiry, but at times he seemed baffled. "I did not realise how deep-seated was the Arab fear of Jewish overlordship and domination," he wrote to a colleague in London. "As to reconciliation between the two races, nobody makes any attempt to bring it about." With increasing numbers of European Jews "pour[ing] into Palestine . . . by means legal and illegal," Lord Peel decried the "unpleasant atmosphere of suspicion" and fretted over the futility of making even "constructive suggestions."

  In July 1937, the Palestine Royal Commission presented its 418-page report to the British Parliament. Declaring "half a loaf is better than no bread," Peel and his fellow commissioners recommended Palestine be partitioned into two states—one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. "Partition offers a prospect," the Peel Commission concluded, "of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace." Hundreds of Arab villages, and at least 225,000 Palestinian Arabs, were inside the proposed boundaries of the new Jewish state; some 1,250 Jews resided on the Arab side of the partition line. An "arrangement" would have to be made "for the transfer, voluntary or otherwise, of land and population . . . if then the settlement is to be clean and final, this question of the minorities must be boldly faced and firmly dealt with," the Peel Commission declared.

  The Zionist leadership accepted Lord Peel's recommendations despite internal dissension. Many Jewish leaders did not want to give up the idea of a Jewish homeland across the whole of Palestine, and some leaders even considered Transjordan, the desert kingdom across the Jordan River, as part of an eventual Jewish state. For them, acceptance of the Peel Commission's report was a major compromise, and their disagreement reflected ideological divisions that would manifest for decades. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Mapai Party and the most influential of the Zionists in Palestine, had argued in favor of the plan. At the core of the Peel Commission plan was the idea of transferring the Arabs, a concept that had been advanced for decades by fellow Zionists. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, had written that in purchasing land from the indigenous Arabs for a Jewish homeland, "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

  Forty years later, during Lord Peel's investigation, Ben-Gurion had instructed Jews who met with the commission to recommend the transfer plan. After the release of the commission's report, the Zionist leader wrote: "We have to uproot from the roots of our hearts the assumption that it is not possible. Indeed it is possible. . . . We might be losing a historical chance that won't return. The transfer cause, in my view, is more important than all our demands for additional territory . . . with the evacuation of the Arab population from the valleys, we get for the first time in our history a real Jewish state." A year later, Ben-Gurion would declare, "I support compulsory transfer." Others sympathetic to the Zionist cause had warned against such measures. Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, for example, had long advocated what Einstein called "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic peoples," who "may have a great future in common."

  The Arabs were as stunned by the Peel Commission's proposal as Ben-Gurion was excited. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, promptly rejected it, not only because of the transfer plan, but because of the partition itself. The Arabs would fight for a single, independent, Arab-majority state.

  In September 1937, the Arab Rebellion erupted again when Arab assassins gunned down a British commissioner on a winding, narrow road in Nazareth. The British response was swift. The military took control from the civil authorities. Military courts stepped up execution of suspected rebels. Thousands were jailed as British forces occupied cities across Palestine, including al-Ramla. British gunners hunted bands of insurgents from the air, at one point employing 16 airplanes west of al-Ramla to kill more than 150 rebels. "Terrorism has called for severe counter measures," wrote the district commissioner for al-Ramla in October, "and these, inevitably, have exacerbated feelings still further. Moderate opinion has now lost the last shred of influence it possessed, and al-Ramla, where the moderates grouped under Sheikh Mustafa Kheiri [Khairi], the Mayor, exercised some restraining power, has capitulated to the gunmen."

  Ahmad's uncle Sheikh Mustafa was in trouble, caught between the British occupying forces and the fedayeen of the Arab Rebellion. For fifteen years, he had commanded great respect as al-Ramla's mayor and leader of one of its most influential families. Sheikh Mustafa's popularity, according to later generations, was based on his defense of the rural poor and their rights to pay lower taxes. "When Sheikh Mustafa came into a room, everyone would stand," remembered Khanom Khairi,, "When he walked by people on horseback, they would get down from the horse. People who were working would stop working. No one asked them to do so; they did it out of respect." The sheikh was
tall and good-looking, with hazel eyes and a mustache, and he was never without his abaya, or dark cape, and the white turban of the religious scholar. He would wrap the turban himself before placing the dark red tarbush (fez) over it.

  The charismatic mayor walked a fine line between the imperial power and the rebels. He had opposed the Peel Commission plan and battled with Arab "notables" who he felt were too close to the British and the Zionists. The mayor, according to later Khairi generations, even secretly used his sons to ferry information on British troop movements to the rebels and to transport weapons in the trunk of a car. If this is true, they did so at the risk of execution.

  Still, Mustafa Khairi was a mayor in a land under foreign occupation and by definition needed to cooperate with the British authorities. Despite his self-image as a nationalist, he was known to oppose Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the rebel leader of the Arab Higher Committee. Sheikh Mustafa was for a time a member of the National Defense Party, which was aligned with Husseini's rivals, and considered to be "collaborators" with the Zionists.

  As the rebellion accelerated anew, rumors began to spread that some Arab elites were cooperating with the British and the Zionists, even informing on the rebels by revealing details of operational plans. Equally incendiary were reports that many of these Arab "notables" had sold land to the new arrivals, prompting evictions of Arabs and the emergence of an angry class of landless peasants. In al-Ramla, townspeople told of a Jewish man from Tel Aviv who was making the rounds, trying to buy more land. It was said that another of Ahmad's uncles, the doctor Rasem Khairi, had angrily sent the man away. Shukri Taji, a cousin of Sheikh Mustafa's and one of the town's most prominent citizens, was said to be going door-to-door in al-Ramla, warning people not to sell their land. But even Taji himself, records would later indicate, had once sold land to Jews. As the reports of informants, collaborators, and land sellers grew, the insurgents killed hundreds of their own people, including, in late 1938, two municipal councillors in nearby Lydda.

  According to British accounts, the mayor stood up to the fedayeen by resisting the taxes they demanded to fuel the Arab Rebellion. In October 1938, according to a British subcommissioner's report, Sheikh Mustafa, "the very able Mayor" of al-Ramla, "left the country" for Cairo "because of fear of assassination. . . . The loss of the Mayor will be keenly felt." The British, meanwhile, used the anger over the rebels' tax demands to recruit more informants from among the disgruntled.

  Within a month Sheikh Mustafa returned to al-Ramla, pledging to try to stay out of nationalist politics and to focus on municipal affairs in the large stone building along the Jaffa-Jerusalem road.

  In May 1939, it appeared to some Arabs that the sacrifices of their rebellion had brought a political victory. With British forces still heavily engaged with the rebels, and with the situation in Europe creating tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, the British government released its White Paper, accepting many of the demands of the Arab Rebellion. The British agreed to strictly limit Jewish immigration and to tighten restrictions on land sales in Palestine. Most important, the White Paper called for a single independent state. Many Arabs in Palestine saw in the White Paper a practical solution to their problem. But Hajj Amin al-Husseini, speaking for the Arab Higher Committee, rejected the White Paper. His word carried the day in Arab Palestine, even though it was made from exile: the ex-mufti had fled Palestine nearly two years earlier, wanted by the British at the height of the Arab rebellion. The ex-mufti's decision was unpopular with many Palestinian Arabs, who believed they had missed an opportunity.

  The new British policy marked a sharp change from the Peel Commission plan of only two years earlier. The Wliite Paper was a major concession to the Arabs. For the Jews of Palestine, it was an abandonment of British support for a Jewish national homeland promised in the Balfour Declaration, at a time when the situation for Jews in Europe was growing more perilous. Within weeks, Jewish paramilitary squads were attacking British forces, planting explosives in Jerusalem's central post office, and carrying out attacks on civilians in Arab souks. The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine. "Satan himself could not have created a more distressing and horrible nightmare," David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary.

  By the turn of 1940, the British authorities had finally defeated the Arab Rebellion through what they called "severe countermeasures": tens of thousands jailed, thousands killed, hundreds executed, countless houses demolished, and key leaders, including the mufti, in exile. In the cities, Arab men had taken off their keffiyehs and replaced them once again with the fez. The Palestinian national movement was deeply divided and utterly unprepared for any future conflict.

  Two years later, on February 16, 1942, newspaper headlines announced British defeats in Burma and Singapore at the hands of the Japanese. In the sands of Libya and Egypt, British forces had retreated three hundred miles in the face of a fresh assault from Nazi brigadier general Erwin Rommel. Stories of Nazi atrocities had begun to trickle out of Poland and Germany; Jews in Palestine were terrified that Rommel, should he reach his prize of the Suez Canal, would keep marching east toward Tel Aviv.

  Compared with a few years earlier, the Holy Land was quiet. The British high commissioner's monthly telegram to the secretary of state for the colonies reported "no genuine political developments" among the Jews and "on the surface no political activity on the Arab side." The commissioner expressed concern over possible Arab recruiting efforts for a postwar conflict. He mused over the exile of Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The now ex-mufti had resumed his nationalist struggle against the British and the Zionists by taking up with the archenemy of the British Empire: Nazi Germany. The ex-mufti was now in Berlin.

  In his February report on the state of Palestine, the high commissioner worried about a Jewish "pseudo-political terrorist gang known as the Stern group," which had begun carrying out assassinations. But mostly the commissioner advised London, "Public interest, both Arab and Jewish, has tended once again to concentrate more on the cost of living and the supply situation": food rationing, the price of yarn, the supply of shoes, and the number of meatless days per week.

  In al-Ramla, Mayor Khairi was once again attending to his municipal duties, confronting black marketeers illegally hoarding foods to get around wartime rationing, and dealing with a failed well and subsequent shortage of water in the town. "The enemies of the Mayor," wrote the district commissioner, "are profiting by the shortage of water as well as of food to conduct a campaign against him."

  There was, in other words, a lull in the battle for the future of Palestine. And on February 16, 1942, at least, Sheikh Mustafa Khairi could be distracted by something far more pleasant than water battles, political attacks, and the prospect of fresh violence in Palestine. His nephew Ahmad would become a father for the seventh time. For the first time, Zakia would give birth to a boy. He was born at home, with the help of a midwife. Zakia was happy and relieved.

  "I don't believe it—my wife brings only girls into the world," Ahmad said, according to his daughter Khanom. "He sent one of the young men from the family to come to the house and unwrap my brother's clothes to see if he was really a boy."

  Many Iambs were sacrificed as thanks. Relatives came from Gaza, and the entire Khairi clan celebrated with song and dance.

  "It was a great occasion," Khanom recalled. "We finally had a brother."

  They called the child Bashir.

  Three

  RESCUE

  THE YOUNG JEWISH salesman walked quickly through the cold down a cobblestone street. Moshe Eshkenazi carried his black leather case full of fine socks, flannel underwear, and other factory samples as he made his rounds from shop to shop in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. Suddenly he stopped. There in plain view, just at his feet, lay a wallet. It was in good condition, untouched, as if someone had only recently dropped it. Moshe stooped to pick it up. The wallet was filled with money—a small fortune to a struggling Jewish peddler trying to support his family in the Bulga
ria of early 1943. During the war, it had become far more difficult for men like Moshe to ensure any security for their families, and for some men, the unexpected find would have been impossible to resist.

  Moshe did not hesitate. He made the only decision possible for him. Taking the wallet to the police was the most natural thing in the world to do.

  At the police station, the officer on duty was shocked to see the salesman with the yellow star bring in a billfold with its contents intact. He consulted with his fellow policemen, and soon Moshe was sent to another office, where he was introduced to a senior member of the force. The officer looked at his unusual visitor with curiosity: Moshe stood short and squat, with wavy black hair, a heavy brow, and a clear, steady gaze. Before long, the peddler and the veteran policeman found themselves deep in conversation, and in the coming days, they would develop a friendship. Moshe's daughter, Dalia, who grew up w th the story, was not yet born in 1943. She would never hear the specifics of these discussions—whether the two men talked about the war, Bulgaria s alliance with the Nazis, or the country's treatment of its Jews—but at some point the policeman decided to reveal a state secret.

  "There is a plan to deport the Jews—soon," he told Moshe. "Settle your affairs, take your family away, and clear out of here." The officer's information, though lacking in some details, had come from senior Bulgarian authorities, and Moshe needed no further warning. His brother, Jacques, had already left the city and joined the Communist resistance in the hills. Moshe had no such intentions, but within days he and his wife, Solia, had gathered their things and were traveling east to her family's home in Sliven, near the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. There, they hoped, it would be safe.

  Bulgaria in early 1943 was a monarchy aligned with the Axis powers. Hitler's reach into southeastern Europe had extended to the edge of the Balkans and beyond, where the kingdom of Boris III lay wedged between the Black Sea to the east and Turkey and Greece to the south. In the previous two years under Boris's rule, able-bodied Jewish men like Moshe, Jacques, and Solia's cousin Yitzhak Yitzhaki, along with Communists and other dissidents, had spent the warmer months living in work camps, building roads and railways to fuel the wartime machine of the Axis.