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

by Sandy Tolan

  Solia Eshkenazi opened a shop for baby clothes in the old Arab sakne, or ghetto, before taking a job with the new national tax authority. Dalia's aunt Stella went to work as an orderly, mopping floors at the hospital, then opened a makeshift beauty salon in her bedroom in the house in Ramla. Dalia would sit and watch as Bulgarian ladies came to the house for haircuts and conversation. After work Solia would join the discussion, pressing for the smallest bits of news from Bulgaria: Is it getting worse under Georgi Dimitrov? What do you know of the neighbors? Soon Stella's sister Dora opened her own beauty shop in an old Arab storefront, and Stella joined her there. Their customers would often sit for hours, and if someone had just come from Bulgaria, the news would be accompanied by many bitter jokes about the Communist regime.

  One day shortly after the salon opened, Stella and Dora had a surprise visitor: their cousin, Yitzhak Yitzhaki. The sisters were astonished. Yitzhaki had not, after all, been killed in the massacre at Mt. Scopus in 1948. After the attack, he told them, he had continued his army service, but a few months later, he was released and went to work settling Bulgarian immigrants in old Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. There was still sporadic fighting nearby, however, and some Bulgarian arrivals told Yitzhaki that they hadn't escaped the Holocaust in Europe to be killed in Jerusalem. Many moved out, to Jaffa and Tel Aviv, and Yitzhaki, much like his brother-in-law Moshe, worked to settle immigrants from Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Soon he was doing this "absorption" work across Israel for the Jewish Agency. It was on a trip for the agency from Jerusalem to Jaffa that he ran into his Aunt Lili, who told him that the Arroyo girls, as he knew them from their youth, were in Ramla. "I went looking for the famous salon of Dora and Stella in the Ramla souk," he remembered, "and sure enough, I found it, to my great joy!"

  Stella and Dora took Yitzhaki to the house on K.B. Street. "I was astonished to see the home in Ramla," he remembered. To Yitzhaki, the modest stone home was known as "The Castle"; he considered it "the most beautiful house in Ramla." The cousins went inside and there Yitzhaki saw Solia with her daughter, Dalia. She was, as Aunt Virginia had observed in late 1947, an extraordinarily beautiful child. Before leaving, Yitzhaki's cousins presented him with a gift—a big bag of lemons from the tree in the backyard. He carried them home to his family in Jerusalem.

  In the meantime, Moshe had turned his job delivering beds into full-time work for the Custodian of Abandoned Properties. He helped respond to the needs of new arrivals who, like his own family, had moved into the houses of the Arabs. Moshe helped repair the houses where necessary, arranging to fix leaks, shore up walls, and the like. As for the former residents, the Israeli government designated them as "absentees." They had simply run away, Moshe and Solia were told, with their soup bowls steaming on the table. The Eshkenazis and others living in the Arab homes did not give the past owners much thought. Instead they focused on building a new society.

  In the first session of the Israeli parliament (known by its Hebrew name, Knesset) beginning in 1949, legislators authorized dozens of ministries, including Agriculture, Defense, Immigration, Justice, Religions, Social Welfare, and War Victims. The first Knesset passed laws authorizing an army and mandatory service; systems for taxation, customs, compulsory education, and the courts; an independence day; an official day of rest; the "transfer of Herzl's remains"; and, perhaps most famously, the Law of Return, whereby citizenship "shall be granted to every Jew who expressed his desire to settle in Israel." This law would become an endless source of bitterness between Israel and the Arab world for the next half century and beyond. For the Palestinian Arabs in exile, the law, and each wave of Jews admitted to the new state, denied their own dreams of return; for the Israelis, the law went to the core of their identity: to provide a safe haven for every Jew who wished to make aliyah, the Jewish migration to Israel.

  In July 1949, David Ben-Gurion announced a four-year plan to build 500 settlements for 150,000 new immigrants. "Today the Jewish people are again at a period of genesis," the prime minister declared. "A waste land must be made fertile and the exiles gathered in." By this time, 42,000 Bulgarian Jews lived in Israel, the vast majority having come in the previous nine months. Of the entire community of Bulgarian Jews who had collectively escaped the Holocaust, at most 5,000 would remain in the fatherland.

  The flood of migrants increased the pressure on Ramla to create jobs. In early 1949, hundreds of immigrants of Ramla marched in Tel Aviv, demanding work and bread. As unemployment grew, so did petty crime, and by July, a year after the surrender of Arab Ramla, Israeli Ramla had established its first criminal court. The Palestine Post reported the historic occasion: The first case involved an Arab, a man named Haddad accused of beating his wife; then came a Mr. Aharon, a Jew charged with brandishing a knife at a local bank manager. The increase in crime was linked directly to the sustained hardship of the immigrants. "The Force was confronted with grave problems," declared the Ministry of Police. Assaults were up by 150 percent, and "offences against morality" had tripled, "a consequence of the rapid growth of the population. . . ." By the end of 1949, as Dalia turned two years old and her "pioneer" parents marked their first year in Ramla, the city surpassed ten thousand residents.

  By now, the municipal naming committee had finished its work and Ramla's streets had new signs. The old Jaffa-Jerusalem highway was called Herzl Street; Birket El Jamusi was named Haganah Street; Omar Ibn Khattab was Jabotinsky, named after the founder of Revisionist Zionism, the ardent right wing of the new Jewish state. The Eshkenazis' street, known before as Sheikh Radwan, was now called Klausner, named after the Revisionist Zionist, literary critic, and scholar of early Christianity.

  July 1949 also marked the first City Council meeting of Israeli Ramla. "Our work is not easy," declared the mayor, a Bulgarian named Meir Melamed, "but by joining forces we will overcome all of the difficulties." Those difficulties included not only water scarcity, unemployment, and an impatient Jewish population, but also what to do with the Arabs of Ramla. Most had been expelled a year earlier, but 1,300 Arabs still lived in the town. With the Israeli military governor scheduled to leave Ramla within weeks, city councillors worried about "opening the closed off area where the Arabs are . . . and with that comes the question of safety in the city."

  The Arab men who had not been expelled were held as prisoners of war after the capture of Ramla on July 12, 1948. During their incarceration, they were not allowed to work their fields. Across Israel, the Arab olive and orange groves had gone largely untended and in some cases had been plowed under to prevent "infiltrators" from returning. In Ramla and Lod (as Lydda was known in the Hebrew vernacular), the military governor had trucked in workers from Nazareth, a Christian Arab community in what was now Israel, to work the olive groves near the two towns. The imprisoned men of Ramla and Lod were put to work weaving thatch baskets for the harvest; their POW labor helped others harvest the lands they had recently cultivated themselves.

  Local Israeli officials began to worry about the consequences of their policy toward the Arabs of Israel. "They still have not gotten used to reality and have become apathetic about the future," wrote an official named S. Zamir in a status report on the Arab community of Ramla. "The government's declaration of equality and freedom is like a voice calling out in the desert unless we prove it by actions. Their economic situation is very bad. They have enough provisions for the time being, but soon the question will arise: 'What will we eat?'"

  After their release from the POW camp, the Arab men of Ramla, like Arabs across Israel at the time, were nevertheless still confined with their families to a few fenced-in blocks. These included Bashir's uncle Rasem, the doctor who had stayed after the expulsions. For several years, the Arabs of Israel would live under martial law. Arab residents wishing to leave their neighborhood or village were required to apply to the military authorities for special permits. Movement was restricted on security grounds. Some leaders in the new state continued to argue for the "transfer" of the remaining
Arabs across the Jordan River to Abdullah's kingdom.

  The Arabs of the Ramla and Lod "ghettos" found their former homes occupied by Jewish families and their agricultural lands controlled by kibbutzim. Not at home, but not in exile, they were defined by the Israeli government as "present absentees." Many sought legal recourse to move back into their houses or resume farming their lands.

  "Though on several occasions since his interview with the Military Governor, Mr. Shomski promised me to return the door and shutters and to re-condition my house," wrote an Arab resident of Lydda in December 1949, "up to this date nothing has been done. On the contrary, owing to the absence of doors and windows unknown persons have carried out extensive damage to my house. . . . I shall be very much obliged if you will give your instructions . . . to return my doors and window shutters as soon as possible."

  "I beg to submit the following for your kind consideration," wrote an al-Ramla landowner, an Arab whose plea had begun in March 1949. "I am the registered owner of the following pieces of land: Parcel No. 69; Block No. 4374; Locality Ramie [Ramla]; Area 5,032 Sq. Metres. . . . All these parcels, including my own share, were treated by the Apetropos [Custodian of Abandoned Properties] as Absentee Properties in spite of the fact that I am not an absentee. . . ."

  "I am the registered owner of Half of Parcel 13," wrote an Arab appellant to the local council of Kibbutz Gezer, five miles southeast of Ramla. "I am prepared to pay the Local Council's taxes on my share in the Parcel. . . . I shall be obliged also to know who has ploughed my land and with whose authority he did so."

  In a black-and-white photograph taken in the backyard of the stone house in Ramla, Dalia stands beside a lemon tree, looking into the camera with tears in her eyes. The image was taken in the summer, perhaps of 1950; Dalia would have been two and a half. She'd been crying briefly, offended by the sparrows who had chosen to fly away rather than stay and eat bread crumbs out of her hand. "Why should they fly?" she cried to her aunt.

  "Why? I love them." It is her earliest memory.

  In another image Dalia's father stands beside her, his dark wavy hair combed back, his cuffed pants hoisted above his waist, his smile frozen in time by Solia's snap. In the background, behind the lemon tree, Moshe had planted bananas and guayabas. To the right, at the edge of the frame, stood a henhouse where the Eshkenazis raised their own chickens. It was the time of the tsena, or scarcity (literally "austerity"), and everyone was expected to pitch in.

  During the tsena, the Ministry of Supply and Rationing moved to the center of Israeli public life. The ministry's job was to regulate the limited supply of food so that no one went hungry. Israel's rapid growth required it to import 85 percent of its food. Although before 1948 the Jewish Agency had direct (if unofficial) trade relations with other states, Israel's sudden entry into the world economy proved jarring. The state had reduced its trade with the markets of the British Empire, and the Arab countries had imposed economic and political boycotts. Egypt was blockading cargo to and from Israel through the Suez Canal, despite a UN resolution calling for free passage through the vital waterway. Israel had to depend on wheat and processed flour, and imported meats, seasonally discounted fish, and even olive oil, from the United States, Canada, and Australia. With the demise of many of the Arab groves, Israel could supply only 8 percent of its own olive oil demands.

  In 1950, officials distributed seven hundred thousand live chickens to new immigrants. Milk was stored in dozens of collection stations around the country. The ministry established a Flour Committee and a Bread Committee and directly oversaw the daily production of tens of thousands of round loaves, rolls, and raisin milk cakes. Ration cards linked the address of each family to the serial number of an assigned retailer. Coupon books provided subsidies for wheat, yeast, and matzo and allowed for extra rations of meat for pregnant women. To do their part, citizens were urged to be creative.

  The Eshkenazis, like many Israelis during the early 1950s, innovated their way through the scarcity. A neighbor's cow roamed the street unmolested, revered as if the neighborhood were in India, not Israel. Solia bartered for milk and butter from the cow's owner, using eggs from the family's chicken coop as currency. This cow nourished Dalia and all of her neighbors.

  In the Ramla market, held on Wednesdays as it had been before July 1948, Dalia would walk with her father, passing by the stalls of cucumbers, olives, and watermelons; past the mounds of oranges and bananas and the hawkers yelling, "Sabra! Sabra!" before the fresh cactus fruit atop buckets of ice; and into the dry goods stores for fabric and shoes. With each purchase, Dalia would watch as her father found top quality without paying too much. "Here," he would say, fingering a pair of trousers for the feel of its fabric. "Compare this"—and he would pick another pair—"to this." Always he seemed to find a slight imperfection and negotiate a lower price.

  In the evenings, Moshe and Solia would invite Bulgarian friends for gatherings in the backyard. They laid out plates of black olives, watermelon, and Bulgarian cheese, pouring cold glasses of boza, a sweet Balkan drink made from wheat. They'd talk of news from Bulgaria, and Dalia would hear them telling off-color jokes in Ladino, the fading language of earlier generations that she could understand only slightly.

  Often during these gatherings Dalia would walk to the side of the house, half listening, and inhale from the "candles of the night," the flowers that opened only after sunset. She compared them with Aunt Stella's margar-itkis—the white and yellow flowers that would close in the evenings as the night candles opened. Often Solia would put a record on the phonograph, and sultry Spanish music, a legacy of the Eshkenazis' Sephardic roots, would drift out from the house. Dalia would watch her mother and the guests sashay across the veranda that Ahmad Khairi had built, evoking the ballroom days in Sofia when she'd met Moshe. At the end of the evening, Moshe would pick roses from the bushes in the garden and present one to each of the departing women. It was a Bulgarian tradition, and one especially familiar for Solia, who grew up alongside the Valley of the Roses.

  By 1955, the year Dalia turned eight, Moshe was rising into the leadership of the local office of the Custodian of Abandoned Properties. Dalia would visit during school vacations, intent on helping her father, answering the phones or showing clients to his office. Usually they were women, often beside themselves with frustration: They had leaks that had needed fixing for months, or after years they still lived in a tent at the edge of town, though they'd been promised better housing. Moshe was genuinely pained by their troubles. He would say, "I am entering your situation," and then explain how his budget was so distressingly limited. He would promise to write appeals to the appropriate ministries, insisting, "I give you my word, I promise to deal with this even if the world turns upside down. . . . " Dalia was amazed to see clients leave the office calmed by the sincere, overwhelmed bureaucrat and hoping for the best. On the street people were constantly approaching Moshe, shaking his hand and thanking him for his help; at other times they would come to his house with gifts. "I understand your gratitude," he would tell them. "I appreciate your gift, but as a public servant I cannot accept it."

  On other afternoons, Dalia would stop at the hair salon her aunts Stella and Dora had opened in a narrow storefront of an old Arab shop. All too often, Stella would put her niece in a chair and work on her until Dalia felt she had hardly any hair at all. "Just a little trim . . . there, just a little bit more; you like that, don't you?" Once, when Stella was taking a nap at home, Dalia took her revenge, cutting her aunt's hair as she slept, cooing, "There, just a little bit more; you like that, don't you?" When Stella woke up and looked in the mirror, it seemed she'd been attacked. Stella's brother Daniel was to be married in a few days. She wore a hat to the wedding.

  The salon catered mostly to Bulgarians, but the two sisters were gaining a reputation, and soon Polish, Romanian, and Moroccan women would come and the language would switch from Bulgarian to broken French or broken Hebrew. Dalia would recall one regular customer from Poland—unf
orgettable for her creamy skin and huge blue-green eyes that struck Dalia as especially sad. To Dalia, the woman was every bit as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor. She would sit in her chair, never smiling, gazing out at nothing. Dalia would watch, riveted, as Stella and Dora combed and snipped, doting on the woman, trying to draw her out.

  Dalia had begun to notice how some of her neighbors were different. They were silent about the past, where her own family spoke openly about the rescue in Bulgaria. At school, she had a teacher who, it was whispered, had lost his wife and children in the death camps in Poland. Teacher Haim, as everyone called him, had come to Israel after the war. He was Dalia's favorite: a short man with dark, heavy eyebrows and a forehead that took up most of his face. His eyes were hazel, vibrant, and intense, and he walked quickly with a wide gait, rarely slowing, always looking forward. In class he would call to her, to all the children, "Come here, tachsheet shell, come here, my jewel, come to the blackboard and show us what you know."

  "He gave us a feeling that he believed in our future," Dalia remembered. "He was a strict disciplinarian, but very affirmative. He gave us tools for life."

  Many of Dalia's classmates, however, seemed almost beyond reach. The children of Poles, Romanians, and Hungarians, they had come to the country, like Dalia, in the first days of the Israeli state. In the eyes of these children, Dalia saw a vacancy.

  A Polish classmate lived next door. His father's eyes were literally bulging out of their sockets in an expression of "permanent incredulity," Dalia would remember, "a fixed stare of terror and horror." For hours at night, over the wall from the inside of another Arab house, Dalia could hear this same man scream at his son, ceaselessly, and she wanted to scream back, "Stop it! Stop it! What do you want from him?" Sometimes she actually put her voice to these protests, but she was always drowned out in the din. At school, the silence of this young Polish friend was punctuated occasionally by sudden outbursts of screaming, crying, and kicking. None of the teachers seemed to know what to do with him.