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

by Sandy Tolan

  The next day, they were driven in an ambulance operated by Salah Salah, the PFLP leader in Lebanon, to the village of Ksara near the "security zone" border. The Israelis controlled most of the zone, aided by a force they had financed and organized, the South Lebanon Army, but the area was far from pacified. Hostile villages chafing under the Israeli occupation had spawned the Army of God, or Hezbollah. Their objective was to expel the Israelis from southern Lebanon, to which end they began firing Soviet-made Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.

  Israel had occupied southern Lebanon for six years, since its 1982 invasion and attack on Beirut. After Black September in 1970, Arafat's PLO, Habash's PFLP, and other rebel factions had left Jordan and set up operations in Lebanon. From their virtual state within a state, they launched attacks against Israel, just as they had in Hussein's kingdom. Israel funneled tens of millions of dollars to Lebanese Christian militias who were alarmed at the militant Palestinian presence and the rapid growth in Lebanon's Muslim population. The militias fought a proxy war for Israel against the Palestinian factions, but with little success, and in 1982, General Ariel Sharon and his Israeli forces laid siege to Beirut. Tens of thousands of shells rained down on the Lebanese capital as Sharon declared that south Beirut should be "razed to the ground." Sharon's central goal was to drive Arafat and the Palestinian forces out of Lebanon and farther away from Israel. PLO forces put up stiffer resistance than expected, but by late July, Arafat and the PLO leadership began to consider the inevitable: evacuation from Lebanon to a safe haven deeper into exile.

  On August 21, 1982, the first four hundred Palestinian guerrillas left Lebanon for Cyprus, an island off the Lebanese coast that was divided between Greek- and Turkish-controlled territories. Over the next two weeks, fourteen thousand more would follow them into exile. Arafat himself would quit Lebanon on August 30, boarding a Greek merchant ship under the protective shield of the U.S. Sixth Fleet. By September 1, the PLO would be establishing its third home in exile: Tunisia, the North African nation on the Mediterranean coast, where Arafat and his cadres would consider their new options. Left behind in Lebanon were nearly half a million Palestinians living in squalid refugee camps. They had arrived in Lebanon in 1948, fresh with the promise they would be going home "after fifteen days." Thirty-four years later, they still taught their children the names of streets in villages long since destroyed. None had been given Lebanese citizenship, which they assured their hosts they didn't want anyway. Their only wish, they insisted, was to exercise their UN-sanctioned right of return.

  Two weeks after PLO forces left, hundreds of Palestinian civilians were slaughtered in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut. The killings began one day after the murder of Lebanese Christian president Bashir Gemayel, whom the Israelis had hoped to help install as a friendly head of state.

  The executioners were Phalangist Christian militias who had entered the camps after Gemayel's death at the encouragement of Ariel Sharon and other Israeli military officers. Their mission, ostensibly, was to root out two thousand militants said to still be in hiding after the departure of the PLO. As Israeli generals and foot soldiers stood by just outside the camps, and the Israeli forces launched night flares to illuminate the militias' search, the Phalangist gunmen began a forty-eight-hour killing spree. Every living creature in the two camps—men, women, babies, even donkeys and dogs—was slaughtered by the Phalangists. It was described in this account by Loren Jenkins in the Washington Post:

  The scene at the Shatilla camp when foreign observers entered Saturday morning was like a nightmare. Women wailed over the deaths of loved ones, bodies began to swell under the hot sun, and the streets were littered with thousands of spent cartridges. Houses had been dynamited and bulldozed into rubble, many with the inhabitants still inside. Groups of bodies lay before bullet-pocked walls where they appeared to have been executed. Others were strewn in alleys and streets, apparently shot as they tried to escape. Each little dirt alley through the deserted buildings, where Palestinians have lived since fleeing Palestine when Israel was created in 1948, told its own horror story.

  Israeli forces provided bulldozers for the digging of mass graves by Lebanese forces. By Israel's later estimates, at least 700 Palestinians had been slaughtered; one independent international commission put the death toll at 2,750.

  The Sabra and Shatilla massacres shocked the world and provoked outrage in Israel, where an estimated four hundred thousand protesters, including Dalia and Yehezkel, filled the streets of Tel Aviv to demand a formal inquiry. It was among the biggest demonstrations in Israel's history. Dalia would recall a day of discussion on the ethics of the Jewish tradition and her feeling of solidarity with the speakers who admonished, "One does not stand by when such a thing is happening to other people. It's an un-Jewish attitude."

  Five months later, the Israeli Kahan Commission declared that Israel, and Sharon, bore indirect responsibility for the massacres. The commission blamed the defense minister "for having disregarded the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps" and recommended that he be dismissed from his post by the Israeli cabinet. Sharon soon began his temporary journey into Israel's political wilderness.

  Bashir, Jabril Rajoub, and the two other deportees had arrived in Lebanon without papers. It was January 14, 1988. Like the Palestinians in refugee camps across Lebanon, they were stateless, unwanted by the Lebanese authorities, and determined to return home. Unlike the refugees, their deportations had drawn international attention, which they intended to exploit to the full advantage of the Palestinian cause and the intifada in particular.

  Jabril had an idea: What if the four activists found a place to set up tents as close as possible to the southernmost edge of Lebanon? This would be difficult, the four men were told by Salah Salah, their PFLP escort. Movement was highly restricted, and all the men risked arrest by Syria, which was in de facto control of the Lebanese Beka'a Valley. The men would have to move as secretly as possible.

  Bashir, Jabril, and their fellow deportees hid in the back of an ambulance driven by Salah Salah. The ambulance snaked through back roads in the Beka'a Valley, toward the village of Ksara, where there was an office of the International Red Cross. The Red Cross would not be pleased to see them, the men were sure, but neither would they be in a position to expel them.

  They emerged from the ambulance into a field in front of the Red Cross building. Someone commandeered a tent. Next to it they pitched a Palestinian flag. Within hours, local supporters arrived with more tents, and soon the four celebrated deportees would be at the center of an ever widening group of activists, dignitaries, and the international press. "I can't remember a night where there weren't at least one hundred people," Bashir would say.

  PLO and PFLP leaders came to see them. The foreign minister of Algeria paid a visit. Lebanese and Syrian officials discussed their status, and the ambassador to South Yemen promised to talk to the Lebanese prime minister and get the four men passports to facilitate their movement.

  The occupation was the driving issue for many supporters of the Palestinian cause, whose ranks were growing, even within Israel. For these supporters, the solution was Israel's withdrawal behind the Green Line to its pre-1967 borders and the creation of a Palestinian state on the other side of the line. Some Palestinians were also beginning to believe that this compromise, embodied in UN Resolution 242, was the best way to end the conflict. For Bashir and hundreds of thousands of refugees, however, "two-four-two" did not go nearly far enough. They still believed in the earlier UN resolution, number 194, which endorsed their right to go back to their homes in what was now Israel.

  "The only solution is return," Bashir told reporters, standing between the tents in the Red Cross field. "We want to go back to our homeland." The reporters wanted to know how—given the strength of Israel, the repeated defeats of the Arabs over the decades, and even the growing discomfort of Arab governments in allowing the deportees to s
peak out from southern Lebanon—this return could ever happen.

  "Since there is an Arab decision against having us here," Bashir replied, "we demand from the Arabs to give us an aircraft so that we can fly ourselves back into Palestine. And it will be a suicide operation." Bashir knew full well his demand would never be granted; he was also aware that his comments would be written down by the reporters and might well circulate around the world..

  Salah Salah watched Bashir with admiration. Here was a man, Salah thought, who knew how to get the attention of the press but always seemed to stay focused on the larger political question. "He was analyzing this as an Israeli policy, not as a personal thing," Salah said. "He was putting himself out of this. He didn't express his personal pain." Bashir's style was quiet but forceful. He spoke in emphatic, low tones, rarely smiling. His left hand was characteristically thrust in his pocket, and his right hand, palm down, cut the air like a blade. He was known as passionate and occasionally argumentative in private meetings among the Palestinian political factions, but in public he measured his words, calculating their delivery for maximum effect.

  Bashir also knew that the political situation in Lebanon at the time was extremely tense between the elected national leaders and the Syrians, who continued to exercise de facto control on the ground beyond the Israeli security zone. "Every word was measured," Salah remembered. "He was very delicate. Not like Rajoub."

  Jabril Rajoub was the volatile leader of the youth movement of Fatah, the guerrilla group founded by Arafat and Abu Jihad in 1965 and later incorporated as the central organ of the PLO. The young activist had less patience than Bashir with the sensitivities of Syrian-Lebanese politics. One afternoon in early 1988, Saiah recalled, after several weeks in the small tent city outside the Red Cross offices, Jabril denounced the Syrians in an angry speech about treatment of Palestinian refugees in the camps.

  Salah knew this meant the end of his comrades' time in Lebanon. He arranged to smuggle the four deportees out of south Lebanon to Beirut, and from there got them on a flight to Cyprus. For his trouble, Salah would be picked up by Syrian intelligence and taken to solitary confinement, where over the next eighteen months he would become well acquainted with the harsh justice of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. "Salah paid for my speech," Jabril Rajoub would acknowledge nearly seventeen years later.

  In February, several weeks after his deportation from the West Bank to Lebanon and days following his escape to Greek Cyprus, Bashir boarded a plane to Athens. The PLO had come up with a new plan for drawing attention to their plight: Al-Awda {Ship of Return), which was to sail out of the Greek Cypriot harbor of Limassol and steam toward Haifa. For some the journey would represent the aspirations of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza; for others, like Bashir, it would symbolically proclaim the Palestinians' right of return. Some of the passengers would compare the ship to the Exodus, the ship of Holocaust survivors that encountered a British blockade when sailing toward Haifa in 1947. On board alongside Bashir would be 130 other deportees and their supporters, including American Jews and Israelis with whom Palestinians had established contact. One of the Israelis had sailed on the original Exodus.

  In Greece, journalists had joined the several hundred supporters of the Palestinian refugees and deportees. There Bashir met reporters who asked him what he thought about Dalia's "Letter to a Deportee," published a month earlier in the Jerusalem Post. A reporter gave Bashir a copy. This was the first time he had seen it. He would read it many times in the coming weeks.

  Bashir, Jabril, and the two other recent deportees would be remembered as if they were rock stars, showered with praise and affection as the celebrated quartet at the center of the journey. Some Israelis were outraged by the display. One official told reporters that the deportees were "criminals" trying to "return to the place of their crime."

  The plan was for the deportees, dignitaries, and activists to stay a night in Athens before traveling to Cyprus to board the ship. Soon, however, word came that the Israelis had pressured the Greek ship owner to break his contract with the PLO. The trip was delayed. Israel was adamant that the ship not sail.

  The anxious delegation in Athens heard that the PLO went to another ship line, and a third and a fourth, but that the same thing happened each time: Israeli commercial pressure on each ship's owner would lead to a cancellation. In Athens, the delegation would prepare to leave and then unpack again in an increasingly surreal waiting game. Hilda Silverman, from the small American delegation that was put up in a five-star hotel by the PLO, recalls this period as "the most bizarre experience in my life. It was like being on another planet. Here we were living in incredible luxury—it's the only time I have ever stayed in a five-star hotel! We were taking walks to the Parthenon during the day, all the time attempting to move this political project forward."

  Finally the PLO decided to buy an old ferry called the Sol Phryne and rename it the Al-Awda. On February 17, on the eve of the journey, Bashir and the others checked out of the hotel and left for the Athens airport en route to Greek Cyprus. They had barely left the hotel when they heard the news: An explosion aboard the ship had ripped a hole belowdecks. Frogmen, they would later learn, had attached explosive charges to the hull. Just hours before the Al-Awda was to sail, it was sunk. "Unidentified persons" were responsible. Suspicion fell immediately on the Mossad, Israel's spy agency.

  Bashir left Cyprus for the exile of Tunis. It was the late spring of 1988. He found a small apartment in the Tunisian capital and spent his days reading, writing, attending political meetings, and thinking about the next move for the resistance. By now it was clear that Bashir's deportation, and that of dozens of others Israel had suspected of organizing the intifada, had done nothing to quell the uprising in the occupied territories.

  Not even the assassination of Abu Jihad by an Israeli hit squad that burst into his Tunis apartment after midnight on April 16 could slow the intifada's momentum. The operation to eliminate one of the most beloved Palestinians was overseen by IDF deputy chief of staff Ehud Barak, among others. They considered the co-founder of Fatah a dangerous terrorist and saw him as a puppet master of the intifada from afar. They believed his death would help bring an end to the "riots" in the territories. If anything, however, the slaying of Abu Jihad had the opposite effect. The intifada grew stronger.

  On May 8, 1988, Nuha and Ghiath Khairi paid a visit to Dalia's hospital room in Jerusalem. They had heard from Bashir, who had heard from journalists in Tunis, that Dalia's fragile pregnancy had kept her confined to her hospital bed for the last seven months. Ghiath had called Yehezkel, and they arranged to meet in the Old City and drive back to the hospital.

  As they walked into the room, Dalia's eyes were drawn to Nuha, elegant and dignified in her pleated skirt, long-sleeved blouse, and high heels, her reddish-brown hair perfectly done. Nuha's large brown eyes looked directly into Dalia's, and she stood closest to Dalia as they all gathered around the bed. For the last four months, ever since her letter had been published in the Jerusalem Post, Dalia had received a stream of visitors, including many reporters and television producers. "Sometimes it got to be too much for me," Dalia remembered, but when Nuha and Ghiath arrived, "I felt an affinity."

  "We have been wanting to visit for a long time," said Ghiath. They asked about Dalia's health and the baby, and Dalia told them it was scheduled to arrive by cesarean section in two days.

  Dalia asked Nuha about the news from Bashir. Nuha said Bashir was now in Amman, but she found it difficult to say anything more, because she didn't want to cry. Ghiath told Dalia that Bashir had written her a response to her open letter and that a journalist, serving as a messenger, would deliver it to Jerusalem soon.

  "How is Ahmad?" Dalia asked, referring to Bashir and Scheherazade's boy, who was now three. Hanine, their daughter, was still a baby.

  "He is asking for his father," Nuha said.

  "What do you tell him?"

  "That the Jews have deported him."

>   Dalia would recall imagining what was going through the boy's mind: Young Ahmad lives with a great enemy, the Jews. The evil that has the power to take his father away from him. She looked at Nuha, at forty-six still one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen, and thought she recognized, behind her eyes, "an unforgiving loyalty to the history and suffering of her people."

  Ghiath spoke up. "In 1967, I went to my father's house. I remember when my father built it. Tell me," he said, looking at Yehezkel, "why, why did your people come to our country?"

  Yehezkel started to say something, but Ghiath continued: "Why should it be at my expense?"

  "We too felt in exile for all these years," Yehezkel replied. "Don't you feel in exile?"

  "Yes, I do," said Ghiath. "I would rather sleep under a lamppost in al-Ramla than in a palace in Ramallah."

  "Your children were not born in Ramla. Don't they feel the same?"

  "Yes, they do feel they same."

  "And their children, will they not feel the same?"

  "Yes, indeed they will."

  "So have we," said Yehezkel. "Our forefathers and the fathers of our forefathers."

  Dalia, flat on her back in her hospital bed, followed the debate with her eyes. She was struck that Ghiath could not understand her people's longing for the ancient homeland.

  "But they were not born here," Ghiath protested. "For example, my Jewish friend, Avraham, he and his father and his forefathers were born here. Their family is from Jaffa. He is a true Palestinian."

  So that means, Dalia thought, that I'm not?

  "It's a different kind of self-understanding," countered Yehezkel, the religious scholar. "What are you going to do about that? Why do you think Israelis are afraid of you? We are not as afraid of the entire Syrian army with all its weaponry as we are of you. Why do you think that is?"