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

by Sandy Tolan

  Ghiath looked at Yehezkel in amazement. Nuha and Dalia remained silent as Yehezkel continued: "Because you are the only ones who have a legitimate grievance against us. And deep down, even those who deny it know it. That makes us very uncomfortable and uneasy in dealing with you. Because our homes are your homes, you become a real threat."

  "Why can't we all live in the same state, together in peace?" said Ghiath. "Why do we need two states?"

  "Then you think you would be able to go back to your father's house?" Yehezkel asked.

  Dalia shifted in her bed. "And what would happen to the people already living in those houses?" she asked.

  "They will build new homes for them," Ghiath replied.

  "You mean," Dalia said, "they will be evacuated for you to return to your original homes? I hope you can understand why Israelis are afraid of you. Israel will do everything to prevent the implementation of these dreams. Even under a peace plan you will not return to your original homes."

  "What do we want? Only our rights and to live in peace."

  "Justice for you is receiving back what you lost in 1948. But that justice will be at the expense of other people."

  Ghiath looked at Dalia. "Bashir told me that you said to him in 1967 or 1968, 'The expulsion was a mistake. But another mistake will not correct this one.'"

  "I really said that so many years ago?"

  "Why do you need a state of your own? And if you do need one, why could you not have gone to Uganda, or to another place, many years ago? How many Arabs are there now in the USA? Do they demand a state of their own in the USA?"

  Dalia said, "I'm not going to explain to you what the yearning for Zion means to us. I will just say that because you see us as strangers in this land, that is why we are afraid of you. You should not think that I myself am free of fear. I have a good reason to be afraid: The Palestinian people as a collective have not accepted the Jewish home in this land. Most of you still consider us a cancerous presence among you. I struggle for your rights despite my fears. But your rights have to be balanced against our needs for survival. That is why you cannot be satisfied. For you, every viable solution will always be lacking in justice. In a peace plan, everybody will have to do with less than they deserve."

  No one spoke for a few moments. It was getting late, and Nuha and Ghiath had to get back to Ramallah.

  Ghiath looked across Dalia's hospital bed and said to Yehezkel, "May you have a son!"

  Nuha looked at Dalia and said, "They only dream of sons. Everyone."

  Ghiath, undeterred, continued, "And may he think like you, Yehezkel."

  "I am a Jew and a Zionist, and if he thinks like me, he will be a Jew and a Zionist!"

  By now everyone was laughing, and Ghiath said, to more laughter, "I will give him Islamic books to read, and you never know what your son will think!"

  They prepared to leave. Yehezkel would drive Ghiath and Nuha back to Nablus Gate at the Old City, to catch a taxi back to Ramallah.

  Nuha leaned close to Dalia and took her hand. "May you bear a healthy child," she said. "Ehsh'Allah. "God willing.

  Two days later, on May 10, 1988, Raphael Ya'acov Avichai Landau was born by C-section in Misgav Ladach (Upholder of the Poor) hospital in Jerusalem. "It was considered a feat by the whole hospital crew," Raphael's mother, Dalia, remembered nearly seventeen years later. It seemed all the doctors and nurses wanted to share with Dalia and Yehezkel in the celebration of their son. His very name—Raphael—meant "God's healing." Dalia had spent months in her hospital bed. She was hooked to intravenous drips and beeping machines that would constantly monitor her condition. Now, she held a healthy baby boy in her arms.

  Outside her hospital room—to the north in Ramallah and Jenin, to the south in Bethlehem and Hebron, to the east in Jericho, to the west in Gaza—the intifada showed no signs of letting up. Perhaps, Dalia hoped, there could be an answer in compromise, like the UN resolution that would honor the Palestinian rights to self-determination while acknowledging Israel's own right to exist in peace with her neighbors. She knew this would not give Bashir everything he longed for or demanded. Yet, after all this time, she thought, must not each of us be willing to compromise?

  By late 1988, as Bashir continued his exile in Tunis, signs of a widening political gap in the Palestinian movement were becoming more apparent. Arafat, it seemed, was considering a monumental political compromise. Although the PLO chairman had not publicly announced his support of negotiations with Israel and the two-state solution, there were enough hints to worry people like Bashir who remained focused on the right of return.

  Arafat believed that the intifada had opened the door to a Palestinian state and that moving through the door would carry a price. At his side in Tunis was Bassam Abu-Sharif, the former hard-line PFLP activist. As early as 1979, when Egypt signed its peace deal with Israel, Bassam had begun to grow disillusioned with George Habash and what he saw as the Popular Front's uncompromising position on Israel. "Why pretend we could defeat Israel by force of arms?" he would recall. "If that wasn't possible, why not face reality and deal?"

  In late 1988, the former PFLP spokesman, who still carried deep scars from the letter bomb that had blown up in his face sixteen years earlier, was working alongside Arafat to tap the "incredible opportunity" provided by the intifada. Both men knew they were taking a huge risk. Arafat had long been a fighter for the return of the refugees through the liberation of all of historic Palestine, and he knew that recognizing Israel would create ruptures with other Palestinian factions, which would decry this step as a sellout. Yet with signs that the cold war was winding down, Bassam sought out Habash, his former boss and leader of the PFLP.

  "Dr. George," Bassam told Habash on the eve of a U.S.-Soviet summit in June 1988, "Reagan and Gorbachev are going to meet in Moscow. They have to discuss hot spots—Central America, the Middle East. The Palestinians must be there with their political plan." No longer would it be realistic, Bassam argued, for the Palestinians to demand a return to all the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. "Look, from river to sea is not accepted," Bassam told Habash. "The world community cannot swallow this. It would mean the elimination of Israel. That is a line that people cannot go over." The next month, July 1988, King Hussein cut all judicial and administrative ties with the West Bank, "in deference to the PLO," further paving the way for a future independent state on the land his grandfather, Abdullah, had annexed nearly four decades earlier.

  The need for compromise with Israel became even more clear to Bassam on December 7, when Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would sharply reduce its military presence in Eastern Europe. Now the Soviet satellites would be allowed to choose their own destiny. Bassam knew that the Palestinian political factions, long supported by the Soviet Union, would soon be cut loose as well. The time to act was now, Bassam believed, and it had to be on the basis of "a two-state solution" as envisioned by many supporters of UN Resolution 242.

  In mid-December 1988, Arafat flew to Geneva, where the UN General Assembly had called a special meeting after the PLO chairman had been barred from entering the United States. On December 14, a year after the start of the intifada, Arafat announced for the first time his unconditional support for 242, which included recognition of Israel's right "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." Arafat also renounced "all forms of terrorism, including individual, group, and state terrorism." This was sufficient for U.S. secretary of state George Shultz, who announced that the United States would open a dialogue with the PLO. The United States, however, continued to oppose a Palestinian state. Nevertheless the U.S. recognition would lead to the so-called Madrid talks, which in turn would lead to Oslo. The road to compromise was open.

  Bashir was not happy. If the Palestinians accepted 242, he knew, they would have to accept Israel's right to exist. And if they accepted Israel and the "solution" of two states, what would happen to Bashir's right of return to al-Ramla, in the
state now known as Israel? What would happen to the dream of hundreds of thousands of others from Haifa and Jaffa and Lydda and West Jerusalem; from the Galilee and the Negev desert—people who were refugees across the Arab world and beyond? The dream of return had been part of Bashir's very identity—part of the Palestinian identity—for four full decades. Bashir insisted on the rights conveyed him by UN Resolution 194. For nearly his whole life, he had watched Israel deny his right to come home while it accommodated waves of Jews from the Middle East, Ethiopia, Argentina, and the Soviet Union. Bashir felt that he had not spent more than half his adult life in prison, enduring humiliation, torture, statelessness, and now deportation, for a compromise like the one Arafat seemed to be considering.

  One of Bashir's colleagues would tell of a heated discussion around this time between Bashir and Arafat, but Bashir would not speak of it, or of his disagreements with other Palestinian leaders, or of strategy for the movement. This was even true for his family; they knew little of the specifics of his political work. "It is all a big secret to us," Khanom said. Behind closed doors within the Palestinian movement, however, Bashir had a reputation for speaking his mind. "He dared to say he was against a policy of negotiating under the conditions of the United States," a former comrade would remember. "He showed unity in public. But when it was just Palestinians together, he was very strong in defending his vision. He didn't sugarcoat anything."

  Bashir was not alone. Even members of Arafat's own organization turned against him. In August 1989, Fatah, the mainstream PLO faction co-founded by Arafat, endorsed renewed armed struggle against Israel.

  In the fall of 1989, Salah Salah, Bashir's PFLP comrade from the Lebanon tent camp, arrived in Tunis after eighteen months of solitary confinement in a Syrian prison. Bashir knew well what prison could do to a man, but still, he was shocked when he saw his emaciated friend. "Suffice it to say," Salah would recall, "that I went into prison at seventy-five kilos [165 pounds], and I came out at fifty-four [119 pounds]."

  Bashir and Salah became neighbors in Tunis, each in his own small apartment. Often they would prepare meals together; Bashir would encourage his friend to eat as much as he could. They played chess and backgammon, smoked their water pipes, and strategized about the future of Palestine and their struggling liberation movement.

  Some afternoons Bashir and Salah would sit quietly in the sun, planning and reminiscing in their garden chairs. From time to time, Bashir would tell Salah about Dalia and the house in al-Ramla. "He would show me documents in a file he carried with him," Salah recalled. "The file had clippings and personal letters," including the letter from Dalia.

  Bashir had read the clipping from the Jerusalem Post many times. He was moved by Dalia's public acknowledgment of the expulsions from al-Ramla and Lydda (Lod); of her declaration that "the feeling has been growing in me that that home was not just my home" and that "the lemon tree which yielded so much fruit and gave us so much delight lived in other people's hearts too." Yet Bashir was also struck by Dalia's references to his "past terrorist actions" and her admonishment that he transform his politics and embrace nonviolence. How ironic, he thought, that he had first read her letter only hours before "unknown persons" had blown up the Al-Awda, which was to make a peaceful journey to Palestine.

  For months, Bashir had been thinking of the best way to respond to Dalia. He had something important to tell her, something that in the twenty-one years he had known her, he had never revealed.

  Dalia doesn't remember exactly where she was when she received Bashir's letter or even who brought it to her. Perhaps it was delivered by a journalist coming to Jerusalem from Tunis; perhaps it was carried to her by a friend of Bashir's or an Israeli peace activist.

  The letter had been translated from the Arabic; it was typed on single-spaced pages and stuffed into a thick envelope. Seventeen years later, Dalia still has the letter, along with the original in Arabic, in Bashir's hand. "Dear Dalia," the letter began.

  It's true that we got acquainted as you mentioned in your letter in exceptional and unexpected circumstances. . . And it's true that after we got acquainted, each one of us has become part of the life of the other. I don't deny that what I've sensed in you, Dalia, of morality, sensitivity and sensibility, left a deep impact in me that I cannot ignore. There was even a sixth sense that was telling me that in this human being that I got acquainted with lives an alert living conscience that will one day express itself.

  Your letter that came in the period of my exile from my land, from the land of my country, Palestine, after our dialogue, conversations and acquaintance had become the talk of the press in the media, and even the talk of all the people whose consciousness was moved to recognize the truth of what's really happening and to reassess what happened.

  Allow me first to express my affection and respect as well as appreciation of your courage to write to me, and your courage to present the ideas contained in your letter. Please allow me to present my respect to your husband Yehezkel Landau, who I have a lot of appreciation for . . .

  Bashir's letter, Dalia saw, reflected the many hours of conversation the two had had before Bashir went to prison in 1969: tremendous personal warmth that somehow bridged a chasm of anguish and mistrust. He told her that he had spoken of her to "my comrades" many times while "living in the graves of the living dead while I was spending my sentence—fifteen years of the prime of my youth" in prison—a sentence, he insisted, that was "for no reason except for my being a freedom fighter who had fallen in love with his homeland and was committed to his cause."

  Now Dalia read as Bashir countered her suggestion that any of his actions had "planted hatred," as she had suggested in her open letter. Rather, he wrote, "the Zionist leadership has planted hatred in the souls of one generation after another."

  He who plants barley, Dalia, will never reap wheat. And he who plants hatred can never reap love. That leadership has planted hatred in our hearts, not affection. It has destroyed all human values the day it destroyed our childhood, our existence, and our right to live on the soil of our homeland. Your change, Dalia, and your new perspective was attained through research and investigation. And your ability to see things the way they are in reality, not the way they were told to you.

  We were exiled by force of arms. We were exiled on foot. We were exiled to take the earth as our bed. And the sky as a cover. And to be fed from the crumbs of those among the governments and international organizations who imparted their charity. We were exiled but we left our souls, our hopes and our childhood in Palestine. We left our joys and sorrows. We left them in every corner, and on every grain of sand in Palestine. We left them with each lemon fruit, with each olive. We left them in the roses and flowers. We left them in the flowering tree that stands with pride at the entrance of our house in al-Ramla. We left them in the remains of our fathers and ancestors. We left them as witnesses and history. We left them, hoping to return.

  Dalia read on as Bashir challenged her description of his actions as terrorist: "You cannot equate the struggle of the people for liberation and independence and self-determination," he wrote. "You cannot equate that with aggression, expansionism and oppression of the other." As for his trying a nonviolent approach, as Dalia had urged in her open letter, Bashir wrote:

  Dalia, I have tried to go back to Palestine on board the Ship of Return {Al-Awda), following Gandhi's road. I did not carry a missile or a bomb . . . I was carrying my history and my love for my homeland. But what was the result, Dalia? The ship was sunk before it sailed. It was sunk while it was docked in a Cypriot port. They sunk it so that we would not return . . . Why aren't we given our right to return? Why are we prevented from determining our future and establishing our state? Why am I exiled from my homeland? Why am I separated from my children, Ahmad and Hanine, from my wife, from my mother, from my brothers and sisters, from my family?

  "I want you to hear something new, Dalia," Bashir continued.

  Do you know, Dalia, that in 1948, with child
hood innocence, I played with one of the booby-trapped toys that were scattered by the Zionists—Stern, the Haganah and Irgun? The gifts of the terrorist Zionist organizations to the children of Palestine . . .

  The family was in Gaza, Bashir explained, late in 1948, shortly after arriving from Ramallah. Bashir, Nuha, and other brothers and sisters had been playing in the dirt yard outside their cement-block house. They saw something gleaming in the sun. It was bulbous, with a wick protruding. It looked like a lantern. The children brought it inside. Bashir held the new toy as the other children gathered around. A clay water jug stood on the kitchen counter; one of the children bumped into it, and it crashed to the floor. The other children scattered. Bashir was left alone with the toy in his hands. Suddenly there was an explosion.

  The booby-trapped toy exploded in my left hand to crush my palm, to scatter my bones and flesh. And shed my blood, to blend it with the soil of Palestine, to embrace the lemon fruits and the olive leaves, to cling to the dates and the flowers or the fitna tree.

  In the explosion in Gaza, six-year-old Bashir lost four fingers and the palm of his left hand.

  Who is more entitled to a reunion, Dalia? Sharansky, the Russian who doesn't have a cultural linguistic historic attachment to Palestine? Or the Palestinian Bashir, who is attached to Palestine with the language, culture, history, family and the remains of my palm that I left in Palestine? Does not the world owe me the right to reunite myself, to reunite my palm with my body? Why do I live without my identity and without my homeland while my palm remains in Palestine?

  Dalia stared at the page in amazement. She was astounded. How could she have known Bashir for twenty-one years and not know he was missing his left hand? Slowly it came to her: His hand was always in his pocket. It was always hidden—hidden so well, she never knew she never saw it. Now Dalia realized: She had only ever seen the left thumb, hitched over the top of the pocket. It looked so natural.