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

by Sandy Tolan

  Dalia found this trauma a direct challenge to her faith. Though Moshe and Solia had never been religious—they rarely went to the synagogue and were the essence of "secular Zionists"—Dalia's own belief in God had, she felt, always been a part of her. Few people in Ramla seemed to want to talk about what had happened in Europe during the war, but Dalia had seen the people with numbers on their arms. As she grew older, she learned about the atrocities in Germany, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. She found this truth indigestible. For God to allow this to happen, she would recall thinking, is utterly unconscionable. She was furious. "You have created human beings!" she would shout to her Creator. "You have to take responsibility for Your creation! You have to be more active in preventing such things!"

  Dalia began to understand these horrors as her people's historical legacy. In school she learned of other atrocities. Burned into her mind was a pogrom in the Ukraine, where Jews were slaughtered by sword-wielding Christians after Good Friday mass. She was taught of the silence of European Christians during the Holocaust, especially that of Pope Pius XII, who did not show the courage of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

  By the time she went to piano lessons at St. Joseph's Catholic monastery in Ramla, Dalia felt a deep ambivalence about Christianity. It was perhaps 1956; Dalia was soon to turn nine. The heavy cross on the monastery gates reminded her of a sword and invoked an instantaneous fear. Entering the monastery, however, she was drawn in by the silence; by the painted statue of St. Joseph on a pedestal; by the dimly lit corridors with their black and white tiles; and by the portrait of another pope, John XXIII, whose face contained something humane. She began to understand something fundamental. Decades later, she would remember this moment as the beginning of a life of discernment: of being able to see the whole and not judge someone or something based simply on a single observation or teaching.

  Growing up, Dalia would frequently ask her parents and teachers: "What are these houses we are living in?"

  "These are Arab houses," she was told.

  "What are these Arab houses that everyone talks about?" she would reply.

  Dalia's school was in an Arab house, and there she would learn Israel's history. She learned about the creation of the state of Israel as a safe haven for the Jews. She studied the War of Independence as the story of the few against the many. The Arabs had invaded, Dalia would read, in order to destroy the new state and throw the Jews into the sea. Most nations confronted with such hostilities would have been paralyzed, but tiny Israel had withstood five Arab armies. Little David had defeated Goliath. As for the Arabs, Dalia's textbooks would report that they ran away, deserting their lands and abandoning their homes, fleeing before the conquering Israeli army. The Arabs, one textbook of the day declared, "preferred to leave" once the Jews had taken their towns. Dalia accepted the history she was taught. Still, she was confused. Why, she wondered, would anyone leave so willingly?

  One afternoon when she was about seven or eight years old, Dalia climbed up the black metal gate that Ahmad Khairi had placed at the end of the stone path in the front yard. Atop the gate perched a delicate piece of wrought iron in the shape of a star and crescent: the symbol of Islam. It bothered Dalia. "This is not an Arab house," she said to herself, and she grasped the delicate crescent and began wrenching it back and forth, back and forth, until it came loose in her hands. She clambered down and threw the crescent away.

  In the spring of 1956, when Dalia was in the third grade, she began to make a connection between the Arabs she had learned about in school and those her parents talked about at home. Israeli newspapers were full of stories about raids of infiltrators from Gaza backed by the new Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Moshe read in his evening paper, Ma yariv, about the incursions onto Israeli soil by Egyptian and Palestinian fedayeen guerrillas bent on wiping out the Jewish state, and about the swift Israeli responses.

  As the Suez Canal crisis made the news, Moshe and Solia understood there would be cause for their nation to go to war. Nasser was defending Egypt's exclusive rights to control the Suez Canal, long overseen by the British, and threatening to close the Straits of Tiran, Israel's only sea link to central and southern Africa. The Egyptian president had also begun to speak of the "Arab Nation" and in defense of the Palestinian "right of return." None of this boded well for Israel.

  In late October 1956, war came suddenly when Israeli paratroopers and infantry battalions crossed their southwestern border and attacked Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula, then moved across the Sinai and toward the Suez Canal. British and French forces joined the fight on the Israeli side. The European powers wrere alarmed at the growing threat posed by this third world Arab nationalist leader, and, like the Israelis, they wanted him stopped. The United States and the Soviet Union, however, had not been consulted. The superpowers had their own separate interests in the region and, in rare agreement, demanded that Britain, France, and Israel withdraw. Israel could still claim a military victory, because it had broken the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, but after the British and French withdrew, Nasser was in control of his prize, the Suez Canal. Because of U.S. and Soviet intervention, Nasser had in effect repelled the European attackers and established Egyptian sovereignty over the canal. The popularity of the Egyptian president surged across the Arab world. He began talking about the importance of Palestine to all Arabs.

  One day in the spring of 1957, Dalia was playing with her girlfriends after school. They were at a concrete shelter in Ramla, the same claustrophobic bunker where Dalia and her schoolmates had practiced air raid drills during the recent Suez crisis. Most of Dalia's friends had been lighter-skinned girls from Europe. But recently a new wave of olive- and brown-skinned Jewish children had come to Israel from the Arab countries, including many from Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen. No longer welcome to live in the Arab world, the newspapers reported, these "Oriental Jews" (also known as Sephardim, or mizrahi) were immigrating to Israel, which would grant them the safe haven it offered to every Jew. Among many of Dalia's classmates, however, there was a sense that the dark-skinned schoolmates were "bringing the class down." They were considered dirty and carriers of lice. Dalia had caught lice herself, much to the shame of her entire family: Aunt Stella had washed her hair with gasoline, scrubbing her scalp to a bright red. Dalia stank of petrol for days and walked around in shame.

  Still, Dalia was stunned, she would recall later, when her Polish friend stood atop the concrete shelter and, hands on hips, declared her intent to expel the darker, Oriental Jews from their play group. There would now be two competing groups among the girls: a "black group"—the cherniti, the schwarzes—and a "white group." The other European girls murmured their assent. The "white group" would be made up of only the lighter-skinned Ashkenazi, plus Dalia and the other Bulgarians. (It was confusing even to Dalia: Her skin was light, lighter than her father's, and her name was Eshkenazi, but in fact, like most Bulgarians she was Sephardic, with roots in Spain.)

  The Polish girl picked up a stone and threw it at a dark-skinned classmate. Other lighter-skinned girls followed. Dalia stepped forward. "Where did you say you came from?" she asked the Ashkenazi girls. "And remind me, what happened to the Jews there?" She paused. "Of all people who should know better," she said. "Of all people who should know how not to treat someone badly just because they are different. If you are going to have a black group and a white group," Dalia announced, "then I am going with the black group." The issue never rose again among her classmates.

  Tens of thousands of Jews had come to Israel from the Arab countries since 1950. In 1958, Avraham Shmil, the director of Ramla's office of the Israeli national labor federation, organized a mass demonstration against the Labor Department of his own ruling party. Many of the mizrahi, or Oriental Jews, of Ramla still lived in crude tent camps and shacks on the outskirts of town and were desperate for work and better living conditions. With his protest, Shmil hoped to pressure the Israeli labor secretary into bringing decent-paying factory jobs to the st
ruggling town. When the mizrahi arrived, Shmil would recall, most of the "good jobs" had already been taken by the Ashkenazi elite from Eastern Europe, who clearly already had insider status in the new state. Sometimes the new, darker-skinned immigrants would fume as they stood waiting in line at the employment office while two Europeans spoke endlessly in Yiddish; they didn't understand that in some cases these Ashkenazi were only trying to ascertain if certain relatives or friends were still alive.

  The Jews from Arab lands, on the other hand, were discouraged from speaking Arabic or from listening to their beloved classical Arabic music, especially with the rise of Nasser. Their Hebrew often was bad, and the only work many of them could find was twelve days per month sweeping streets, maintaining roads, and "building" forests for the Jewish National Fund.

  The forests, part of what the JNF called "total redemption of the land of Israel for the entire Jewish people," were part of a legacy of "BOULDER-STREWN mountains, stagnant swamps, hard, arid soil, and sterile sand dunes [that] must be redeemed from the neglect of twenty centuries." The forests in many cases were planted on land that had only recently held Arab villages. From 1948 until the mid-1960s, hundreds of villages were demolished—by bulldozers, by army units training demolition crews, and by aerial bombing—to be replaced by new cities, expanded kibbutzim, or JNF forests. The work of the mizrahi and other immigrants for the JNF thus served several purposes: It eliminated the former residences of villagers who might attempt to "infiltrate" across the armistice lines; it cemented Israel's position against the UN resolution that authorized the return of Palestinian refugees; and it ensured low-paying work for thousands of poor Jewish immigrants from the Arab countries and elsewhere.

  Yet the problem for the mizrahi was not just work. Like many of the early immigrants, they needed to feel they belonged in the Jewish state. In Ramla, Avraham Shmil worked to help the immigrants forge an Israeli identity out of their patchwork of nationalities and more than a dozen languages. Shmil organized field trips to the Galilee and the Negev for immigrants to take in the breadth of the new state and to begin to get to know one another. In Ramla he organized classes, plays, and concerts in Hebrew; evenings of folklore from Bulgaria, Morocco, and Yemen; and neighborhood culture and hiking clubs.

  The model held up for all of the immigrants, especially the men, was the Sabra, the native-born Israeli whose optimism, strength, and mythical heroism was something for all to aspire toward. Sabra came from the Hebrew word tzabar: a. cactus fruit, thorn-covered but sweet inside. In 1950s Israel, the Sabra was the New Israeli Man: handsome, tough, physically strong, an ardent Zionist, upbeat, without fear, and unencumbered by the weakness of his ancestors. The Sabra, by definition Ashkenazi, from a generation that had come to Palestine before the Holocaust, had shed the shameful baggage of the old country. He had become, in essence, the Israeli embodiment of Ari Ben Canaan, Leon Uris's hero in Exodus. The Sabra was, in the words of one Israeli writer, "the elect son of the chosen people."

  Social engineers consciously cultivated this image as an alternative to the diaspora Jew. In 1949, a Bulgarian-language paper of the leftist Mapam Party serialized a novel by writer Moshe Shamir in which the "New Jewish Man" is actually a giant, emerging from the sea in a fantastic aliyah to build up the land. The idea, recalled the editor, former Knesset member Victor Shemtov, was to "wash off that old Jew," to erase the image of the "squirming ghetto Jew," and to focus on the "new Jew" who was "standing tall for the first time," plunging his hands into the soil to create a new country.

  For many new Israelis, this potent icon was something to strive for. They wore the Sabra "uniform"—khaki shorts and a khaki or faded blue work shirt and "biblical sandals." Ramla's first Israeli mayor wore the uniform, as did many immigrants. Some even had Sabra-style khaki weddings. For many children, the Sabra ideal inspired them to adopt "Israeli" names.

  For the older generation of immigrants, the Sabra image was often impossible to attain. For Holocaust survivors, it was absurd. For the Sabra, the Holocaust survivors often represented the shame of Jews going like sheep to the slaughter. Thus, Dalia would recall years later, the phrase Never again was not only a promise by Jews not to repeat the past; it indicated a desire, rooted in shame, to distance themselves from the image of the victim.

  One observer of an early transit camp in Israel referred to Holocaust survivors as "difficult human matter" and said "these people have known such hell that nothing more can move them now. Their senses have been blunted." David Ben-Gurion famously called Holocaust survivors "human dust" and said that "turning these people of dust into a cultured, independent nation with a vision will be no easy task." An agricultural worker charged with turning Holocaust survivors into productive farmers advised colleagues: "We must understand who we are working with . . . a community of rejects, of pathetic and helpless people. [Emphasis in original.] We must approach their most basic feelings, which are very volatile and unpredictable and full of fear . . . fear of the ground falling away from under their feet. . . . Fear of work—The mere thought of taking any personal initiative and having to face unfamiliar conditions terrifies him . . . he has an uncontrollable fear for the future of his children. . . ."

  For the immigrants from the Arab countries, the pursuit of the Sabra ideal was equally unrealistic. They often struggled mightily with Hebrew, and their experiences in Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, or Iraq had little to do with the swashbuckling warrior image of the native-born Ashkenazi Sabra. Moreover, many Ashkenazis, including some Israeli leaders who established early immigration policy, considered the mizrahi, in Ben-Gurion's description of North African Jews, "savage" and "primitive"; others referred to them, in actual policy discussions, as "mentally regressed," "hot-tempered," or "chronically lazy."

  In Ramla, as in the rest of Israel, each immigrant group quickly attracted its own labels, which ranged from derogatory to affectionate and sometimes were both. A Moroccan was a sakin, or knife, because of his reputation as violent; Iraqis were pajamas, because of their dress; Germans were yeke, after the jackets they wore in the fields, or putzes, a kind of upscale schmuck; Romanians were thieves; Bulgarians were cheap; and a Pole was dripke: Yiddish for dustcloth.

  Bulgarians, however they were labeled, were widely respected in Israel. They had none of what would come to be known as the "Holocaust complex." As Israel grew up, the Bulgarians would gain a reputation as fair-minded and hardworking, with a passion for European high culture. Solia Eshkenazi embodied this. She appreciated that the entire Bulgarian Jewish choir had come on a boat together and that Bulgarians were playing in the new Israeli philharmonic. She loved to read Tolstoy and Chekhov, Victor Hugo, Thomas Mann, and Jack London. Most of all, she adored Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, her beloved, kindred soul whose work she considered profoundly sensitive and who, during the war, had lost faith in humanity and cut open his veins.

  Culture could be imported, but much of what Solia loved had been left behind in the Bulgarian landscape. As Dalia grew older, she noticed how often her mother would speak of the winds that would tumble through the narrow corridors of Sliven or the hikes she and her friends used to take up Vitosha mountain.

  As a teenager, Dalia began to see her mother as an uprooted tree that couldn't take to new soil. Moshe had brought his skills with him to build a new state. He was a doer who grew exasperated with weak-mindedness and would exclaim, "What's this indecisiveness? I cannot understand! If it doesn't work for you, just cut it off like a pickled cucumber!" After coming to Ramla, Solia aged quickly. Her job in the tax office did not suit her personality and the radiance and mischief she arrived with; she wasn't good at cooking and sewing; and though she and Moshe would travel occasionally with friends to walk along the beach in Tel Aviv, Solia's world had narrowed. Her sisters thought of her as an extraordinary woman who would "take the food from her own mouth if she sees anyone in need," as the Bulgarian saying went. But a light had dimmed, and gradually, as she went to work year after year in the national tax office, S
olia grew quieter.

  In 1963, as Dalia entered high school, city leaders marked fifteen years since the "liberation of Ramla" from Arab hands in 1948. A promotional film showed men in narrow ties paddling rowboats through the town's ancient underground cisterns, as a deep voice intoned, "Near to this ancient monument there are new buildings and factories emerging. The municipality is proud that Ramla was transferred from a pure Arabic city to a place where now live twenty-five thousand citizens most of which are new immigrants."

  Three years later, in 1966, Dalia Eshkenazi graduated from high school and began making plans to enroll at Tel Aviv University to study English literature. She had taken a special English-language curriculum at an international high school in Yafo, now a mixed Arab-Jewish town just south of Tel Aviv. (Arabs still called the town Yaffa.) The Israeli army had recently recruited Dalia into its officers' training corps, a special program for gifted students that allowed them to attend college before their military service.

  By the mid-1960s, Ramla, with its cement smokestacks on the outskirts of town, its high percentage of unemployed mizrahi, and its Arab "ghetto," had gained a reputation across Israel as, above all, rough and gritty. Some people knew Ramla as the "Liverpool of Israel," in part because of the growing rock-and-roll scene playing out in the old Arab houses of the ghetto, where bands from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would come on the weekends. Life had finally achieved some normality for Dalia and her fellow countrymen. For most of her high school years, conflict with the Arabs had been relatively silent, and she could afford not to think about it much. As she spent her first summer out of high school, however, Dalia noticed a change.