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

by Sandy Tolan

  From Cairo to Baghdad to Damascus to Amman, thousands of Arabs flooded rebel offices to volunteer in the renewed fight against Israel. Fatah even got its own frequency on Egyptian radio, Arafat was invited to Cairo as a state guest of Nasser, and the ranks of Fatah swelled.

  The "spectacular" operations of the PFLP, meanwhile, began to attract legions of young Europeans, who saw in the airline hijackings a willingness to risk everything to achieve liberation. This was a time not only of cold war, but of revolution, inspired in part by massive and worldwide street protests against the Vietnam War and, in some cases, support of the Vietcong. In the third world, the Vietcong were often seen as freedom fighters and the United States as their oppressors. Similarly, the Palestinian rebels, through the hijackings and other high-profile operations, quickly became identified on the Left with the struggle for revolutionary justice against an occupying power. In the United States, even within much of the Left, and especially among idealistic young Jews who would soon make aliyah to the Holy Land, Israel was still considered the just victor of the recent war. But the surging radical movements in Europe began to feed the Palestinian nationalists with wide-eyed anti-imperialists: Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, and German youths who had become frustrated with the capitalist system and its leaders.

  Inspired by Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and by Chairman Mao's admonition to become "fish in a revolutionary sea," the European leftists arrived in PLO and PFLP training camps in Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, and Yemen. From these connections, "solidarity committees" sprang up across Europe, doling out financial aid and medical supplies and sending volunteers into the occupied territories.

  Soon, infamous revolutionary groups and fugitives throughout the West became identified with the Palestinian struggle. They included the Venezuelan Communist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (aka Carlos the Jackal), Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof (leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Gang), and various factions of the Red Brigade: ETA from Spain, the Italian Brigada Rossa, Action Directe of France, and the Japanese Red Army. "The only language which the enemy understands is that of revolutionary violence," declared George Habash, "thereby turning the occupied territories into an inferno whose fires consume the usurpers." His slogan was "unity, freedom, vengeance."

  For thousands of Palestinians, the "spectaculars" brought a sense of power out of defeat and attention to the Palestinian cause as never before. Many Palestinians believed their attacks were against not Israeli civilians, but rather "soldiers in civilian clothing" in a "colonial settler regime" that could be mobilized against them in a moment's notice. This was war, the Palestinian rebels believed, and their attacks represented their only recourse to bringing attention to their cause. "When we hijack a plane it has more effect than if we killed a hundred Israelis in battle," Habash said. "For decades world public opinion has been neither for nor against the Palestinians. It simply ignored us. At least the world is talking about us now." In much of the world, however, the PFLP tactics had turned people against the Palestinians and their liberation movement.

  The PFLP operations, moreover, provoked a massive Israeli crackdown. Thousands of Palestinians were jailed, including many who had no knowledge of any guerrilla operations. They were held indefinitely without charge. The PFLP tactics thus became a growing source of tension within the Palestinian nationalist movement, and in February 1969, the same month Bashir was arrested, a new faction broke off from the PFLP, soon to be called the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abu Laila, one of the DFLP founders, believed the "lunatic actions" of the PFLP against civilians outside Israel had "smeared the legitimacy of the resistance." The DFLP leadership also objected to the rhetoric of "pushing the Jews into the sea" and began to see their struggle as against not Jews, but Zionism. They advocated for coexistence between Arabs and Jews within a single state, where no one would be forced to move. Some within the DFLP even began to talk of Arab and Jewish states existing side by side. Even among some of the radical factions of the Palestinian resistance, the idea of coexistence was gaining ground.

  By 1970, however, ideological tensions within the Palestinian movement were minor compared with the antagonistic atmosphere between the Palestinians and King Hussein of Jordan. After the battle of Karama, Fatah and other factions in the Palestinian liberation movement had grown so strong that they became a virtual state within a state in Jordan, turning the capital, Amman, into their "Arab Hanoi." Rebels saw the king as coddling the West through his qualified support for a UN compromise, which they feared would scuttle their right of return. Some rebel leaders had labeled the king a "paper tiger" and threatened to topple him. On September 1, following a Jordanian army shelling of Palestinian refugee camps, the king survived an attack on his convoy that the Jordanians believed was an assassination attempt.

  A few days later, with Bashir still in prison and awaiting his long-delayed trial, PFLP fighters staged perhaps the most spectacular operation in the history of the Palestinian resistance. Their plan was to simultaneously hijack three New York-bound airliners from European capitals, thereby maximizing the number of U.S. passengers and the consequent international attention. The airliners would then land in an old British airfield in the Jordanian desert, where the passengers would be held until Israel released Palestinian political prisoners.

  PFLP operatives seized two of the flights and directed them toward Jordan. The third attempt was foiled. Leila Khaled, the Palestinian "queen of freedom fighters," underwent plastic surgery to hide her identity. She and a fellow PFLP operative posed as a Mexican bride and groom. The attempted hijacking, on an El Al flight from Amsterdam, went awry when the pilot took the plane into a sharp plunge to throw the "newlyweds" off balance. The "groom" was shot dead by the Israeli security chief on board; Khaled was taken to a jail in London. However, three days later, when a Palestinian working in Bahrain heard that his heroine queen had been taken prisoner, he single-handedly hijacked a British airliner and ordered the pilot to join the other two planes already on the ground in Jordan. Palestinians would come to know this stretch of desert east of Amman, in Hussein's kingdom, as "Revolution Airport."

  "I'm sorry," Bassam Abu-Sharif shouted through his megaphone to the several hundred passengers, standing in the sun in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, "we have just hijacked you to the desert in Jordan. This is a country in the Middle East, next to Israel and Syria. We are fighting a just war, a war for the liberation of our country from Israeli occupation. The reason you're in the middle of it is that we want to exchange you for prisoners who were taken in Israel and other countries."

  The list of Palestinian prisoners included the name of Khaled, the "Mexican bride" whose hijacking operation had unraveled and who sat in jail in London. Khaled would be released in a prisoner-for-hostage exchange, as the direct result of the actions of her admirer. (Bashir's name would appear on another prisoner-exchange list two years later, during a hijacking at the airport near Tel Aviv; the operation ended when Israeli commandos shot and killed the hijackers. Bashir remained in prison.)

  After six days, the crisis at "Revolution Airport" ended with all hostages safe and three charred jumbo jets in pieces on the tarmac, blown up by PFLP fighters to demonstrate their seriousness to the world. Within days, however, King Hussein used the PFLP's spectacle as reason for swift action against all Palestinian factions in the country.

  For two weeks in September 1970, civil war erupted as the king's troops engaged PLO, PFLP, DFLP, and other Palestinian factions in fierce battles in the Palestinian refugee camps formed after 1948 and in provincial towns across the desert kingdom. Jordanian troops outnumbered Palestinian guerrillas by more than three to one and had more than nine hundred tanks and armored vehicles, compared with none for the Palestinian side. When Syria crossed the Jordanian border to fight on the side of the Palestinians, the king secretly contacted Israel, asking for air support against the Syrians: a rare personal appeal from an Arab leader to Israel to attack other Arabs. On the grou
nd, especially in the refugee camps, it was Arab against Arab as the Jordanian military unleashed its hardware, killing thousands of Palestinians in the span of eleven days. The month would forever be known to Palestinians as Black September.

  On September 26, at the urging of Gamal Abdel Nasser, King Hussein and Yasser Arafat flew separately to Egypt, where they signed a cease-fire agreement. This was to be the last political act of consequence for Nasser. Two days later, the Egyptian leader, still revered across the Arab world despite his central role in one of its most catastrophic defeats, died of a heart attack. Millions of people filled the streets of the Arab capitals, wearing black and sobbing openly, in scene after scene of mass grief. The era of pan-Arab nationalism, of a single hero promising to lead the people to victory over an oppressor, was finished.

  Dalia was sickened by the actions of the PFLP. In later years, she would recall her horror at a PFLP-organized attack on the Lod airport, when three members of the Japanese Red Army opened fire with Kalashnikovs, killing twenty-five people, including Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. Attacking civilians crossed an ethical line and "hit a very hard place in me." At times like these, Dalia understood how someone could feel murderous in response to such attacks.

  Between her classes at the university in Tel Aviv, or at home on the weekends, Dalia wondered who these people were and how they thought they could achieve their goals with such extreme tactics. She wondered about Bashir, too. Who was he, really?

  Bashir was in jail, a member, according to the Israeli authorities, of the PFLP. It was hard to believe that the same young man who had come to Dalia's door—whose family was received with such warmth in her home—could be part of the Popular Front. She was stunned not because she had considered Bashir a friend, but because she thought the connection was, in some ways, even deeper than that. "It's beyond friendship, because you didn't choose it," she would say. "Israel did not choose to have the Palestinians, and the Palestinians did not choose to have Israelis. It's a given, and that's the most critical point, how one deals with the given."

  Through her encounter with the Khairis, Dalia, now twenty-one years old, had begun to question the stereotypes she was raised with: the stories of mistrust, suspicion, and hatred. "It was generally believed that an Arab can befriend you, but if their national interest dictates otherwise, they will stab you in the back with a knife," she said. "That was a very prevalent thing. One had to fight against that, to prove that it's not true." Now, Dalia feared, Bashir's perceptions of his own national interest had clashed completely with hers.

  At the core of Dalia's faith was the conviction that personal dialogue was the key to transformation. If Bashir was in fact part of the PFLP, if he was connected to the Supersol bombing, it showed that "personal relationships meant nothing in the face of collective forces. If national interest comes before our common humanity," Dalia said, "then there is no hope for redemption, there is no hope for healing, there is no hope for transformation, there is no hope for anything!"

  One morning as pretrial preparations dragged on, Ahmad, Zakia, and Nuha Khairi decided to visit Bashir in jail. Prison officials had moved him repeatedly, and now he sat and waited in a cell in al-Ramla. Ahmad's eyesight, always poor, had begun to fail him—it was part of a long, slow decline that would eventually blind him—but as the three Khairis passed through the gates and into the visitors area, he realized where he was. "Bashir," Ahmad said when his son was finally sitting in front of him, "did you notice where this prison is? This is exactly where our olive trees used to be."

  Ahmad said the land had been bequeathed to Khair al-Din al-Ramlawi by the Ottoman sultan in the sixteenth century. The waqf land had remained in the family for at least twelve generations, until 1948. Bashir realized the symbolic was also the literal: He was being imprisoned on his own land.

  Nuha was constantly worrying about her brother. "We don't know how long he will be in jail, we don't know what will happen with Bashir," she would say. "So many questions, so many uncertainties. He's twenty-eight years old, and still, he's not married. And now he is in prison for I don't know how long. How will this affect his future?"

  In 1970, Bashir's trial began at a military court in Lod (formerly Lydda), a few miles from his old home in al-Ramla. His sister Khanom, who was living in Kuwait, had not seen Bashir since his arrest. She came to see him, but there were no family visiting hours during the trial. Bashir's lawyer told her she could pretend to be his assistant, "just so I could see him. But he told me that I would not be allowed to talk to him and that if I did, there would be consequences." When the jailers brought Bashir from the courthouse lockup, however, Khanom could not control herself. "When I saw him, I shouted. I yelled out, 'Habibi Bashir!My darling Bashir!' I was expelled from the courthouse. But at least I saw him."

  One afternoon during a recess in the trial, Ahmad decided he could no longer stay away from the house in al-Ramla. For more than three years, he had resisted a visit to Dalia and her family, telling his children, "I would have a heart attack before I reached the front door." Now, a few minutes removed from the military court and the prison where his son passed his days and nights, Ahmad stood with Zakia and Nuha at the door of the house he had built in 1936. He was barely able to see, but he could make out the figure of a Jewish man in his mid-fifties: Moshe Eshkenazi, from Bulgaria. The two men stood facing each other across the threshold: Ahmad and Moshe, two fathers of the same house.

  They went through the house and outside again, to the garden in back. Ahmad walked forward slowly, touching the stones of the house, as Nuha and Zakia helped him along. Moshe invited his guests to sit. Dalia and Solia were out on an errand, soon to return. When they did, as Nuha recalls, Dalia asked all about Bashir. Before leaving, Ahmad asked Dalia if he could take one of the flowers from the fitna tree. Dalia told Ahmad, "You can take it right from the tree."

  Dalia, three decades later, has no such memories; she doesn't believe she was at the house during the Khairis' visit that day, nor does she believe she ever met Ahmad Khairi. She does, however, remember her father telling her about the visit, and especially about what Bashir's father said to Moshe. On this point, her memory is identical to Nuha's.

  "There was a lemon tree here," Ahmad said to Moshe. "I planted it. Is it still here? Is it still alive?"

  Nuha and Moshe rose and stood on either side of Ahmad. They led him slowly to the corner of the garden. Ahmad extended his arms, running his fingers up the smooth, hard bark, over the soft knobs on the tree's base, and along the slender, narrowing branches, until, between his hands, he felt the soft brush of leaves and, between them, a small, cool sphere: a lemon from the tree he had planted thirty-four years earlier. Zakia watched from the table in silence, tears in her eyes.

  Ahmad's head was among the lower branches, and he was crying silently. Moshe plucked a few lemons and placed them in Ahmad's hands. The men returned to the table and sat down. Moshe rose again and returned with a pitcher of lemonade, which he poured in silence into waiting glasses.

  "It was nice," Nuha would recall in another century, as a woman in her sixties still in exile in Ramallah. "Very nice. Of course it was nice! We planted that tree with our own hands. Dalia's family—they were all very kind. But what does that matter? They were the people who took our house."

  Ahmad brought the four lemons back with him to Ramallah. "As a gift," Dalia would say. "And a memory."

  In 1972, Bashir Khairi was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for complicity in the February 1969 bombing of the Supersol market on Agron Street in West Jerusalem and for membership in an outlawed organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israeli witnesses and Palestinian informants had testified that Bashir had served as a liaison between the bomb makers and the two members of the PFLP who hid the explosives on the spice rack at the market.

  As the judge announced the sentence, Khanom Khairi began to scream. "Bashir! Bashir!" she cried out as her younger brother locked eyes with her. Nuha was in sho
ck, at the beginning of what she would later describe as a nervous breakdown. The court was in an uproar, and Khanom's enraged cries cut through the din.

  Bashir had been expecting the conviction. He stood up and faced the judge. "I don't recognize this court," he said. "I'm innocent." At no point would Bashir admit any role in the bombing or acknowledge any membership in the PFLP. He considered the entire military trial a "charade" conducted by an illegitimate government. "I did not confess," Bashir would recall in 1998, twenty-six years after his conviction. "They could not extract a confession from me. They were false accusations. Because if they had been able to prove it, I would have been sentenced to life in prison, not for fifteen years. However, I am Palestinian. I have always hated the occupation. And I believe that I have the right to resist it by the means that are available to me. Yes, at one stage the means were violent. But I understood them. I understood the actions of the Palestinian fighters who were ready to sacrifice themselves. I still understand them."

  Bashir's co-defendants received harsher sentences: Khalil Abu Khadijeh was sentenced to twenty years; Abdul Hadi Odeh got life. In a separate trial, sisters Rasmiah and Aisha Odeh also received life sentences. "When the sentences were read out," Khanom recalled, "the mother of Abdul Hadi fainted. We all ran towards her and got her water, and someone splashed some perfume on her to wake her up."

  Bashir's aunt Rasmieh left the court and closed herself in her room at home. There she recited the sura of Yassin, from the Koran: "A sign for them is the night. From it we draw out the day and they are plunged in darkness."

  She repeated the verse forty times.

  "We say it has to do with faith and fate," Khanom said. "This we believe saved him, in the end."

  The convictions of some of the defendants rested in part on the testimony of Israel Gefen, the Israeli veteran. The explosion in the spice rack had embedded paprika with such force into Gefen's skin that he had reeked of the stuff for weeks; three years after the explosion, every time he took a bath, he would still find tiny silvers of plastic—from the spice bottles—resting in the bottom of the tub. As for his foot, doctors at the Gates of Righteousness hospital had managed to sew it back to his ankle, but even after several operations it would never be the same. For the rest of his life, on especially cold or hot days, or when he felt especially tired, he would feel again the heat of the blast in his ankle.