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

by Sandy Tolan

  After Bashir's conviction, Dalia immediately cut off all contact with the Khairi family. "I felt very betrayed," she would recall. Dalia had attached her deepest faith to the unfolding dialogue with Bashir. Now that was shattered, and along with it Dalia's belief in the power of "person-to-person relationships" to "touch the deeper humanity that goes beyond all national and political differences—a deeper humanity from which transformative miracles are created." Dalia's "natural, inborn faith" dictated that "together we can find a solution. That was a central component, a central part of my being. That personal relations hold the key for transformation." Bashir's commitment to his own cause, Dalia believed, meant that he was "determined that we should 'go back where we came from.' It meant that we were not wanted here. We were not going to be accepted." Alongside this anguish, there was a deep sense—more emotional than rational, Dalia would conclude later—that Bashir had confirmed a prejudice inherent to many Israelis: Arabs kill Jews simply because they are Jews.

  "Yeah, everything stopped," she said twenty-six years after Bashir's conviction. "No contact. It was too much for me." The door she had opened was closed.

  Dalia grew cynical about the future of Arab and Jew living side by side. She became zealous in the defense of Israel and participated wholeheartedly in the nation's defense as an officer in the Israeli army.

  When she got out of the service, Dalia plunged into her new work as an English teacher at the Ramla-Lod High School. The school stood adjacent to the Ramla prison, so close that the bricks of the two buildings actually touched.

  In September 1972, as Bashir began serving his time, eight Palestinian gunmen snuck into the Olympic village at Munich, shooting two Israeli athletes dead and capturing nine more. In a subsequent shoot-out at a military base with German police, fourteen people died, including all of the Israeli hostages. The gunmen were part of the Black September organization, a splinter group of Fatah born after the civil war in Jordan. One of Black September's first operations, in 1971, had been the assassination of Jordan's prime minister—as revenge for his role in the attack on the Palestinian factions in September 1970. To this day it is not clear whether Black September acted independently in the Munich assassinations or whether Fatah chief Yasser Arafat knew of the operations in advance. At the time, Arafat defended such actions. "Violent political action in the midst of a broad popular movement," he declared, "cannot be termed terrorism." Many Palestinians agreed. They believed, twenty-four years after the 1948 war, that Israel was occupying their lands and homes and that desperate times required desperate measures: No one would pay any attention to their struggle unless they forced their way onto the international stage. "Humans must change the world, they must do something, they must kill if needs be," Habash had declared. "To kill, even if that means we in our turn become inhuman."

  Israelis responded to the Munich assassinations with air strikes against suspected Palestinian bases in Syria and Lebanon, killing at least two hundred people, including many civilians. Within days, a series of assassinations and maimings rocked the Palestinian movement, part of Israel's Operation Wrath of God. The Israeli general who directed the operation called the assassinations "politically vital" and said they were driven by "the old Biblical rule of an eye for an eye." Operation Wrath of God, however, did not represent an entirely new policy, but rather an intensification of Israeli reprisals in the era of Palestinian hijackings. On July 8, a car bomb had killed revered Palestinian novelist and PFLP spokesman Ghassan Kanafani and his twenty-one-year-old niece as they drove to enroll her at the American University of Beirut.

  Two and a half weeks later, Kanafani's PFLP colleague Bassam Abu-Sharif would receive a book-size package in a plain brown wrapper marked INSPECTED FOR EXPLOSIVES.

  "Bassam," the postman called to the young man, "you've got a present—looks like a book. . . . " The young rebel tore off the wrapper and saw he had been sent a book about Che Guevara, one of his longtime heroes. "Casually," he would recall in his memoir twenty-three years later, "I began leafing through the pages to see what it was like. . . . Underneath, I saw that the book was hollow. There were two explosive charges in this hollow space, wired to go off when the uncut section of the book was lifted

  "I had just lifted it."

  The explosion blew off a thumb and two fingers of Bassam's right hand, broke his jaw apart, smashed his lips and teeth to pieces, opened large wounds in his chest, stomach, and upper right thigh, blinded him in his right eye, and severely impaired his hearing in both ears. Like Israel Gefen, the rebel would be sewn back together and would carry the explosion around with him for the rest of his life. From that day forward, family, colleagues, friends, and visitors would be required to sit close to Bassam Abu-Sharif and shout their greetings, their intimacies, and their questions.

  Bashir would spend the next twelve years in several Israeli-run prisons, mainly in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Ramallah. His prison mates were other Palestinian men convicted of armed insurrection, or of membership in banned political groups, or of demonstrating against the occupation, or were simply those who waited for formal charges to be filed against them. In the eighteen years following the Israeli occupation in June 1967, an estimated 250,000 Palestinians—or 40 percent of the adult male population—had seen the inside of an Israeli jail.

  Bashir would live the monotonous routine that defined prison life: up at 6:30, prison count, breakfast of one egg or a piece of bread and cheese, a morning of study, a lunch of thin soup, then an afternoon of more study, discussion, and rest. Exercise was discouraged, prisoners would recall, to prevent them from becoming physically stronger.

  Fellowship grew from the common experience of incarceration, visceral hatred of occupation, and the dream of return. Prison study groups pored over Hegel, Lenin, Marx, Jack London, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude, and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Prison officials carefully screened incoming books to intercept Palestinian nationalist literature, but occasionally some made it through, including the late Ghassan Kanafani's Return to Haifa, which prompted renewed discussions about UN Resolution 194. Sometimes a visitor even managed to smuggle in verse from the beloved Palestinian poet-in-exile Mahmoud Darwish.

  It was crucial to prison life to find ways to pass the time. The men would listen to Chopin, the great Arabic classical singer Umm Kulthum, and the Lebanese star Fayrouz as they played chess or backgammon on the floor of their cells. They would sit in a big circle, sometimes two or three times a day, to discuss dialectical materialism; the finer points of Soviet versus Chinese Communism; political tensions in Vietnam, South Africa, Rhodesia, or Cuba; Nixon's and Kissinger's ventures in China and the Middle East; the philosophical history of the American Revolution; and the question of Palestine. Often one prisoner would volunteer to study an issue in depth, prepare a paper, and present it at a subsequent meeting. The news of the day came generally from Hebrew-language newspapers, which, over the years, Bashir and his fellow inmates would learn to read.

  In the evenings, the prisoners would create their own theater: comedy skits, Shakespeare, Arabic literature, and impromptu compositions about prison interrogations. Other times the men would sing their history: nationalist songs, harvest songs, songs from villages long destroyed; or they would debate whose Palestinian political faction spoke to the people's deepest aspirations and invent new slogans to attach to each faction. Bashir had become a committed Marxist.

  Every month, Ahmad would look forward to his prison visit with Bashir. "He couldn't wait," Khanom recalled. Many times, however, the night before the visit, Ahmad would break into cold sweats. "He would get the shakes, like an addiction," said Khanom. "And the next day he would be sick and exhausted. And so often he could not go," leaving Zakia to make the visit without him. On one such occasion, Khanom, who had moved back to the West Bank from Amman in order to visit Bashir every month, told her mother, "You were very happy to have the baby bo
y. But life has not been easy with Bashir."

  Zakia said nothing, but when they got to the prison, she teased Bashir with his sister's words. "Can you believe what your sister is saying about you?" Zakia asked Bashir.

  "Bashir was very difficult," said Khanom. "When he was in prison we would send him special food, and he would send it back. We sent him clothes, and he refused to wear them. He forbade us from coming in a taxi. All other families came by public transport in buses, and we would refuse to take a bus. He refused to see us several times when we visited him because we had arrived in taxis—he was tough on us. He wanted to be one of the people, and we did not help him in that. So eventually we took the bus."

  During her visits, Khanom noticed that Bashir had become a leader among the prisoners. "He would always ask us to take something to other prisoners' families," she said. "Always he was helping the poor and needy families. He would ask for shoes for this family; clothes and medicine for that family. At the beginning of the school year, he would arrange for books for another family. Every time we visited, he asked us to do this."

  As the years passed, Nuha Khairi marked the events in her life that Bashir, her younger brother, hadn't witnessed: her marriage to Ghiath, their cousin who had made the journey to al-Ramla in 1967; the birth of her first son, Firas, a second son, Senan, and a third, Jazwan; birthdays; anniversaries; celebrations. His brother and sister were moving into middle age, and still Bashir remained in prison.

  Khanom consoled herself with the thought that Bashir, her modest, undemanding younger brother, possessed the traits of a Muslim holy man, Omar Ibn Khattab, the second caliph, or successor, to the Prophet Mohammad. Omar Ibn Khattab lived in the seventh century. "Decent man, disciplined, serious, responsible, a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Every time I read about Khattab, I would think about Bashir."

  For years, Dalia would walk past the Ramla prison on her way to work. Nearly every day, she thought about making contact with Bashir. At least, she thought, she could find out if he was there; indeed, for a time he was. Yet she never inquired about him. Dalia's urge to find out, she would say later, was outweighed by the desire not to know. Who needs to know all of this? she would remember thinking. Why open a wound? Why start all this again?

  Dalia still felt "grievously betrayed." For years she had waited for some signal from Bashir, some indication that he was safe and that he was innocent, or sorry.

  "Indeed, I was for many years waiting for a letter saying, 'I never did this,' " Dalia said, her voice rising. "Or: 'If I did this, I am very, very sorry' But I never received such a letter. But I am his friend, yesi Am I his friend or not? If I am his friend, he can tell me frankly. 'I had nothing whatsoever to do with it.' And yet he belongs to an organization that puts on its agenda to destroy Israel, also through terror actions—so-called armed struggle. Bombing buses and so on where also Palestinians are. Where Palestinian children can be, because terror is indiscriminate. And /can be on one of these buses, tool!

  "I believed he was guilty. I still believe so. And I would be the happiest person on earth to be disabused of this notion."

  At her core, Dalia believed that what Bashir did, if he did it, "was not an answer. And if it is an answer, it is not an answer I can accept."

  At times, Dalia would consider entering into a new discussion with the family. But then she would remember the Supersol bombing.

  In the fifteen years Bashir spent inside Israeli jails, wars would be fought and lost and leaders would rise and be shot down. In 1973, Egypt launched a surprise attack in what came to be known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War. An American president, Richard Nixon, resigned in disgrace, to be replaced by Gerald Ford, and then Jimmy Carter, who spoke of human rights and peace in the Middle East. Civil war broke out in Lebanon, where the Israelis would launch two invasions. In 1974 Arafat addressed the United Nations in New York, to the fury of Israel and thousands of American demonstrators, but to a standing ovation in the General Assembly, where he offered his dream of the "Palestine of tomorrow," whereby Arab and Jew would live side by side in a secular, democratic state. The Palestinian movement began to show signs of deep divisions over whether to accept the UN resolution recognizing Israel, which meant a possible end to the dream of return. Bashir and his fellow inmates debated these issues without rest. For Bashir, there could never be compromise on the right of refugees to return to their homes.

  Bashir began to draw: first political caricatures, then map after map of Palestine, then more expressive renderings—drawings of uprooted trees, demolished houses, and Palestinians under arrest. One painting he made in the 1970s shows a green-eyed Palestinian peasant woman, one hand on an olive branch and the other holding a torch with the colors of the Palestinian flag. With another prisoner, he passed dozens of hours making a strikingly detailed replica of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, gluing three thousand threads and hundreds of tiny blue and yellow squares of fabric to a Styrofoam base.

  As Bashir's Hebrew improved, he began to pressure Israeli prison officials for better conditions: bed frames instead of mattresses on the floors; daily exercise; bigger meal portions, instead of the scant protein and bread that would scarcely nourish a child. Frequently Bashir would organize hunger strikes to protest prison conditions.

  "When Bashir was in prison, my father used to fall asleep with the radio in his lap," Khanom remembered. "When he heard the prisoners were on a hunger strike, he used to go on a hunger strike with them. We would tell him the strike was over so he would eat, and he would know we were trying to trick him. He would say, 'That's not true, they would have announced it on the radio.' " It would have been hard to deceive Ahmad on this point; at such times, he went to sleep with the radio on beneath his pillow. "Bashir had a special relationship with his father, perhaps because he was the firstborn son," said Khanom. "They had more than a special relationship, they had chemistry. They adored each other."

  Despite talks with Israeli corrections officials, Bashir reported no changes, other than those outside the walls, which he saw as disastrous.

  On November 19, 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat made an unprecedented trip to Jerusalem, signaling his willingness to make a separate peace with Israel despite the continuing opposition of the rest of the Arab world. Two years later, after intense negotiations with U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David accords, which ended the state of war between Egypt and Israel. It had been twelve years since the Arab world suffered catastrophic losses in the Six Day War and six years since Egypt had regained a measure of military respect in the Yom Kippur War, or what the Palestinians knew as the October War, of 1973; now, following Camp David, Israel would begin its pullout from the Sinai Peninsula.

  For many in the West, in Israel, and in Egypt, Sadat was a hero, a statesman who risked his life to make peace across what Rabin would call the "wall of hate surrounding Israel"; it was, for supporters, a necessary first step toward a Middle East finally at peace. Indeed, the Camp David accords envisioned a five-year transition to "full autonomy" for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet Palestinians were not represented in the Camp David talks, and the accord did not address the dreams that remained central to millions of Palestinians: the right of return and the future of Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state.

  Many Palestinians, including Bashir, believed the Egyptian president had sold them out by negotiating his own deal and not focusing on a comprehensive settlement involving all the parties. Demonstrations against Sadat and Camp David erupted across the occupied territories. In the coming years, the Begin government would refuse to withdraw from the West Bank and instead intensified Israel's construction of settlements in the territories. Led by Ariel Sharon and the religious parties, the ruling coalition of Begin's Likud government rushed to create new "facts on the ground," laying claim to Eretz Yisrael in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians were required to present proof of ownership or make way for bul
ldozers, barbed-wire fences, and Israeli settlers. Palestinians thus came to see their deepest fears realized: They were still stateless, the occupation was becoming more entrenched, and now they would need to go forward without Egypt, their most powerful ally in their decades-long liberation struggle. In the West Bank, Sadat became so despised among Palestinians that he spawned a new word in the Palestinian Arabic dialect: To this day, to be a sadati is to be one who is weak, one who capitulates, one who acts cowardly, or, in the words of an old friend of Bashir's, "someone who is ready to make concessions in exchange for false personal glory." In 1981, the Egyptian president would pay for his courage, or his cowardice, with his life. On October 6, while watching a military parade with foreign dignitaries, he was assassinated by gunmen from Islamic Jihad in Cairo.

  Throughout the late 1970s, Dalia would often sit on her veranda in Ramla after work, gazing out at the Queen Elizabeth roses. During this period, she often felt "swept into despair by collective forces clashing against each other" and worried that "my spirit was being crushed by a historic wheel of inevitability." She wondered if the conflict with the Palestinians would ever end. She knew that each side often seemed to want to wish the other away, but her own attempts to block the Khairi family from her mind were not working. "Something within me kept pushing," she wrote years later. "A little nagging voice wished to figure out why it came to me to be involved in this. People came and knocked on my door, and I chose to open it. Is that door now forever shut? Was that a fleeting opportunity, a passing episode?"