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

by Sandy Tolan

  Dalia lay in a Jerusalem hospital bed, listening to doctors and nurses discuss the intifada. It was January 1988.

  In recent days, the news of the Palestinian uprising had come sporadically: A friend would bring in a newspaper, an orderly would roll in a television, or Dalia would lie on her back and listen to the anguish in the voices of the hospital staff.

  Nine months earlier, Dalia had been diagnosed with cancer. After her initial biopsy and treatment, she received four medical opinions strongly recommending more invasive procedures; this treatment, she said, would have involved a hysterectomy. She reluctantly agreed to the procedure, but just days before the surgery, Dalia discovered she was pregnant. She was forty years old. Against the advice of all her doctors, she refused the surgery. They warned her that if she went forward with the pregnancy, she would be risking her life. There was no way to know whether the cancer would come back. "As a doctor I object," one of the specialists told her. "But as a human being, I respect, acknowledge, and admire."

  One evening a few weeks later, Dalia walked to the Old City. She felt elated by her decision to keep her baby and wanted to pray at the Wailing Wall. When she came home she felt intense cramps. In the hospital, doctors told her she had a high-risk pregnancy related to her cancer treatment. She was immediately confined to her hospital bed, twenty-four hours a day. It was in this state that she heard the first news of the intifada.

  In early January, Dalia's husband, Yehezkel, arrived at her bedside with the news that Bashir was about to be deported. He was suspected of helping organize the intifada, and it appeared an Israeli military court would order his deportation any day.

  "Why don't you do something?" Yehezkel asked.

  Dalia thought the question was ridiculous. Do something? She was six months pregnant and struggling to recover from a life-threatening illness. She had been bedridden for months. She could not even rise to go to the bathroom without feeling contractions, and the potent anticontraction medicine was making her tremble.

  "Like what?" Dalia asked.

  "Maybe you could write about your history," Yehezkel replied. "About Bashir and the story of the house in Ramla."

  "No, of course not," Dalia would remember saying to her husband. "I don't want to expose myself. I need peace and privacy. I don't want to."

  Yehezkel let the matter drop.

  At the Jneid prison on January 13, 1988, as Bashir, Jabril Rajoub, Hussam Khader, and Jamal Jabara walked past the rows of cells, the other prisoners began banging on their bars, shouting, "Allahu akbar!"—"God is great!"— and singing the unofficial Palestinian national anthem, "Billadi, Billadi, Billadi!"—("My Homeland, My Homeland, My Homeland!"). As the noise built to an ear-hammering pitch, Bashir and Jabril would recall, Israeli prison guards fired tear gas canisters into the cells, and the yelling and banging gave way to coughing and moaning. As they approached the exit and the noise began to fade, they could hear a few prisoners still shouting: "Do not deport them! Do not deport them from the homeland!"

  The deportation hearing the previous day in an Israeli military court had been swift: Israeli and Arab lawyers for Bashir and the three other prisoners, declaring the proceedings a "judicial charade" by a court they said lacked legitimacy, had abandoned their attempts to prevent the deportations. "The game was fixed from the beginning," said the Israeli human rights lawyer Leah Tsemel at a press conference. In court, the four men were described by the Israeli army as "among the leaders and instigators" of the disturbances in the West Bank and Gaza. Consequently, the military judge declared, he would approve the deportation order for the four Palestinians, despite objections from many nations, including the United States, and a strongly worded resolution from the United Nations Security Council. The resolution was prompted by the deportation of Bashir, his comrades, and several other groups of Palestinians.

  The four men had no idea to where they would be deported. "You can deport me," Jabril Rajoub would recall telling the judge. "But you cannot deport Palestine from my heart. You can deport us, kill us, destroy us. But this will never assure security for you."

  As defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin was a central figure in the deportations of Bashir and his comrades. Only days earlier, Bashir recalled, he had met with Rabin at Jneid prison. The defense minister arrived following complaints from human rights groups about treatment of prisoners. Bashir told Rabin that the conditions in Israeli prisons were not fit for dogs, and that even Haim Levy, the Israeli director of prisons, had said much the same thing. Rabin listened to Bashir's list of prison grievances and said, "If there will be peace, there will be no problem any more with the prisoners." Within days, Rabin, who had been part of the Israeli force that expelled Palestinians from al-Ramla and Lydda in 1948, would approve the deportations of Bashir and the three others to Lebanon.

  The soldiers pulled Bashir and the three other prisoners from the military van. It was a cold January morning. As Bashir stood on bare ground, he could feel the blast of wind from the blades of a helicopter, and he felt himself being pushed inside. The helicopter began to rise, then swing around to point north. Bashir could not see and had no idea where he was going.

  The four men in blindfolds could imagine the lands beneath them. Below, on their left, the shoreline of the Mediterranean snaked north from Jaffa and Tel Aviv toward Haifa and Acca (known to the Israelis as Acre or Acco). Behind them, just inland on the coastal plain, lay al-Ramla and the house Bashir's father had built fifty-two years earlier; beyond, farther east, the Jordan River trickled south from the Sea of Galilee toward the Dead Sea. Between river and sea—from the old Arab port of Jaffa to the mountains of the West Bank; from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem to the fertile warmth of Jericho, one of the cradles of civilization—this crooked finger of land, sixty miles at its widest, was known to most of the world as Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. To Bashir and the other deportees beside him, all of it was still Palestine.

  "I had been in prison six times," Jabril Rajoub would remember. "For me, deportation was worse than any of that. I was born in Palestine. My parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and my great-great-grandparents are all from Palestine. My memories are in this country. I feel I am a part of this country. I feel I have a right to live in this country. With my family, with my friends, in my homeland."

  The helicopter crossed Israel's northern border and set down on a road in southern Lebanon. Bashir, Jabril, the two other activists, and the Israeli soldiers guarding them were in the Israel Defense Forces' "security zone," a twenty-five-mile south-to-north buffer established in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon to crush the PLO. Israel had remained in southern Lebanon ever since, declaring its intent to stop incursions and rocket attacks into the northern Galilee, but the occupation had grown increasingly unpopular, both in Lebanon and at home. Already the conflict was becoming known as "Israel's Vietnam."

  Bashir stepped beneath the helicopter blades and felt someone take off his blindfold. He could see Jabril and the other two men. The four activists looked out to see two waiting black Mercedes sedans.

  An Israeli officer gave Bashir $50 and looked him in the eye. "If you even try to come back," he recalled the officer saying, "we will shoot you."

  The four men climbed into the black sedans driven by masked Lebanese militiamen and sped north, out of the "security zone" and deeper into Lebanon's Beka'a Valley.

  ISRAEL DEFIES UN AND DEPORTS FOUR PALESTINIANS, read a headline in the January 14 edition of the Times of London. "Israel defied the United Nations Security Council openly yesterday and deported four Palestinians to southern Lebanon, as its inner cabinet met to approve even tougher measures to put down the disturbances which are continuing unabated throughout the occupied territories," the dispatch stated.

  The same day, under the headline FOUR EXPELLED SECRETLY, the Jerusalem Post reported on its front page that Bashir and the three other activists accused of "inciting riots in the administered territories" were "shuttled secretly by helicopter to the nor
thern edge of the Southern Lebanon Security Zone at noon yesterday, without a word of notice to their families or lawyers." The deportations, the newspaper indicated, were widely denounced around the world as a human rights violation and antithetical to a peaceful solution to the conflict. Even the normally reserved U.S. State Department issued a statement of "deep regret" about the actions of its ally. Israel's UN ambassador, a young politician named Benjamin Netanyahu, replied that the deportations were "totally legal" and that the United Nations Security Council could not be a fair arbiter because it "condones any violence on the Arab side, while condemning all Israeli countermeasures."

  Israeli society was increasingly divided over the deportations, the occupation of southern Lebanon, and the treatment of Palestinians during the intifada. On the Right stood the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir, which advocated a continuation of the hard-line policy against the Palestinians. Netanyahu, the UN ambassador, had forged many of his own convictions after the death of his brother, Yonatan, during an Israeli raid against a PFLP hijacking in Entebbe, Uganda.

  Toward the Israeli political center, representing the conservative wing of the Labor Party, stood Yitzhak Rabin, who, on the eve of Bashir's deportation, had recognized the "despair" of Palestinian refugees. "As a soldier, I feel that these people have fought with a courage that deserves respect," he would tell Mustafa Khalil, the former Egyptian prime minister and an architect of the Camp David accords. "They deserve to have an entity. Not the PLO, not a state, but a separate entity." Rabin believed that Israel could not agree to the Palestinians' central political demand—recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and to Yasser Arafat as their leader. To do so, Rabin argued, would require Israelis to compromise on the right of return for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and that, the defense minister argued, would be "national suicide."

  At the center of Israel Defense Forces policy under Rabin remained the iron fist: crushing the intifada with military force and deporting PLO and PFLP operatives to Lebanon. Other Israelis, however, had already begun to rethink this logic. In the same January 14 edition of the Jerusalem Post, at the back of the paper on the editorial page, a quiet voice emerged amid the international furor over the deportations and the Israeli crackdown in the occupied territories.

  The voice belonged to a forty-year-old woman who had grown up in Ramla. Her article was titled "Letter to a Deportee."

  "Dear Bashir," wrote Dalia. "We got to know each other twenty years ago under unusual and unexpected circumstances. Ever since, we have become part of each other's lives. Now I hear that you are about to be deported. Since you are in detention at present, and this may be my last chance to communicate with you, I have chosen to write this open letter. First I want to retell our story."

  Dalia had initially dismissed Yehezkel's suggestion that she write about her history. Afterward, she would remember, "an inner voice, an inner conviction" rose up, "welling up in a wave, saying, Yes, it's right to do it. You've got to do it. At that moment it came with the courage. And I knew: Yes, I'm going to be out there."

  Dalia recounted for Israeli readers the story of the Eshkenazis, the Khairis, and the house in Ramla: Bashir's visit to the house after the Six Day War; Dalia's visit to Ramallah and the "warm personal connection" they established across the gulf of political differences; and her understanding, ultimately, that the house she, Moshe, and Solia moved into in November 1948 was not simply "abandoned property":

  It was very painful for me, as a young woman 20 years ago, to wake up to a few then well hidden facts. For example, we were all led to believe that the Arab population of Ramla and Lod had run away before the advancing Israeli army in 1948, leaving everything behind in a rushed and cowardly escape. This belief reassured us. It was meant to prevent guilt and remorse. But after 1967,1 met not only you, but also an Israeli Jew who had personally participated in the expulsion from Ramla and Lod. He told me the story as he had experienced it, and as Yitzhak Rabin later confirmed in his memoirs.

  "My love for my country," Dalia wrote, "was losing its innocence . . . some change in perspective was beginning to take place in me." She then recounted the "unforgettable day" of Ahmad Khairi's only visit to the house he had built and the moment when he stood at the lemon tree, tears rolling down his face, as Moshe Eshkenazi plucked a few lemons from the tree and placed them in Ahmad's hands.

  Many years later, after the death of your father, your mother told me that, whenever he felt troubled at night and could not sleep, he would pace up and down your rented apartment in Ramallah, holding a shriveled lemon in his hand. It was the same lemon my father had given him on that visit.

  Ever since I met you, the feeling has been growing in me that that home was not just my home. The lemon tree which yielded so much fruit and gave us so much delight lived in other people's hearts too. The spacious house with its high ceilings, big windows and large grounds was no longer just an "Arab house," a desirable form of architecture. It had faces behind it now. The walls evoked other people's memories and tears.

  Dalia described a "strange destiny" that connected her family to Bashir's. Though the plans for turning the house into a kindergarten and a center for Arab-Jewish dialogue had been long delayed, this "destiny" was still on her mind. "The house with which our childhood memories were connected," she wrote, "forced us to face each other." But Dalia then questioned whether genuine reconciliation could be possible across a chasm as wide as the one between herself and Bashir. She recounted Bashir's conviction and prison term in the aftermath of the explosion that killed three civilians in the Supersol market—"My heart aches for those murdered even now"— and then pleaded with Bashir to transform his politics.

  Dalia told Bashir that his support of George Habash and the PFLP—support he had never acknowledged, but which she assumed—represented a "refusal to accept a Jewish state in even part of Palestine," a position she said "will alienate all those Israelis who, like myself, are prepared to support the Palestinian struggle for self determination."

  People like yourself, Bashir, bear a great responsibility for triggering our anxieties which are well justified, given the PFLP's determination to replace Israel with a "secular democratic state" and to use terror to achieve this aim.

  If you could disassociate yourself from your past terrorist actions, your commitment to your own people would gain true moral force in my eyes. I well understand that terror is a term relative to a subjective point of view. Some of Israel's political leaders were terrorists in the past and have never repented. I know that what we consider terror from our side, your people considers their heroic "armed struggle" with the means at their disposal. What we consider our right to self-defense, when we bomb Palestinian targets from the air and inevitably hit civilians, you consider mass terror from the air with advanced technology. Each side has an ingenuity for justifying its own position. How long shall we perpetuate this vicious circle? . . .

  Dalia then turned to the actions of her own government in deporting Bashir, which she called a "violation of human rights," which "create[s] greater bitterness and extremism among the Palestinians" and allows the deportees "greater freedom to plan actions against Israel from abroad." Yet Dalia understood that at the heart of Bashir's deportation was something beyond politics:

  You, Bashir, have already experienced one expulsion from Ramla as a child. Now you are about to experience another from Ramallah forty years later. You will thus become a refugee twice. You may be separated from your wife and your two small children, Ahmad and Hanine, and from your elderly mother and the rest of your family. How can your children avoid hating those who will have deprived them of their father? Will the legacy of pain grow and harden with bitterness as it passes down the generations?

  It seems to me, Bashir, that you will now have a new opportunity to assume a leadership role. By its intention to deport you, Israel is actually empowering you. I appeal to you to demonstrate the kind of leadership that uses nonvi
olent means of struggle for your rights . . .

  I appeal to both Palestinians and Israelis to understand that the use of force will not resolve this conflict on its fundamental level. This is the kind of war that no one can win, and either both peoples will achieve liberation or neither will.

  Our childhood memories, yours and mine, are intertwined in a tragic way. If we can not find means to transform that tragedy into a shared blessing, our clinging to the past will destroy our future. We will then rob another generation of a joy-filled childhood and turn them into martyrs for an unholy cause. I pray that with your cooperation and God's help, our children will delight in the beauty and bounties of this holy land.

  Allah maak. May God be with you.

  Dalia

  Bashir would not read Dalia's open letter for weeks. The morning it appeared in print, he and the three other deportees were well inside Lebanese territory at a PFLP training camp in the Beka'a Valley.