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

by Sandy Tolan

  Bashir returned to the sitting room with a tray of cookies and a teapot with three tiny glasses. He wore pressed gray slacks, a gray V-neck sweater, and a blue windbreaker, and he sat beside a bookshelf filled with Arabic literature and political thought and two volumes in English: The Age of Reason and The Age of Enlightenment. Gamal Abdel Nasser's image stared down from the white walls, alongside a black-and-white framed photograph of the house in al-Ramla. The picture was taken in the 1980s, around the time Bashir was deported to Lebanon, and showed the one-story home with its fourteen layers of white Jerusalem stone and a television antenna on the roof. A large palm tree grew out of the frame. Two beat-up cars were parked in front. Children were walking past the gate Ahmad Khairi had placed there in 1936.

  Ahmad's son spooned three teaspoons of sugar into his steaming glass, and as he stirred, he asked his visitors what was on the agenda for today, one of many days of long interviews. The visitors had just returned from al-Ramla, and Bashir sat expressionless as he heard the new Israeli names of his old streets. Omar Ibn Khattab, the street named after the second caliph, whom Khanom liked to compare to Bashir, was now called Jabotinsky, named after a founding father of the Israeli right wing. "Do you have any idea," he asked after a while, "how it feels that you can go there and I can't?" In fact, Bashir found it difficult to go even to Amman, where he wanted to visit Khanom, Bhajat, and other family but was unable to get the necessary permits from the Israelis. "I really miss Bashir very much,"

  Khanom had told a visitor to Amman. "He is not able to come to Amman. He is in his prison again, in Ramallah. An open prison, a big prison. I am now getting old, and I'm not able to go there very much." Bashir rose again and returned with photocopies of the family tree—encircled names in Arabic script with arrows and dates going back four centuries—from Khair al-din al-Ramlawi through fifteen generations to the twenty-first-century Khairi diaspora in the West Bank, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Canada, and the United States. Khairis across the globe, Bashir said, still have claims to the waqf lands of Khair al-din, in what is now Israel. "There are documents from the Ottoman period," Bashir said, his left hand in his pocket. "You can go to the Islamic law court in Istanbul to find these documents."

  For many Palestinians like Bashir, such claims, grounded in a 1948 United Nations resolution, remained paramount; for others they were less important than ending the occupation, now in its thirty-eighth year. Since the outbreak of the second intifada, more than 550 Palestinians under the age of eighteen had been killed. This was five times the number of Israelis of that age. One of the most recent victims was Iman al-Hams, an unarmed thirteen-year-old Palestinian girl. She was shot and killed by an Israeli officer, who then, according to accounts from his fellow soldiers, fired a stream of bullets into her body. Dozens of the deaths were of children under ten years old; thirteen were babies who died at checkpoints as their mothers gave birth. "With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli," an Israeli columnist wrote. "Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent?"

  Daily humiliation was unavoidable for Palestinians traveling out of their own town or village. Bashir himself had been waiting for months for the Israeli authorities to grant him the permission to travel to Jordan for medical treatment. Numerous reports documented ambulances denied passage at checkpoints. Other Palestinians endured lengthy waits in long lines at muddy, potholed crossings or on foot at the checkpoint turnstiles. In one incident, a young Palestinian man on his way to a violin lesson was told by Israeli soldiers to take out his instrument and "play something sad" before he was allowed to pass. For many Israelis, the incident evoked memories of Jewish violinists forced to play for Nazi officers at concentration camps, and it created a national outrage. Many of the commentators believed the checkpoints were essential for protecting Israel from suicide bombers, but they believed the humiliation of the young Arab violinist, Wissam Tayem, had undercut Israel's moral authority and disgraced the memory of the Holocaust.

  For Palestinians, the effects of the intensifying occupation fueled a growing rage and sharpened the debate about the best course of political action. The disagreements were pronounced, even within Bashir's own family.

  "If you want to get the land back," Ghiath Khairi was saying, "we will need generations and generations. An entire cycle of history. A new balance of power." Ghiath was at home in Ramallah, sipping a cola in the family's living room. Ghiath was a few years older than his cousin Bashir; he had left al-Ramla shortly after Bashir in 1948; he had attended law school in Cairo with Bashir in the early 1960s; he had traveled back to Ramla with Bashir and cousin Yasser on the bus in 1967; he had married Bashir's sister Nuha after Bashir's imprisonment for the Supersol bombing. The couple had three children.

  After all the suffering he had witnessed, of his cousin and of others around him, Ghiath had adopted what he considered a patient and practical attitude. "I can't draw the map of the world in two hundred years," he said. "Before one hundred years there was no Soviet Union. Two hundred years ago, Ottoman troops were in Vienna. Before two hundred years, there was nothing called Germany. Who is to say what the next hundred years will bring? Now Israel rules America. But I don't know what happens after one hundred years. It is the Israeli opinion that for the time being I cannot go back. So I yield up: I don't plan for coming generations. We can't do anything."

  Nuha sat erect on the couch across from Ghiath. "We have the right to go back to our homeland," she said. "We can't be scattered all over. And meanwhile, they [Israelis] come from all over to live in our home." She crossed her arms. "Someone has to convince America of our right of return. Everybody should go back to his house. What about us these last fifty-six years? Whoever cares about us? Everybody cares only about them. They should go back where they came from. Or they could go to America. There's plenty of space there."

  "These are dreams, dreams Ghiath exclaimed.

  "This is justice," Nuha replied. "And the solution."

  Ghiath would not back down. The problem of the day, he believed, was not return, it was the occupation. "Every day, every night, the Israelis are coming here," he told his guests. "We went to a wedding last week, and the Israelis arrested the groom! Nevertheless, George Bush says Sharon is a man of peace. This is a joke, my dear sir. We are les miserables. We can't do anything! We are weak, and they are strong, and because we are weak, we should never have made this intifada. I don't believe in it. Hamas named it the 'Al-Aqsa intifada.' The PLO named it the 'intifada for the liberation of Palestine.' Israel named it the 'intifada of the security wall.' And who succeeded?"

  "The Israelis," Nuha said quietly.

  "The intifada brought us this wall," Ghiath proclaimed. He shrugged. "I'm a practical person. Since I can do nothing, I'm sad for nothing. If what you want does not happen, want what happens."

  Ghiath no longer believed that radical Palestinian politics served the people's interests. "In 1984, a few months before Bashir was released, I went to the prison," he said. "I said, 'Look, Bashir. You spent fifteen years in an Israeli prison. Now, Bashir, it is enough for you.'"

  Bashir looked at his older cousin. He made something clear: He would never give up his right of return or his intention to fight for it by any means necessary. "I told him, 'You are talking nonsense,'" Ghiath recalled.

  "I'm very proud of being Bashir's sister," Nuha said. "I believe in resistance. The way the Israelis are treating us today, we can't sit silent." She paused and looked at her husband. "I wish you were like Bashir."

  "I will never be like Bashir," Ghiath replied. He turned to his guests. "There is a competition between me and bashir," he said with a little smile. "And we are cousins."

  Nuha reached for the television remote. The Bold and the Beautiful flickered on the screen, with subtitles in Arabic.

  "We have to go back to our homes," she said.


  Dalia sat in the passenger seat of the rental car, staring straight ahead and trying to look casual, as if she, too, were a journalist and that it was normal for her to cross the Israeli military checkpoint heading north from Jerusalem to Ramallah. In fact, it was forbidden for Israeli civilians to travel to the occupied territories, and Dalia knew she risked being turned back. The soldier, however, checked only the driver's American passport, and surprisingly, the gamble paid off: Dalia was through the checkpoint and on her way to Ramallah. This was Qalandia, where Bashir and Ahmad had landed in the plane from Gaza in 1957; where, a decade later, Bashir had spotted the Israeli tanks from his rooftop in Ramallah.

  "Oh, my God," Dalia gasped. To her left, a long line of vehicles pointed south, nearly frozen in place. Young Palestinian men and boys passed between the cars, offering gum, cactus fruit, cucumbers, kitchen utensils, and soap to frustrated, immobile drivers. "The Palestinian duty-free," said Nidal Rafa, the Palestinian journalist who was accompanying Dalia.

  Just behind the cars and the hawkers stood the subject of Dalia's exclamation: a towering curtain of concrete, stretching out of sight to the north. This was Israel's "security barrier" separating the West Bank from Israel and, in some cases, the West Bank from itself. Construction for the barrier had begun in 2002 and would include six thousand workers digging trenches, stringing razor wire, erecting guard posts, laying concrete, and installing tens of thousands of electronic sensors. Part wall, part electrified fence, the construction project would cost $1.3 billion, or more than $3 million per mile. "The sole purpose of the fence," Israel declared, "is to provide security" in response to "the horrific wave of terrorism emanating from the West Bank."

  "They are building the wall," said Nidal, "so they don't have to look into our eyes."

  Palestinians called the barrier the "apartheid wall" and accused Israel of grabbing more land in the West Bank under the guise of security. The barrier did not follow the 1967 border, or Green Line, and in some cases it carved deep into West Bank lands to incorporate settlements. In the summer of 2004, the UN's International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled, "The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law." The court suggested Israel was creating a "fait accompli" on the ground by annexing West Bank lands in lieu of a political settlement. Israel rejected the court's ruling, declaring, "If there were no terror, there would be no fence." Further, Israel said, the international court had no jurisdiction in the matter. The White House concurred, saying the UN court was not "the appropriate forum to resolve what is a political issue." John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, called the barrier "a legitimate act of self-defense" and said it "is not a matter for the International Court of Justice."

  The rental car bumped along potholed roads, passed under a banner welcoming visitors to Ramallah, went left at the first traffic light, and stopped near a shop selling Palestinian crafts. Dalia got out and waited at the entrance to the building. Nidal, who would translate for Dalia, stood beside her.

  "You go first," Nidal said.

  "No, please, you first," Dalia said. "Let me hide a little bit. It's been seven years." They walked up the stairs.

  Bashir stood waiting at the second-floor landing.

  Bashir and Dalia stood in the hallway outside Bashir's office and shook hands for a long time, smiling broadly and looking straight into each other's face. "Keef'hallek?" Bashir said. "How are you, Dalia?"

  Dalia handed Bashir a white paper bag with green lettering in Hebrew. "A little lemon cake, Bashir," she said.

  Bashir led Dalia into his office, and they faced each other again, still standing. "How is Yehezkel?" Bashir asked in English. "And Raphael? How is your son?"

  "Raphael is sixteen now. He's in high school. He likes computers. And I heard Ahmad is eighteen and going to Harvard!"

  "It's only for four years."

  "The years mean nothing to him," Dalia remarked, looking at Nidal. "He was fifteen years in prison."

  Bashir nodded; his silver hair matched his steel-framed glasses. He wore khaki pants and a khaki windbreaker. "Now I'm getting old," he said. "I'm sixty-two."

  "The gray looks good on him," Dalia said. "Tell him, Nidal. Good, wonderful!" As Nidal translated, Bashir's face turned red.

  Bashir had been smiling from the moment Dalia arrived; now his face changed. "I'm eager to see you, but I was very afraid for you. Especially with the news of each day. The wall, the arrests, the house demolitions, the way it is. The situation is not quiet. You can see people tense. You never know what could happen."

  Bashir had not expected Dalia, or he would have received her at his house. When she hadn't confirmed, he explained, and given the difficulty of passing the checkpoints, he had assumed she wasn't coming.

  There was a pause; Bashir disappeared for a moment to heat water for tea, and then the two old friends moved into padded chairs across a coffee table in the tiled, spare office.

  "Everything's all right?" Bashir asked.

  "What shall we say?" Dalia replied. "I cannot answer this question."

  "Is Raphael doing well in school?"

  "Yes."

  "Of course, this is natural. He comes from his father and you."

  Dalia rubbed her hands together and looked around the office. On the wall to her left was a picture of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP and PLO official assassinated by Israeli helicopter rockets in 2001.

  "Was he a friend?" Dalia asked after a long pause.

  "Yes, a good friend. He was killed by two rockets from an Apache."

  Bashir got up for a moment and returned with steaming Styrofoam cups of tea. The subject turned to prison. Dalia wanted to know if Bashir was in Ramla when she was teaching high school next door in 1971.

  "Maybe I was there, in solitary confinement," Bashir replied. "I was there less than one year. I was in seventeen prisons."

  "So you were moving around. Getting the grand tour. A prison tourist!" Dalia laughed uncomfortably. "Did any of the guards treat you well?"

  "There was a Romanian guard. He was a good guy."

  Bashir looked at his watch. Dalia knocked over her teacup, splashing herself and looking flustered.

  "Don't worry! Don't worry!" Bashir exclaimed as Dalia mopped herself with a tissue.

  "The Romanian guard," Bashir continued, "he kept letters from my nephew because the warden was coming to confiscate them."

  "Didn't you tell me once that Rabin came to visit the prison?"

  Yes, Bashir said, it was when he was at Jneid prison near Nablus, before he was deported to Lebanon. Bashir was the prisoners' representative. "I told Rabin that even Haim Levy"—the prisons commissioner—"said that a dog couldn't live in these conditions."

  "It's interesting that he would come as minister of defense to sit with the prisoners," Dalia remarked.

  "I was a prisoner. He was minister of defense. Nothing changed."

  Dalia was thinking of Rabin and Oslo. "But Bashir—don't you think that someone like that, who did something to change—made some progress, as much as he could in changing his position, to move a little bit—to make a compromise and extend his hand to your people . . . ?" Her question was left unfinished.

  Bashir leaned forward. "For Palestinians it didn't change the daily life. It went from bad to worse. I didn't go back to al-Ramla. We don't have our independent state, and we don't have our freedom. We are still refugees moving from one place to another place to another place to another place, and every day Israel is committing crimes. I can't even be on the board of the Open House. Because I'm Palestinian, not Israeli. If somebody comes yesterday from Ethiopia but he's Jewish, he will have all the rights, when I'm the one who has the history in al-Ramla. But for them I'm a stranger."

  Dalia's arms were folded tightly across her chest. She unfolded them and took a breath.

  "Bashir. Maybe I have no right to say what I'm going to say. We need to make sacrifices if both
of us are to live here. We need to make sacrifices. And I know it is not fair for me to say that. I know. I mean, you cannot live in your house in Ramla. I know it's not fair. But I think we do need to strengthen those people who are willing to make some compromise. Like Rabin, who paid with his life. And so for your own country, you need to strengthen the hand of those who are ready to make a compromise and ready to make space for us here. By not accepting the state of Israel or by not accepting the state of Palestine, I think none of us has a real life here. Israelis don't have a real life here, either. But if you're not okay, we're not okay. And if we're not okay, you're not okay."

  Dalia took another long breath. She slipped off her sandles and tucked her feet beneath her on the office chair. "I was passing through the checkpoint today," she said. "I could see the wall—it is like a wall in the heart. You said you're in your prison here in Ramallah. Who am I to say that people like you who find themselves in a situation like this, that they need to sacrifice so much, so that my people will have a place? I mean, it's unfair, I understand, from your point of view. But you know from me from the past, how attached I am to the state of Israel. And how can I even ask you to make space for this state? But if I knew or if we knew that you could make space for the state of Israel, first of all in your heart, then we could find a solution on the ground. How much less threatened my people would feel. I say this understanding that I don't even have a right to ask you for this. I'm just asking this. That is my plea."

  As Nidal translated, Dalia and Bashir gazed across the room at each other, not smiling, not frowning, not blinking, eyes locked. The lemon cake sat forgotten in the white bakery bag on the table. A refrigerator hummed in the next room, and the voices of children at play drifted through the window.