In telling these stories, Tolan is also retelling the ancient biblical story of exile and homecoming–one that started with Abraham casting out Ishmael into the wilderness to die. Widely viewed as the father of the Arab race, Ishmael is cast out of his father’s protection with his mother (a servant/slave) but God hears his cries and provides water and later blesses him saying:
As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation.
In the Biblical story, the Jewish people continue and grow through the lineage of Isaac but are exiled to Egypt at one point for close to 400 years before God uses Moses to bring about their homecoming to Israel.
In The Lemon Tree, the author explores the nation-state of Israel’s creation (a ZIonist “homecoming”) through the lens of the post-WWII Jewish survivors–in Dalia’s family’s case, Bulgarian Jews. And we see the Biblical story retold with the casting out of the Arab people (in this case the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants like Bashir’s family) from the villages and cities in modern day Israel to make way for the homecoming of global Jews. Note: I acknowledge this is a gross oversimplication–my intent here is to capture the way the author approaches the narrative. To be clear, Tolar doesn’t make any explicit biblical connection in his book–that’s just a freebie from me. In this Palestinian exile one sees a parallel longing to return to their homeland (falastin) as the two thousand year old zionist desire and narrative.
Tolan uses the exile of Bashir’s family from the house his father built with his own hands the decade before to illustrate how this pain gave birth to a fierce resistance movement and ethos led by people like Yasser Arafat and later, organizations like Hamas. In Bashir’s case he spent half of his life in jail (at least some portion of it unjust)--and these years most certainly led to radicalization and cemented his resolve in the right of return. What makes the current situation such a stalemate though is that a right to return to their original homes and land now–over half a century later–means displacing generations of Israeli Jews with scant memory of anywhere else being their home.
Despite the bloodshed, animosity and atrocities on both sides, The Lemon Tree does offer a sliver of hope through the example of their joint open house initiative where a contested space is transformed into an open space for both Jews and Palestinians. But even this deteriorates despite Dalia’s three A’s framework of acknowledgement, apology and amends. Even the most earnest attempts at understanding appear to be no match for successive failures in diplomacy, settlement expansions and inflexibility on the Jerusalem question. This book was published in 2006–the last two decades have only added more layers on hurt, death and injustice. Despite all this, resolution may only exist if both sides can embrace Dalia’s profession that “Our enemy... is the only partner we have.”
Understanding & Coexistence
"And I started expressing my understanding of their sense of exile," Dalia recalled. "And that I could understand their longing for their home. I could understand their longing for Falastin through my longing to Zion, to Israel. And their exile I could understand from my own exile. I had something in my collective experience and through which I could understand their recent experience."
be a place of encounter between Arab and Jew. They would call it Open House.
Even though this was part of what she, too, considered the biblical land of Israel, for centuries it had also been home to other people. Hard as it was, Dalia believed, each side in this conflict had to give up something precious.
hityakhadoot: being alone and intimate with the soul of another and making space in your heart for that soul.
Dalia had long believed in Einstein's words—that "no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." For Dalia, the key to coexistence lay in what she called "the three A's": acknowledgment of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948, apology for it, and amends. Acknowledgement was, in part, to "see and own the pain that I or my people have inflicted on the Other." But she believed this must be mutual—that Bashir must also see the Israeli Other—lest "one perpetuate the righteous victim syndrome and not take responsibility for one's own part in the fray." Through this acknowledgment, she and Bashir could act "as mirrors through which our own redemption can eventually grow." As for amends: "It means that we do the best we can under the circumstances towards those we have wronged." But for Dalia this could not involve a mass return of refugees. Yes, she believed, the Palestinians have the right of return, but it is not a right that can be fully implemented, because the return of millions of Palestinians would effectively mean the end of Israel. For Bashir, as for
"Our enemy," she said softly, "is the only partner we have."
“The serendipity is quite mind-blowing,” Dalia says after learning of the group’s mission. “I often ask myself questions about the memories of the places. For me it always has to do with the expansion of the heart. I find it a constant challenge to my own bias. For me it always confronts me with the story of the other.”
Identity, Exile & Longing for Home
When the principal returned, she invited them to tour the house. They did so, Ghiath crying the whole time.
"Israel was the only safe place for us. It was the place where the Jews could finally feel that being a Jew is not a shame!" "But you are saying that the whole world did this, Dalia. It is not true. The Nazis killed the Jews. And we hate them. But why should we pay for what they did? Our people welcomed the Jewish people during the Ottoman Empire. They came to us running away from the Europeans and we welcomed them with all that we had. We took care of them. But now because you want to live in a safe place, other people live in pain. If we take your family, for example. You come running from another place. Where should you stay? In a house that is owned by someone else? Will you take the house from them? And the owners—us—should leave the house and go to another place? Is it justice that we should be expelled from our cities, our villages, our streets? We have history here—Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramla. Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land. Their civilization, their history, their heritage, their culture. And now we are strangers. Strangers in every place. Why did this happen, Dalia? The Zionism did this to you, not just to the Palestinians."
"Yes, I do," said Ghiath. "I would rather sleep under a lamppost in al-Ramla than in a palace in Ramallah."
Zionism, Immigration & the Founding of Israel
Talk of a return to Zion went on for several decades in the pages of prewar Zionist newspapers in Bulgaria. Arabs already living on the land did not figure in these discussions, and some Bulgarian Jews would recall reading about the "land without people for a people without land." Debates in these pages centered on whether Jews should learn Hebrew in preparation for emigration to Palestine or stay with Ladino, the Judeo Spanish mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews.
For many of the 1,800 Bulgarian Jews on the train from Sofia—or the tens of thousands of Hungarian, Romanian, or Polish Jews emigrating in the fall of 1948—the journey to Israel represented a return after two thousand years of exile, a chance to fulfill the Talmudic promise "He who makes four steps in Israel, all his sins will be forgiven."
But the train crossing the Yugoslav border at dusk on October 25, 1948, also represented a triumph for a movement critics once dismissed as folly. Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, knew that establishing a Jewish national home meant forging alliances with the imperial powers. They would need to be convinced that a Jewish state, in Palestine or perhaps elsewhere, would be in their interests. "Moses needed forty years," Herzl declared. "We require perhaps twenty or thirty."
so the two men discussed a possible Jewish homeland in Cyprus, Sinai, or even Uganda.
began to sing "Hatikva," for sixty years the anthem of the Zionists and now of the new state of Israel. "A Jewish soul yearns," they sang. And towards the east An eye looks to Zion Our hope is not yet lost, The hope of two thousand years, To be a free people in our land The land of Zion and Jerusalem.
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."
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."
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."
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.
Palestinian Resistance & Struggle
Strangely, though, in the midst of occupation and the utter failure of the Arab regimes, a sense of freedom was emerging: a notion that the Palestinians were suddenly free to think and act for themselves. In the weeks after the occupation, Bashir began to believe that his people would go back to their homeland only through the sweat and blood of Palestinian armed struggle. He was far from alone in this assessment.
The legend of Abu Amar, Arafat's nom de guerre, was built largely on the stories of his narrow escapes: of the time he crawled out a back window as soldiers came through the front door; or when he eluded capture by dressing as an old woman; or when Israeli soldiers arrived at Arafat's cave to find his coffee still steaming on the fire.
Palestinians now understood that their painful longing for home would have to be answered from within. Arafat knew this instinctively; he captured his people's imagination with his slogans of "Revolution Until Victory," "In Soul and Blood We Sacrifice for Palestine," and "We Shall Return."
battle of Karama, though in many ways a military defeat, would go down as one of the great symbolic victories in the history of the Palestinian resistance, further enhancing Fatah's image within Jordan.
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.
The intifada was born.
Five days into the intifada, however, a new group emerged from the same Gaza refugee camp that had spawned the uprising. It would be called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas. Its leader, a crippled, bearded, middle-aged man named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had fled with his family from the village of al-Jora in 1948;
Hamas favored no recognition of Israel and no compromise on the right of return. The organization sought an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine.
Hostile villages chafing under the Israeli occupation had spawned the Army of God, or Hezbollah. Their objective was to expel the Israelis from southern Lebanon, to which end they began firing Soviet-made Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.
Prison, Suffering & Resilience
"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.
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.
"He slept on the floor, and he was not used to a bed anymore," Khanom said. "He couldn't wear regular shoes, either, because after fifteen years without shoes the size and shape of his feet changed." More disturbing were the marks of what his family believed was torture. "When he got out of prison, he had a lot of cigarette burns on his body," Khanom said. "When we asked him what they were, he said it was an allergy."
Dalia stared at the page in amazement. She was astounded. How could she have known Bashir for twenty-one years and not know he was missing his left hand? Slowly it came to her: His hand was always in his pocket. It was always hidden—hidden so well, she never knew she never saw it. Now Dalia realized: She had only ever seen the left thumb, hitched over the top of the pocket. It looked so natural.
Failed Peace & Negotiations
That is why you cannot be satisfied. For you, every viable solution will always be lacking in justice. In a peace plan, everybody will have to do with less than they deserve.
Bashir felt that he had not spent more than half his adult life in prison, enduring humiliation, torture, statelessness, and now deportation, for a compromise like the one Arafat seemed to be considering.
"That was really the turning point," Yehezkel said. "It destroyed any chances for accommodation, at least for a long time. I remember thinking in subsequent years, If Rabin had lived, would he and Arafat have worked something out?"
influential Middle East negotiator, Dennis Ross, thought little of these "old arguments about the settlements being illegal and the Palestinians needing the 1967 lines," calling such positions "the same old bullshit." This view apparently influenced the president, who also considered these positions to be Palestinian intransigence.
Bill Clinton lost his temper. "You have lost many chances," the president told Arafat, echoing former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban's slogan that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. "First in 1948 . . . now you are destroying yourselves in 2000."
Arafat did not budge. "If anyone imagines that I might sign away Jerusalem, he is mistaken," the Palestinian chairman told the president. "I am not only the leader of the Palestinian people, I am also the vice president of the Islamic Conference. I will not sell Jerusalem. You say the Israelis move forward, but they are the occupiers. They are not being generous. They are not giving from their pockets but from our land. I am only asking that UN Resolution 242 be implemented. I am speaking only about 22 percent of Palestine, Mr. President."
Many other observers, including diplomats present at Camp David, believe the reasons for the summit's failure were far more complex and were partly the result of American favoritism toward the Israeli side and deficient understanding of the Palestinian perspective. All of this was exacerbated, according to these critics, by poor American preparation and rivalries between Madeleine Albright's State Department and Sandy Berger's National Security Council, which resulted in what American insiders called a "dysfunctional" negotiation conducted by "too many poobahs."
For the Palestinians, land was not given but given back."
Courage, Moral Action & Goodness
Most people, however, have responded to the story of the Other with passion and courage.
Suichmezov made Kyustendil's case, speaking through tears about the long lines of train cars at the railway station.
None of this would have happened without what the Bulgarian-French intellectual Tzvetan Todorov calls "the fragility of goodness":
A friend had told a story of the day Bashir left jail. Israeli prison officials required that he sign a pledge not to commit any future acts of terror. What Israel called terror, however, Bashir often saw as legitimate resistance. He did not accept the legitimacy of the Israeli justice system, and he had never been told why he was in jail; consequently he refused to sign the document. "If you don't sign," the guard said, "we will send you back." Bashir told the guard to send him back. It was then, according to Bashir's friend, that the Israeli guard asked Bashir for a favor: Could he wait there a few minutes to make it appear to the other guards that he was cooperating? This could solve both men's problems. Bashir, suppressing a smile, agreed, and a few minutes later he was released.
Historical Context & Displacement
Jewish paramilitary squads were attacking British forces, planting explosives in Jerusalem's central post office, and carrying out attacks on civilians in Arab souks. The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine.
Gold had long been the resource of emergency for the Arab women of Palestine, and many women, hearing stories of searches and confiscation by the occupying Israeli soldiers,
Just outside the camps, and the Israeli forces launched night flares to illuminate the militias' search, the Phalangist gunmen began a forty-eight-hour killing spree. Every living creature in the two camps—men, women, babies, even donkeys and dogs—was slaughtered by the Phalangists. It was described in this account by Loren Jenkins in the Washington Post:
In some ways, the specifics of Bashir’s decision to maintain silence with Dalia do not matter. They are symptomatic of a steady deterioration of relations between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israel claims ever more West Bank land, the settler population surpasses eight hundred thousand, and seventeen Israeli settlements encircle East Jerusalem, long the place Palestinians fought for as the capital of their new nation of Palestine. Now, special roads just for settlers and “VIPs” crisscross the West Bank. Palestinians are not allowed on these roads—even though they, too, were built on lands supposedly set aside for a future Palestine.
