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

  Praise for The Lemon Tree

  " The Lemon Tree is the story of two people trying to get beyond denial, and closer to a truth they can both live with. By its end, Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi are still arguing, talking—and mostly disagreeing. But their natures—intellectual, questing, passionate and committed—may represent the best hope of resolving one of the most intractable disputes in human history . . . It is very tempting to write off the Israeli-Palestinian standoff as insoluble. But one lesson of The Lemon Tree is the relatively short span of its history. The conflict between the two peoples is little more than a century old."

  —Seattle Times

  " The Lemon Tree is not only an empathetic look at the struggles of these Holocaust survivors and Palestinian exiles, but a concise history of their competing claims for Israel and Palestine. The story of Dalia and Bashir's first face-to-face meeting in 1967, and the remarkable four-decade friendship that has followed, illuminate the personal narratives at the heart of the conflict.''

  —Mother Jones

  "This wonderful human story vividly depicts the depths of attachment to contested ground. An excellent choice for general readers."

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  "Instructive, heartbreaking and well-written, The Lemon Tree will inform readers of efforts by Palestinians and Israelis to make peace, despite the geopolitical and religious pressures to the contrary."

  —St. Louis Post Dispatch

  "Tolan, who first told this story in a public radio documentary, is admirably evenhanded, alternating between the points of view of the two families and their respective nations. The book has no neat solution. But just as the Khairis and Eshkenazis learn each other's better qualities, we come to understand more about both sides."

  —BookPage

  "Through broad sweeps of narrative going back and forward in time, Tolan's sensitively told, eminently fair-minded narrative closes with a return to that lemon tree and its promise of reconciliation. Humane and literate—and rather daring in suggesting that the future of the Middle East need not be violent."

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  "A much-needed antidote to the cynicism of realpolitik."

  —Booklist (starred review)

  "This truly remarkable book presents a powerful account of Palestinians and Israelis who try to break the seemingly endless chain of hatred and violence. Capturing the human dimension of the conflict so vividly and admirably, Sandy Tolan offers something both Israelis and Palestinians all too often tend to ignore: a ray of hope."

  —Tom Segev, author of One Palestine, Complete

  "Those looking for even a symbolic magical solution to that conflict won't find it here: the lemon tree dies in 1998, just as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process stagnates. But as they follow Dalia and Bashir's difficult friendship, readers will experience one of the world's most stubborn conflicts firsthand."

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  "This fascinating book is a tapestry of compassion, grief, and hope about a land that has not been running short of any. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been one of the most bitterly disputed and extensively analyzed in the world and yet only a few books can claim to grasp the human dimension of the conflict as honestly and thoroughly as this one. Sandy Tolan's great achievement is that he renders the abstract and intricate world of international and regional problems almost 'touchable' by making us see them against a background of the experiences and emotions of the ordinary individuals who have lived them. This honest and meticulous research encompasses a spectrum of generations of tales and tales of generations. Sandy Tolan's voice speaks with great compassion and acumen, and this painfully beautiful narrative lingers in the mind long after the book is over."

  —Elif Shafak, professor of Near Eastern Studies, University of Arizona, and author of The Bastard of Istanbul

  THE LEMON TREE

  An Arab, a Jew,

  and the Heart of the Middle East

  SANDY TOLAN

  BLOOMSBURY

  For the children, Arab and Jew, between the river and the sea. And for Lamis, who brought me into the story.

  Copyright © 2006 by Sandy Tolan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural,

  recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests.

  The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental

  regulations of the country of origin.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Tolan, Sandy.

  The lemon tree : an Arab, a Jew, and the heart of the Middle East / Sandy Tolan.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-1-59691-922-8

  1. Palestinian Arabs—Biography. 2. Israelis—Biography. 3. Arab-Israeli conflict—Biography. I. Title.

  DS126.6.A2T65 2006

  956.9405092'2—dc22

  2005030360

  First published in the United States by Bloomsbury in 2006

  This paperback edition published 2007

  7 9 10 8

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  CONTENTS

  First Words

  Author's Note

  A Note on Spelling and Pronunciation

  MAPS

  Palestine under the British Mandate, 1936

  United Nations Partition Plan, November 1947

  Israel and the Palestinian Territories, with Israeli Settlements, 2005

  Introduction

  1 Bell

  2 House

  3 Rescuse

  4 Expulsion

  5 Emigration

  6 Refuse

  7 Arrival

  8 War

  9 Encounter

  10 Explosion

  11 Deportation

  12 Hope

  13 Homeland

  14 The Lemon Tree

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography: Works Cited

  Source Notes

  FIRST WORDS

  The house depicted in this book is an actual place, and the lemon tree in its yard is a real one. You could see the place for yourself if you boarded a bus in the West Jerusalem terminal, rode west, climbed and then plunged down the hills toward the Mediterranean, and banked up a two-lane rise until you came to a bustling, industrial town in a place once known as Palestine that is now the state of Lsrael. When you stepped off the bus, you yd walk down the busy main road known as Herzl Boulevard, past the juice vendors, the kebab stands, and the old storefronts selling trinkets and cheap clothing, and take a left at a street called Klausner. There, at the next corner, you 'd spot a run-down gas station, and across the street a modest house with a pillared fence, a towering palm, and stones the color of cream.

  This is the place, you could say to yourself This is the house with two histories. The house with the lemon tree.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  THIS BOOK is firmly planted in the soil of nonfiction narrative. Many of the events depicted are from fifty, sixty, or seventy years ago; nonetheless, their retelling relies, like e
verything else in the book, entirely on the tools of reporting and research: interviews, archival documents, published and unpublished memoirs, personal diaries, newspaper clippings, and primary and secondary historical accounts. For The Lemon Tree I conducted hundreds of interviews in Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Bulgaria over a period of seven years, mostly since 2002; visited archives in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Beirut, Sofia, London, New York, and Austin, Texas; and consulted hundreds of first- and secondhand sources, many housed in one of the world's great research centers: the Doe Library at the University of California at Berkeley.

  I have not taken liberties with the history, no matter how minor. At no point do I imagine what probably happened, for example, at a family event in 1936 and state it as fact; nor at any moment do I describe what someone was thinking unless those thoughts are based on a specific recounting in a memoir or interview. Rather, the scenes and sections of the narrative are built through a combination of the available sources.

  For example: Descriptions of events surrounding the Eshkenazi family are based on family interviews in Jerusalem and Sofia; interviews with other Bulgarian Jews now living in Israel; documents unearthed in the State Archives of Bulgaria, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee archives in Queens, New York, and the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem; and newspaper clippings and other historical accounts translated from the National Library in Sofia. The portrait of the Khairi family in al-Ramla in 1948 is similarly based on multiple sources: personal interviews of family members; memoirs and other accounts translated from the Arabic; Israeli military intelligence reports; documents from state and kibbutz archives; the memoirs of Yitzhak Rabin and Arab Legion commander John Bagot Glubb; U.S. State Department cables of the day; secondary historical accounts by Middle Eastern scholars; and years of my own interviews with Palestinians in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon. For details and additional historical context, see the source notes section.

  An author's refusal to take poetic license does not, of course, ensure that each event depicted speaks an "objective" truth, especially when the topic at hand represents two highly subjective histories. Where else, after all, would the same event be remembered as the War of Independence by one people and the Nakba, or "Catastrophe," by another? In such cases, particularly when the history described is volatile or less familiar to Western readers, I have intensified my basic research approach, endeavoring to gather an even greater multitude of sources from various perspectives, thus ensuring that the emerging narrative is not based primarily on decades-old personal memories.

  None of this, of course, means that The Lemon Tree represents a definitive history of the conflict between Arabs and Jews since 1948 (or, if you prefer, since 1936, or 1929, or 1921, or 1917, or 1897, or 1858). By juxtaposing and joining the histories of two families, however, and placing them in the larger context of the days' events, I hope to help build an understanding of the reality and the history of two peoples on the same land.

  A NOTE ON SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION

  IN THE MIDDLE EAST, the use of a single letter—say, an "e" instead of an "a"—can be a political statement, or at the very least a declaration of identity. Take the case of Ramla—or, al-Ramla, or Ramie, or Ramleh, or Ramlah. Present-day Israelis use "Ramla," which is how the road signs read in English; in classical Arabic, it's "al-Ramla"; in spoken Arabic, and throughout its history from the eighth century A.D., including during the British Mandate from 1917 to 1948, it was "Ramie." Israeli historians generally use "Ramie" when referring to the era before 1948, and some Israelis continue to call it "Ramie" rather than the Hebraized pronunciation of "Ramla," because, unlike other cities where Jews lived in antiquity, Ramie was always exclusively an Arab town, founded by Muslims in 715.

  How to resolve this dilemma for a writer intent on conveying two histories? I have decided, after much experimentation, to use the classical Arabic "al-Ramla" when looking at the city through Arab eyes and "Ramla" when describing the place through the Israeli experience. This way, it is clear that I am referring to the same place—and, by the way, not to Ramallah, a Palestinian town in the West Bank about twenty miles to the east.

  In single references, I tend to use the pronunciation favored by the person through whose eyes the reader is seeing at a particular moment. Thus, Bashir sees the hilltop at Qastal, not Castel, or Kastel, as many Israelis know it; similarly, Dalia looks upon the hills of Judea and Samaria, known as Jabal Nablus and Jalal al Khalil (Nablus and Hebron Mountains) in Arabic.

  For Arabic words, I have chosen not to use accent marks unfamiliar to most readers; rather, I have used spellings in English which will come closest to the actual pronunciation in Arabic. Similarly for the Hebrew. For example, the Hebrew letters kajf and khet, indicated as "ch" by some writers, are pronounced like an "h," but in a more gutteral way, and I have generally used "kh," which comes closer. (An exception is where the "ch" spelling is commonly accepted, as in Chanukah.) This gutteral "kh" is also represented by the Arabic letter kha, and pronounced similarly—as in Khairi, Bashir's family name, and Khanom, Bashir's sister. Bashir's name, by the way, is pronounced bah-SHEER.

  Dalia's family name was Eshkenazi, not Askhenazi; despite how odd that spelling may look to many Jewish readers, it is common for Bulgarians, and Dalia assures me this is how her father always spelled his name in English. Her name at birth was Daizy, and she kept that name until she was eleven years old, when she changed it to Dalia. To avoid confusion, and after consulting Dalia, I have decided to refer to her as Dalia throughout the book.

  INTRODUCTION

  IN EARLY 1998, I set out for Israel and the West Bank in search of a surprisingly elusive story. Despite the forests of newspaper stories and miles of videotape documenting the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, precious little light had fallen on the human side of the story, the common ground between enemies, and genuine hopes for coexistence. My assignment came on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the first Arab-Israeli war—known as the War of Independence to Israelis, and the Nakba, or catastrophe, to Palestinians. I wanted to explore how this event, and the history that followed it, was understood by ordinary Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. I needed to find two families linked by history in a tangible way.

  I spent weeks reading Israeli military history, Palestinian oral history, and scholarly treatises, looking at the roots of the conflict. I traveled from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, from Ramallah to Hebron to Gaza, digging for the human story that would move beyond the heartbreaking images transmitted from the region.

  I encountered many dead ends and broken leads. But then I came across something real. It was the true story of one house, two families, and a common history emanating from walls of Jerusalem stone on the coastal plain east of Tel Aviv and Jaffa. From a single house, and the lemon tree in its garden, lay a path to the histories, both separate and intertwined, of the Khairi and Eshkenazi families, and to the larger story of two peoples on one land. This promised to be not simply a recounting of decades of pain and retaliation; as I began interviews with Bashir Khairi in Ramallah and Dalia Eshkenazi Landau in Jerusalem, I quickly saw that I would cross new landscape, to the twin hearts of the story.

  Like many Americans, I grew up with one part of the history, as told through the heroic birth of Israel out of the Holocaust. The mother of one of my schoolmates had lived in Anne Frank's neighborhood and had got out of Amsterdam in a harrowing journey, just in time. I knew of Israel as a safe haven for the Jews. I knew nothing about the Arab side. For millions of Americans, Jew and Gentile, it was the same. They too were raised with the version of Middle Eastern history as told in Exodus, Leon Uris's hugely influential mega-bestseller, first published in 1958, then made into a movie starring Paul Newman. In Uris's engaging novel, Arabs are alternately pathetic or malicious, or perhaps worse; and they have little real claim to their land: "If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it—much less run from
it without real cause." But as generations of historians have since documented, and as Dalia and Bashir recounted to me in their own words, the actual history of the two peoples' relations is far more complex, not to mention richer and more interesting.

  The story of Dalia and Bashir was first broadcast as a special forty-three-minute documentary for NPR's Fresh Air, and the response was overwhelming. Though I've reported from more than thirty countries over the last twenty-five years, the feedback I received from that single program was greater than that from all the stories I'd ever done, put together. Clearly the story had awakened a desire for a deeper narrative, one that would penetrate beneath the headlines and the endless cycles of repeated history, and explain how we got to this difficult place.

  Seven years later, after countless hours in archives and on the ground in Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Bulgaria, the seed of the radio documentary had grown into The Lemon Tree, and the response to the book, and to a series of public talks and readings I've done in the months that followed, has again been astonishing. As I've traveled from San Francisco to Milwaukee, from Detroit to Los Angeles to New York to Boston to Seattle, I've been moved to see how this story of one home and two families creates an opening for a deeper, sometimes painful exchange about the past, and the future.