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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2008, pages 55-56 Waging Peace The Lemon Tree
COMMEMORATING the 60th anniversary of the first Arab-Israel war in 1948, NPR Radio producer, university professor and author Sandy Tolan was on tour during the month of May to lecture and promote his book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. He spoke on May 16 at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC. Explaining why he wrote the book, Tolan said, “I spent 10 years of my life attempting to produce something that would encapsulate both narratives of the story of the Arabs and Jews.” He grew up Catholic in Milwaukee with Leon Uris’ Exodus his only reference to the state of Israel, along with the stories he heard from his childhood friend Tracey and her family, who told him of the horrors of the Holocaust. All this gave him an image of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Tolan said, and he never knew the other side of the story. That all changed when he attended Harvard graduate school and fell in love with and married a fellow student who was Palestinian. Although they eventually divorced, Tolan learned that there was indeed another side to the story. “I began to wonder how this story could be seen through such different sets of eyes,” he said. In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the war, he found the story: In 1936, Ahmed Al-Khairis built a house for his family of Jerusalem stone in Ramle, British Mandated Palestine. In the backyard he planted a lemon tree. At the time tensions were erupting between the indigenous Arabs and the Zionist Jews. According to Tolan’s research, since 1922 the Jewish population in Palestine had grown from 84,000 to 340,000. Tolan jumped ahead to 1947, which he described as “a great moment for the Jews” and “a tragedy for the Arabs,” who were asked to pay for the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust. People didn’t understand the 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what would become the state of Israel, he discovered. In order to capture Palestinians’ suffering during their expulsion he interviewed 15 to 20 people who had been on the forced march. All spoke of their extreme thirst during the trip. He heard of a grandmother who drank her grandchild’s urine in order to stay alive. Perhaps 30,000 walked in the extreme heat from Ramle and Lydda to safety. Among them was the Khairis family, including Ahmed’s son Bashir. In Ramallah, Arab armies took them by the truckload to the surrounding hills. “There tens of thousands of the refugees would mill about stunned,” Tolan said, “looking for food and determined to return home.” This will to return home is still a major foundation for many concerning this conflict, he noted. The story continues four months later, when 11-month-old Dalia Eshkenazis leaves with her Jewish family from Bulgaria for Haifa. Even though there was no sign of hostility toward them, 90 percent of the Jewish population of Bulgaria left en masse for Israel. The family went to Ramle, which by then was under Israeli occupation. The few Arabs who remained in the town were now in POW camps. By all counts the Arab houses were standing empty, and the Eshkenazis family was instructed to go and choose one. “They picked one made of Jerusalem stone with a lemon tree in the backyard,” Tolan said. Dalia lived in this house until she was 21, always wondering about the previous inhabitants. She was told that the Arabs ran away, leaving their soup warm on the table. “But this doesn’t quite compute,” Tolan said, and “she remains curious.” After the Six-Day War in 1967, refugees who had resettled in the West Bank were able to travel to see their land in Israel proper due to the fact that the Israeli military was busy administrating the newly acquired territories. Bashir Al-Khairis, along with his two cousins, decided to leave Ramallah in search of their family home. Dalia was alone at home when the doorbell rang. Three men in suits were standing at her doorway. Dalia told Tolan that she knew who they were as soon as she saw them. “I had always been waiting for them,” she explained “It was the beginning of the story of the relationship of the two families,” Tolan said. Tolan returned to the region six months ago, when he was producing an NPR program on the Palestinian olive harvest. As he traveled the area he witnessed increasing challenges to the two-state solution. He was stunned by what he saw, he said, including the Israeli wall made up of electrified fencing, separated by moats, which cut off the Palestinian farmers from their olive groves, as well as the expanding settlements and hundreds of checkpoints, some almost resembling international border crossings. “Is this going to be dismantled for a two-state solution,” Tolan asked, “or is it part of what is going to become a two-state solution?” While Tolan was in Israel/Palestine, he picked up Dalia from her home and went with her to visit Bashir. Once in Ramallah, Bashir greeted Dalia with a huge smile on his face. They asked about their children; it had been 30 years since Dalia met him at their door. Big noisy arguments followed over the solution to the current situation. As Dalia and Tolan walked down Bashir’s front steps, she told the writer quietly, “Our enemy is the only partner we have.” To hear Tolan’s NPR report on the olive harvest, visit <www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16506897>. —Jamal Najjab |
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