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

On the morning of February 21, 1969, there was an explosion in a Supersol market in Jerusalem. Israel Gefen, a veteran of World War II and several Arab-Israeli wars, was seriously wounded. Moshe Eshkenazi told his daughter, Dalia, that Bashir Khairi, based on an article in the newspaper, was accused of having taken part in the explosion as part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) under George Habash. The PFLP took part in the hijacking of an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and the hijacking of another El Al plane in Zurich.

Bashir Khairi was held in a small cell, where, he recalled, interrogators put a hood over him and beat him. He believed the interrogators were from Shin Bet. They also conducted psychological operations, which included the sounds of shots and screaming, but Bashir admitted nothing. Others, including an Israeli human rights lawyer named Felicia Langer, have documented the experiences of prisoners who faced beatings and humiliation in detainment. The Times of London also featured an investigation of the use of torture in Israeli jails, which Israel denied. After Bashir was taken prisoner, his sister, Nuha, was taken to the Israeli interrogation center and made to listen to her brother’s screams before she fainted and was released to find her own way home.

Following the Six Day War, Palestinian fedayi were welcome everywhere in the Arab world (at least among the general population). Many attacks were launched from Jordan, which increased the tension between King Hussein and Israel. Israel launched an attack on the Jordanian city of Karama in March 1968. Although the battle was a success for Israel, the images of captured Israeli tanks being paraded through the streets were a psychological victory for Palestine. The attack prompted many people to join Fatah, and European leftists, inspired by other groups such as the Vietcong, flocked to join PLO and PFLP camps. The “spectaculars,” as the PFLP called its new operations, provoked a crackdown by Israel. The Palestinians in Jordan were at odds with King Hussein, who survived an attack on his convoy that may have been an assassination attempt in 1970.

Meanwhile, the PFLP launched a plan to hijack three airliners bound for New York from European cities. While two hijackings proceeded as planned, the third, involving the “queen of freedom fighters” (174), Leila Khaled, was foiled, and Leila was jailed in London. One of her admirers in Bahrain single-handedly hijacked a British plane, winning her release. The other hostages in the planes were released, and the PFLP burned the planes. In response, King Hussein cracked down on the Palestinians in refugee camps and secretly asked Israel to bomb the Syrians. Hussein’s actions were known as Black September to the Palestinians. However, at the end of the month, King Hussein and Yasser Arafat signed a ceasefire agreement under the aegis of Nasser, who died shortly thereafter.

The actions of the PFLP turned Dalia’s stomach. She began to doubt that personal dialogue could transform relationships. Ahmad, Zakia, and Nuha Khairi visited Bashir in jail, which was in al-Ramla on the site of the former waqf land on which the family formerly had olive trees. They attended his trial and visited Moshe Eshkenazi at their former house. Ahmad brought four lemons home with him. Bashir was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in the Supersol bombing and his role in the PFLP, an outlawed organization. He did not admit to playing any role in the bombing. Dalia cut ties with the Khairi family and began working as an English teacher at Ramla-Lod High School.

In September 1972, eight Palestinians who were part of the Black September organization, a splinter group of Fatah, entered the Olympic village in Munich, shot and killed two Israelis, and captured nine others. Israel responded with air strikes against Palestinian bases in Syria and Lebanon, part of Operation Wrath of God.

Bashir would go on to spend 12 years in Israeli prisons: 250,000 Palestinians, or 40% of the male population, were jailed by Israel at some point during this time. Bashir spent his time in prison in study groups and listening to music. His father would greatly look forward to monthly visits with his cherished son but would also get so anxious that he made himself sick and was unable to go. Dalia walked past the Ramla prison on her way to work, but she did not inquire about Bashir.

In 1973, Egypt attacked Israel. During this conflict, the Yom Kippur War, a civil war erupted in Lebanon, which Israel invaded twice. In 1974, Yasser Arafat addressed the UN, meeting with protests outside and a standing ovation within the General Assembly. In prison, Bashir began to draw, and he led hunger strikes by the prisoners. In 1979, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel signed the Camp David Accords after negotiating with US President Jimmy Carter. Israel agreed to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula but not the West Bank, and the Palestinians felt that Sadat had betrayed them. In 1981, assassins from Islamic Jihad shot him in Cairo.

Bashir continued to speak about Dalia and how open-minded she was, but he did not write her. In September 1984, Bashir was released from prison. When he went home, he would only sleep on the floor and bore the marks of torture. Three months after his release, his father died. Bashir married his cousin, Scheherazade, and had a child whom he named Ahmad after his father, in the Arab tradition. Moshe Eshkenazi died the same year, eight years after Solia.

Dalia legally owned her parents’ house but did not know what to do with it. Yehezkel Landau, Dalia’s husband, sent a message through a Palestinian Anglican priest named Audeh Rantisi in Ramallah asking Bashir to meet. Dalia, then 37, met Bashir, then 43, at Rantisi’s house in Ramallah. Though Dalia could not legally share the house with Bashir or give it to him, she agreed to Bashir’s suggestion to turn it into a preschool for Arab children.

Three years after he was let out of jail, Bashir was sent back to jail as part of an Israeli crackdown. Demonstrations erupted in Gaza and the West Bank in which Palestinians hurled stones at Israeli soldiers—part of a movement called the Intifada.

A new group called Hamas emerged in the fight for Palestinian independence. Led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a middle-aged man with a disability, the movement did not recognize Israel and wanted a full return of Palestinians to their former homes. The PLO’s leader, Arafat, was in exile in Tunis. Palestinians had their own grassroots rebellion, carrying out hit-and-run operations on Israeli troops and refusing to buy Israeli goods.

In January 1988, as Bashir was taken from his jail cell in Nablus, Dalia lay in a hospital bed. She had been diagnosed with cancer nine months earlier but refused doctors’ advice to have a hysterectomy because, at age 40, she had discovered she was pregnant. Her husband arrived at the hospital to tell her that Bashir was deported. He asked her whether she wanted to do something, such as write about her personal history with Bashir. Bashir and three other prisoners were quickly sentenced in proceedings that both Israeli and Arab lawyers called a “judicial charade.” The defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was part of the proceedings and approved Bashir’s deportation to Lebanon.

The deportations received international criticism and divided Israeli society. On the right was the Likud, led by Yitzhak Shamir. Rabin was in the center, at the right wing of the Labor Party. Though he did not want to recognize the PLO as the sole representative of Palestine, he believed Palestinians merited their own entity, if not a state.

In January 1988, Dalia wrote a letter to The Jerusalem Post that was printed on the editorial page. Entitled “Letter to a Deportee,” it was addressed directly to Bashir and detailed her discovery that her house had formerly been occupied by his family. “My love for my country,” Dalia wrote, “was losing its innocence” (201). She went on to describe Ahmad’s visit to her house and the image of him holding a shriveled lemon from his tree when he couldn’t sleep: “The lemon tree which yielded so much fruit and gave us so much delight lived in other people’s hearts too” (201). However, she wrote that Bashir should separate himself from the PFLP and should commit himself to nonviolence. She also criticized her government for deporting Bashir, making him “a refugee twice” (202). She hoped for a better future for their children.

Bashir would not read her letter for four weeks. He was transported to a PFLP training camp in Lebanon, which had also become radicalized after six years of Israeli occupation, spawning a group called Hezbollah. The PLO and PFLP were now based in Lebanon, from where they launched attacks at Israel. Israel funded Christian Lebanese militias to fight these organizations in a proxy war. By 1982, the PLO left for Tunisia, while other Palestinians in Lebanon fled to Cyprus. After the PLO left, hundreds of Palestinians were killed at two refugee camps in Lebanon after the assassination of President Bashir Gemayel, a Lebanese Christian. As Israeli troops stood outside the camps, Phalangist Christian militias slaughtered everyone inside. The response was protests in Israel, including by Dalia and her husband.

Bashir, Jabril Rajoub, and two other deportees were stateless while living in Lebanon, where they were transported by the PFLP contact named Abu Mohammad Saleh Tartir to an international Red Cross station. PLO, PFLP, and Arab diplomats visited them there. While many Palestinians still supported UN Resolution 242, which would require Israel to withdraw behind the Green Line, Bashir and others supported Resolution 194, which would allow Palestinians to return to their homes in Israel. While Bashir spoke in measured tones, Jabril was the incendiary leader of the youth movement of Fatah. He denounced Syria, which controlled that part of Lebanon, and the four deportees were then smuggled to Cyprus.

From Cyprus, Bashir traveled to Athens, where he spoke to reporters, and they showed him the letter Dalia wrote to The Jerusalem Post. The PLO planned to sail a ship called Al-Awda (Ship of Return) out of Cyprus toward Haifa to highlight the plight of the Palestinian refugees; it would be similar to the Exodus, the ship of Holocaust refugees that was detained by Britain en route to Haifa in 1947. However, Israel convinced ship line after ship line to cancel their contracts with the PLO. When the PLO bought a ferry, it was sunk before it sailed, likely by the Mossad. Bashir left Cyprus for Tunisia. The Israeli assassination of Abu Jihad only further inflamed the Intifada.

Nuha and Ghiath Khairi visited Dalia in the hospital, where she was to receive a C-section in two days. They brought news of Bashir and his children, Ahmad and a baby girl named Hanine. They debated the future of Israel, and the Khairis expressed the belief that Jews who had not lived in Israel for several generations should leave their homes. On May 10, 1988, Dalia’s son, Raphael, was born—a feat accomplished by the entire medical team that attended to Dalia during her months in the hospital.

While the Intifada showed no signs of lessening, Arafat, working in Tunis alongside Bassam Abu-Sharif, a former PFLP hardliner, came to believe a two-state solution might involve recognizing Israel. In 1988, King Hussein severed administrative ties with the West Bank, freeing it to become part of an independent country. In addition, the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant the Soviets would no longer support the Palestinians, creating pressure to find a solution. Arafat attended a UN meeting in December 1988, in which he announced his support for Resolution 242 and renounced terrorism, leading to the Madrid and later the Oslo talks. Bashir refused to accept this compromise and kept supporting the earlier resolution, 194.

Salah, a friend of Bashir’s who had been imprisoned by the Syrians, showed up in Tunis, where he befriended Bashir. Over time, Bashir told him about Dalia, and Bashir decided to send Dalia a letter. After expressing his personal affection and regard for her and her husband, he wrote that Zionism “planted hatred in the souls of one generation after another” (217). He refuted her claim that he had engaged in terrorism, referring to the fact that he tried to return to Palestine on the Al-Awda—a peaceful protest that Israel, presumably, thwarted. He also told her about an explosive that had been planted as a booby trap in Gaza and removed four of his fingers as well as the palm of his left hand when he was a child. Dalia had not realized that he was missing his left hand until that moment. She realized that Bashir associated Zionism with all that was evil, including planting explosive “toys” in the desert for Palestinian children to find.

Shortly after receiving the letter, which made her feel “shaken,” Dalia traveled to Ramla to meet with Michail Fanous, a Palestinian Christian whose father, a Christian minister, was held as a POW by Israel in 1948. As one of the few Arabs in his high school, he was elected president of the student body and later to the Ramla City Council. Dalia proposed to work with Michail as the Arab representative in a center called Open House, which would have an Arab kindergarten and would become a place where Arabs and Jews could meet.

In 1996, Bashir waited with his sister, Khanon, to go home via Jordan through the Allenby Bridge, which was under the control of the Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Negotiated by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the accords stipulated that Israel would pull out of Gaza, Jericho, and other cities on the West Bank, and that Palestine would hold free elections. Bashir, however, regarded Oslo as flawed, and he continued to hope for the return of the rest of Palestine, backing UN Resolution 194 rather than Resolution 242. Nevertheless, Oslo allowed Bashir to be reunited with his mother, wife, and two children.

In 1995, an American settler named Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians praying at the mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and a cycle of violence and retaliation followed. The actions of suicide bombers were met with Israel bulldozing the houses of their families and rounding up suspected conspirators. The later Oslo II Accords, signed in 1995, detailed three phases of troop withdrawals from the West Bank. By this time, Palestinian and Israeli support for the peace process had declined. Rabin was under attack by Netanyahu, who was extremely critical of Oslo even though Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

Open House continued to push forward with its Jewish-Arab dialogue, which Dalia noted increasing Israeli interest in. On November 4, 1995, Dalia was returning from a convent run by the Sisters of Zion in the Old City while Rabin was delivering a speech at Kings of Israel Square about the potential for peace. As she was riding down the Via Dolorosa, she heard the news that Rabin had been shot by a religious law student named Yigal Amir: “There was an immense sense that something was lost” (233). In 1999, an Arab Israeli teacher at Open House noticed a middle-aged man looking at the children playing in the yard of Open House. Bashir had returned to his former home, intense longing in his eyes.

In 2000, Arafat met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David with President Clinton and members of his administration. Clinton continued to push land-for-peace proposals but was met with what he considered Palestinian intransigence. Clinton proposed the right of Palestinians to return to the West Bank and Gaza but not to old Palestine. However, Arafat contended that he would be seen as a traitor if he even gave Israel partial sovereignty over the site of the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem (what the Arabs call Haram al-Sharif).

After the failure of this summit, the Intifada renewed in intensity, and it spread to Arab communities within Israel. While the Open House remained an island of open dialogue, reconciliation in the rest of Israel was shutting down. Israeli negotiators met with Arafat in the Egyptian resort city of Taba, but after a suicide bomber injured more than 40 Israelis in Netanya, the conference collapsed.

On August 27, 2001, Bashir was again taken into Israeli police custody for allegedly being part of PFLP, which he denied. On that same day, Israeli helicopters fired on the Ramallah headquarters of the PFLP, killing its leader, Abu Ali Mustafa. Sharon, then the prime minister of Israel, declared war on the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli forces reoccupied the West Bank. Despite Israeli protests against this practice, Sharon also increased the practice of destroying Palestinian houses in the occupied territories—a practice that the British began during the Great Arab Rebellion of the 1930s. On November 21, 2002, 14-year-old Raphael Landau, Dalia’s son, boarded a bus to school. The phone rang in Dalia and Yehezkel’s apartment to let them know there had been an explosion. By watching TV, Yehezkel learned that a municipal bus, not Raphael’s school bus, had exploded, killing 11 adults and children and injuring 49 others. Sharon ordered Israeli troops to reoccupy Bethlehem, making Jericho the only unoccupied city in the West Bank. The “toxic atmosphere” of the Intifada drove Yehezkel to carry out interfaith work at the Hartford Seminary in the United States, while Dalia chose to stay in Israel.

On July 14, 2004, Dalia landed in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, which she left in 1948. She was going to meet Maxim, the son of Jacques and Virginia, whom she had never met. Jacques had died, and Virginia was now 83. Dalia visited Plovdiv and met Susannah Behar, whose father had been the rabbi in the city in 1943. They visited the Bulgarian Orthodox monastery, where they saw the tombs of Kiril and Stephan, the Orthodox bishops who helped save Bulgaria’s Jews and who were declared “Righteous among the Nations for saving Jews during the Holocaust” by Yad Vashem (249), Israel’s Holocaust memorial. Dalia also visited the Sofia synagogue where Theodor Herzl spoken to Zionists in 1896.

In 2003, Bashir was released from the Ramallah jail where he had been held since August 2001. Now 62, he had spent a quarter or more of his life in jail. When he was leaving, Israeli officials asked him to sign a paper stating that he would not commit any more terrorist acts. He refused, as he had never been told why he was in jail. He still spoke with force about the Palestinian resistance and with softness about the lemon tree in the garden of the house at al-Ramla. His memory of having lost his hand was still powerful. While for Bashir, the right of return was paramount, many Palestinians thought first of ending the occupation, now in its 38th year. The occupation gave rise to growing rage. Ghiath Khairi, who was married to Bashir’s cousin Nuha, regarded returning to their former homes in Old Palestine as unrealistic, while Nuha defended the right to return. Ghiath did not feel that radical Palestinian politics helped the people.

Although it was illegal for Israelis to travel to the occupied territories as civilians, Dalia made the trip to Ramallah. She saw the concrete barrier separating Israel from the West Bank. The wall did not follow the Green Line, and in some cases, it dove deep within West Bank lands. She met with Bashir in Bashir’s office, to which she brought lemon cake. Rafael was 16, and Ahmad, Bashir’s son, was going to Harvard. Bashir was afraid for Dalia to travel to his house, though he was glad to see her. Bashir recalled when Rabin visited the prison he was being held at, which Dalia suggested meant that Rabin tried to understand the Palestinian perspective. Bashir wanted not only the right of return but the creation of a single state where everyone would be treated equally. Since Oslo, many Palestinians began to see his viewpoint as unrealistic. Dalia believed in compromise and the creation of two states. She thought Palestinians should be allowed to return only to part of old Palestine. They parted, Dalia reflecting, “Our enemy […] is the only partner we have” (262).

In 1998, the lemon tree died. Dalia hoped Bashir and his family could return to plant another tree. Instead, Dalia and a group of Arabs and Jews planted a new tree on January 25, 2005, during the Jewish holiday of Tu B’shvat, the holiday of the new year of trees. Bashir heard about it from Ramallah and hoped one day to go home himself to plant a tree.

In April 2011, members of the Shin Bet again arrested Bashir, and after four days of questioning, he was allowed to go home. In the summer of 2013, Bashir said he had not seen Dalia since 2005, though he still speaks to her about her family by phone occasionally. As of 2011, Dalia lived in West Jerusalem near Ein Karem, a former Palestinian village. She said Bashir did not answer her calls or letter, believing that she violated their agreement to keep the kindergarten in Ramla only for Arabs. She wondered if Raphael’s service in the Israel Defense Forces angered Bashir, though Raphael did not serve in a combat unit and worked as a teacher in the army. Tolan writes that the fraying of Dalia and Bashir’s friendship is “symptomatic of a steady deterioration in the relations between Israelis and Palestinians” as Israel claims more of the West Bank and many wars have decimated Gaza (269). Rockets fired by Hamas have rattled Israel. Dalia remained hopeful and continued to work through Open House. She could not accept her friend’s silence, saying of their relationship, “It’s deeper than friendship. […] It has something to do with family” (270).