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

“Dalia believed God had a hand in Israel’s survival and compared her own feeling of awe and wonder with the feeling she imagined her ancestors had when witnessing the parting of the Red Sea.”

In the aftermath of the Six Day War, Dalia believes that divine intervention protected Israel. The allusion to the story of Moses and the story of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt contextualizes this feeling in terms of Jewish religious and cultural tradition: She believes that God has played a role in their return and that Israel is their destiny.

“Why, she thought, would You allow Israel to be saved during the Six Day War, yet not prevent genocide during the Holocaust?”

Dalia finds it difficult to reconcile her faith in God with the occurrences during the Holocaust. Her comparison of this event to the Six Day War, when Israel quickly emerged victorious, suggests how the power dynamics have shifted in the post-WWII world. Her reflections demonstrate her questioning nature, which eventually facilitates her friendship with Bashir.

“In the corner of the yard behind the house, he had chosen a spot for a lemon tree. Once the tree was in the soil, Ahmad knew it would be at least seven years, and probably more, before the strong Palestinian sun and sweet waters of the al-Ramla aquifer would nurture the tree to maturity. The act of planting was thus an act of faith and patience.”

Ahmad plants the lemon tree in the 1930s, and he believes he will be there long enough to see it flower, although the process takes many years. Later, the tree is among the parts of his home he most misses, as it symbolically represents his hope for his future and that of his family.

“Satan himself could not have created a more distressing and horrible nightmare.”

David Ben-Gurion, who was later the first Prime Minister of Israel, said this about the White Paper the British produced in response to the Great Arab Rebellion in the 1930s. The White Paper placed a limit on Jewish immigration to Palestine and did not allow Arabs to sell land to Jews, thereby trying to close off Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust. This paper sparked Jewish rebellions against the British.

“I had given my word to the Jews that I would defend them […] And I would not back out.”

Asen Suichmezov, a leather shop owner, vowed to protect Bulgaria’s Jews during World War II. To do so, he traveled to Sofia and met with the head of the parliament. His actions and those of other Bulgarians prevented Bulgaria’s Jewish population from being deported to concentration camps, demonstrating The Power of Individuals to alter history and combat injustice.

“This gap between public pan-Arab unity and the hidden interests of individual leaders would prove significant in the months and years to come.”

While many Arab leaders, such as King Abdullah of Transjordan (later Jordan) said that they supported Palestinians as part of the pan-Arab cause, the reality was different. In actuality, many Arab leaders tried to extract their own gains by attacking Israel, and they were more interested in helping themselves than helping the Palestinians.

“The boundaries of the state will not be determined by a UN resolution, but by the force of arms.”

David Ben-Gurion made this statement. Right after Israel was declared a nation in 1948, conflict broke out between Israel and the surrounding Arab nations. The combatants intended to fight to determine their land gains rather than follow the dictates of the UN resolution that had created Israel.

“‘Don’t shoot,’ Glubb recalled the response, ‘unless the Jews shoot first.’”

When John Bagot Glubb, the head of King Abdullah’s Arab Legion, asked how he was going to fight without supplies, he received this response from the prime minister, Tawfiq Abul Huda. Because of the UN embargo on weapons, which Israel evaded, the Arab Legion did not have enough supplies to fight Israel, which proved decisive in the outcome of the war and thus the boundaries of the new state.

“At home the Khairis, the Tajis, and the rest of the people of al-Ramla had left behind their couches and tables, rugs, libraries, framed family pictures, and their blankets, dishes, and cups. They left their fezzes and gallabiyas, balloon pants, square keffiyehs, dishes, and cups.”

Tolan catalogs the many belongings the Khairis and other Palestinians had to leave behind when Israel ousted them from their homes in 1948. The long list emphasizes not only the sense of loss the Palestinians felt as they had to flee their houses but also the limbo they were left in afterward; it is as though they left their homes as part of a brief trip rather than a permanent expulsion.

“Some recall it as a chain reaction, others as a deliberate, joyous step toward an ancient homeland, others as a fever.”

After World War II, many Bulgarian Jews became interested in Zionism. Even if they were not thinking of emigrating to Israel beforehand, seeing others planning to emigrate caused the idea to become widespread; the word “fever” suggests an element of social contagion and hints at the disapproval some Jewish Bulgarians voiced either at the time or later.

“It felt to many that after all their struggles, they had finally come home.”

The Jews who arrived in Israel had survived centuries of persecution and the horrors of the Holocaust. They did not regard Israel as a foreign country but as the homeland that they had been waiting to return to. Much of the pathos and irony The Lemon Tree locates in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stems from the fact that this homecoming coincided with and caused the expulsion of many Palestinians from their homes.

“For a six-year-old boy, a seemingly simple deprivation would take on enormous meaning: One day Bashir’s father told Zakia in frustration that he didn’t even have enough to buy his friends a cup of Arabic coffee. For an Arab man, Bashir knew, inviting friends for coffee was an elementary gesture of hospitality—a fundamental expression of the meaning of being at home—and the inability to do so represented a profound humiliation. Bashir would remember this shame for the rest of his life.”

Bashir witnesses his father’s humiliation in exile from his home. While Ahmad was once prosperous, Ahmad does not even have money to take his friend for a coffee, suggesting how Ahmad’s existence and culture were uprooted and disturbed when he was forced to leave Palestine. The connection Tolan notes between coffee and hospitality is particularly significant; the Khairis and other Palestinians have lost their homes and thus the ability to extend hospitality either literally or (as here) figuratively.

“More than ever, Bashir was focused on return. It would avenge the Palestinian defeat; it would restore his family’s dignity; it would repair the loss his father, mother, and siblings had suffered. It would wash away the shame of dispossession.”

Bashir’s insistence on return is motivated by his family’s experience of humiliation and dispossession. Tolan underscores Bashir’s single-minded focus on this goal through his use of anaphora; by opening a series of successive sentences with “it would,” Tolan emphasizes Bashir’s belief that returning to the family’s home will remedy everything that ails them.

“She’d been crying briefly, offended by the sparrows who had chosen to fly away rather than stay and eat bread crumbs out of her hand. ‘Why should they fly?’ she cried to her aunt. ‘Why? I love them.’ It is her earliest memory.”

This is Dalia’s first memory. Her sadness in seeing sparrows fly away characterizes her as deeply empathetic and foreshadows the sadness she feels upon learning that Bashir and his family had to leave their home in 1948. At the same time, the episode symbolically hints at some of The Trials of Friendship Between Israelis and Palestinians; from Bashir’s perspective, the compromise that Dalia urges is akin to handing out “crumbs.”

“She found this truth indigestible. For God to allow this to happen, she would recall thinking, is utterly unconscionable. She was furious.”

Growing up in Israel, Dalia comes to know Holocaust survivors, many of whom seem hollow inside. Her knowledge of what they endured causes her to feel bitter toward God.

“For the Sabra, the Holocaust survivors often represented the shame of Jews going like sheep to the slaughter.”

In the early days of Israel, the state tried to foster a culture of heroism and strength. Some native-born Israelis, or Sabra, looked down on Holocaust survivors who, the Sabras felt, had too meekly accepted their fate.

“[T]urning these people of dust into a cultured, independent nation with a vision will be no easy task.”

Ben-Gurion said this of Holocaust survivors in the early days of Israel. He wanted the new generation of Israelis to be tough in a way that many felt European Jews had not been.

“‘To us this lemon is more than fruit, Dalia,’ Bashir said slowly. ‘It is land and history.’”

Bashir explains to Dalia that the lemons from the tree his father planted at the house in al-Ramla are not mere fruit. They symbolize the centuries of history his family spent living on and cultivating the land and thus their long connection to that land. When Dalia replants the lemon tree, it is therefore a sign of respect for that heritage.

“I can understand your longing for home because of our own experience of exile.”

Dalia connects Bashir’s family’s experience of exile from Palestine with the Jewish people’s experience of exile from the land of Israel. She believed that their families’ similarities could help them understand each other, but Bashir finds the abstraction of Dalia’s ancestral connection to Israel difficult to grasp.

“Israel, long portrayed in the West as a David in a hostile Arab sea, was suddenly cast as Goliath.”

As Israel began to crack down on the Intifada, its strength became clear. The allusion to David and Goliath highlights the discomfort of this for many Israelis; David is a Jewish hero and an underdog, so when Palestinians fought back by throwing stones—the very weapon David used—it forced Israelis to see themselves in a new light.

“The lemon tree which yielded so much fruit and gave us so much delight lived in other people’s hearts too.”

This was part of Dalia’s letter to Bashir that was printed in The Jerusalem Post. She wrote of the connection between her family, Bashir’s family, and the lemon tree in the hard of the home they both occupied at different points in time. Here, the lemon tree symbolically evokes the land itself, which Dalia recognizes is important not only to the Jewish people but also to the Palestinians.

“[T]he Zionist leadership has planted hatred in the souls of one generation after another.”

Bashir wrote this in his letter to Dalia. He explained that he was not a terrorist, as she asserted in her letter, and argued that Israeli leadership was responsible for creating hatred and resistance among the Palestinians.

“All that I wish is for you and me to struggle together […] for my return to my old mother, to my wife and my children, to my homeland, to struggle with me to reunite with my palm, my palm that has blended with every grain of Palestinian soil.”

Bashir also included this in his letter to Dalia. He asks her to experience the longing for home that he feels and to understand the suffering he has endured, including the loss of his left palm when an explosive planted by the Israeli army blew up in his hand as a child. He describes the physical result of this event in symbolic terms, suggesting that it bound him further to the Palestinian cause by mingling his own flesh with the land.