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

Bashir Khairi is a Palestinian man and one of the two figures whose stories The Lemon Tree centers. He was born in 1942 to Ahmad and Zakia Khairi, who at the time lived in al-Ramla in Palestine. His family lived in Palestine for centuries. In 1948, when Israel became a country, his family was uprooted by Israeli troops and forced to move—first to Ramallah in the West Bank, then to Gaza, and finally back to Ramallah. However, Bashir always dreamed of returning to his family’s home in al-Ramla. After becoming a lawyer in the West Bank, he was accused of having participated in a supermarket explosion in Jerusalem carried out by an extremist Palestinian group. Over the years, he was jailed many times and also exiled for some time. He married his cousin and has two children—a boy named Ahmad after his father and a girl named Hanine.

Bashir met Dalia when he returned to his family’s old house in 1967. The Lemon Tree focuses to a large extent on both Bashir and Dalia’s relationship and the underlying similarities between their family backgrounds, developing The Parallels Between the Jewish and Palestinian Experiences. However, these parallels only go so far; in particular, Bashir’s commitment to the idea that Palestinians should be allowed to return to their homes in old Palestine remained a sticking point in his conversations with Dalia that highlights The Trials of Friendship Between Israelis and Palestinians.

Dalia is an Israeli woman and the other principal focus of The Lemon Tree. She was born to Jewish parents in Bulgaria in 1948. Soon thereafter, her parents left Bulgaria to go to Israel, where they settled in Bashir’s former home in Ramla. She grew up there and then attended university, studying English. She became an English teacher and married a man named Yehezkel Landau, who later left Israel to dedicate himself to interfaith work in the US. She had a son named Rafael at age 40, while she was recovering from cancer.

Dalia met Bashir for the first time in 1967 when he came to her house when she was on break from college. Dalia had by this point begun to question some of what she learned about the creation of Israel and the state’s relationship to Palestinian Arabs, and meeting Bashir crystallized those concerns. She later devoted herself to transforming her family’s home in Ramla into the Open House, which includes a kindergarten for Arab and other children and is a place for Jewish-Arab dialogue. The Lemon Tree thus frames Dalia as embodying the curiosity and compassion that it suggests could foster peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Ahmad and Zakia are Bashir’s parents. Ahmad, who ran a furniture workshop, built his house in al-Ramla in the 1930s, when Palestine was under British control. He carefully constructed it out of stone, and he also planted a lemon tree in the backyard. Ahmad and Zakia had six girls before giving birth to their first boy, Bashir. After Israel became a country in 1948, Ahmad and his family were uprooted and had to flee to Ramallah. They afterward lived briefly in Gaza before returning to Ramallah.

The Lemon Tree particularly emphasizes the close relationship between Bashir and his father. Tolan depicts Bashir as always having the capacity to soothe his father, including when Ahmad collapsed after flying to Ramallah from Gaza. After Bashir brought back lemons from the tree in Dalia’s house, Ahmad treasured them and placed them in a glass case—a symbolic moment that reveals both Bashir’s commitment to recovering his family’s ancestral home and Ahmad’s recognition of his son’s efforts. Ahmad visited Bashir in jail and died shortly after Bashir was let out of jail after serving a long sentence.