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

The Lemon Tree traces several phases in Dalia and Bashir’s friendship. When they were young, they were idealistic about forging a friendship based on open dialogue and the connection emblematized by their sharing the same house (in fact, they both lived in the same room in that house, though of course at different times). When Bashir first visited Dalia, she gave him several lemons from the tree that his father, Ahmad, planted in the 1930s. These lemons were such a poignant reminder of the house that Ahmad built that he kept these lemons in a glass case in his house in Ramallah, where they represented not only Bashir’s dreams of returning to his home but also Dalia’s recognition of his longing.

Maintaining this friendship did not prove easy, however. In part, the challenges were external: Dalia and Bashir had difficulty staying in touch over the years, as Bashir was jailed many times and then lived for a time in exile. Even after he returned to the West Bank, the security barriers set up between Israel and the West Bank made it hard for Dalia to visit him. Though justified as necessary for Israel, these physical boundaries also function as a symbol of the mistrust that Dalia repeatedly describes as hindering mutual understanding and (ultimately) peace.

Despite Dalia and Bashir’s respect for one another personally, Tolan shows that their friendship was also marked by seemingly irreconcilable disagreements. Bashir continued to hope for his family’s return to his old house; he favored a one-state solution in which anyone who came to the country after 1918 would need to emigrate. Conversely, Dalia believed in the right of Jews who settled after 1918 to remain in Israel and argued that while Palestinians possessed a theoretical right to their old homes, they could not return en masse. Instead, she argued for a two-state solution in which many Palestinians would need to accept their exile. These positions are mutually exclusive and, Tolan suggests, tend to sound nonsensical to those on the opposite side of the debate; Dalia was stunned the first time Bashir suggested she should leave the only country she had ever known, while Bashir struggled to understand what it meant to “have a right [to return], but not be able to exercise it” (261).

Over the years, Dalia and Bashir approached their differences in various ways. During the final meeting Tolan recounts, Bashir mourned the fact that the subject had even come up; he hoped by avoiding it, they could simply interact as friends. The symbolic withering of the lemon tree, which coincided with the growing distance between Dalia and Bashir, implies that this is not an option. However, much as Dalia continued to hope for the regrowth of her friendship with Bashir, she also planted another tree in her yard. Although relationships between Israelis and Palestinians can be difficult, The Lemon Tree suggests, they represent the only way forward.

Bashir and Dalia’s lives have been affected by politics and events beyond their control. Dalia’s family left Bulgaria after the Holocaust, and before they arrived in Israel, Israeli forces uprooted Palestinians like the Khairis from their homes. To some extent, Bashir and Dalia are thus representative of Palestinians and Israelis broadly. For example, Tolan draws attention to the fact that Dalia was born just days after the UN announced the plan to partition Palestine, making her birth analogous to the birth of Israel. Later, Tolan juxtaposes the failure of the Oslo Accords and the growth of the Intifada with the deterioration of Bashir’s and Dalia’s relationship. By the end of the book, while they still have personal regard for each other, they are distanced from each other, just as Israelis and Palestinians seem no closer to finding a peaceful solution to coexistence.

At the same time, Tolan underscores the particularity of both Bashir and Dalia’s experiences—the specific ways in which broad historical forces manifest in their lives. For example, the uncle of Bashir’s father, Sheikh Mustafa, expressed Palestinian nationalist sensibilities but also butted heads with the fedayeen over taxation during the Arab Rebellion. Tolan also includes anecdotes that have nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict—e.g., his account of Dalia’s cancer diagnosis and difficult pregnancy. Such details emphasize that Bashir, Dalia, and others like them are multifaceted individuals rather than mere stand-ins for their respective “sides.”

The very structure of The Lemon Tree emphasizes this. In intercutting between biographies of its two principal figures and its overview of Israeli and Palestinian history, it illustrates how the political and personal intertwine but also how they can diverge.