The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (22 page)

In Ramallah, life was transformed. The summer theater festival and countless other plans were canceled abruptly. Israeli soldiers took the place of Jordanian police, and the prisons began to fill with young Palestinian men. Within weeks, the authorities announced a new justice system to be administered by occupation judges sitting in the West Bank. But the Israelis had a problem: Almost no Arab lawyers would come to court. A general strike had rendered the new Israeli courts virtually silent and empty. The strike had been organized, the Israeli authorities would soon learn, by a young West Bank lawyer named Bashir Khairi.

Bashir and dozens of other Ramallah lawyers had begun meeting secretly with clients in private homes. The occupation authorities threatened him and the other organizers with jail time and enticed them with reduced sentences for clients already in prison. "As long as there's an Israeli flag behind the judge in the courthouse," Bashir told an Israeli colonel, "I won't be representing my people." An Israeli judge told Bashir he would release fifteen Palestinians accused of illegal demonstrations if Bashir simply showed up in court to represent them. Bashir refused, as did almost every other lawyer in similar circumstances: Of the eighty lawyers in Ramallah, Bashir would recount, only five took part in the new system. Now nearly anytime a new trial would be called, the court would be vacant except for the accused and his accusers. Civil matters went underground entirely. People began to resolve their disputes in private, creating an alternative system in the face of a collective enemy.

As the occupation wore on, a sense of calm and clarity began to settle over Bashir. The loss was devastating, but it made one thing clear: Palestinians could rely only on themselves to deliver their own justice. It was clear that the right of return, guaranteed by United Nations Resolution 194, would never be delivered by the UN or the international community. Return was subsequently promised by the Arab states whose armed forces instead were crushed and humiliated. The Arab states still put up a rhetorical front—in the days after the war, they would publicly declare "no reconciliation, no negotiation, and no recognition" regarding Israel—but these were increasingly taken as empty words by Palestinians.

Strangely, though, in the midst of occupation and the utter failure of the Arab regimes, a sense of freedom was emerging: a notion that the Palestinians were suddenly free to think and act for themselves. In the weeks after the occupation, Bashir began to believe that his people would go back to their homeland only through the sweat and blood of Palestinian armed struggle. He was far from alone in this assessment.

In the wake of the June 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, the pan-Arab movement was in shreds, but the spirit of a Palestinian national liberation struggle was surging. Thousands of young men signed up to become fedayeen—freedom fighters, or, literally, "those who sacrifice." Their goal was to "liberate Palestine" and guarantee the right of return by any means necessary. The ranks of Fatah, led by Arafat and Abu Jihad, swelled, and soon a new organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), would be born from an alliance with the pro-Nasser Arab Nationalist Movement. Its leader was Dr. George Habash, the refugee from Lydda.

Across the West Bank and in exile, young men confronted their parents with their plans. Fathers demanded their sons seek the safety of higher education in Cairo or London; one son, a young man named Bassam Abu-Sharif, asked his father, "What is a PhD when we have no country?" He did not want to be "an eternal foreigner, a landless, homeless, stateless, shamed, despised Palestinian refugee." Bassam, after joining the PFLP, would recall telling his angry father, "I would rather be in prison in my own country than be a free man in exile. I would rather be dead."

For now, though, Palestinians would find themselves returning to their homes not in triumph, but simply to ask permission to peer inside.

The great paradox of the occupation was that suddenly historic Palestine was easier to reach than at any time since 1948. Within days of Israel's capture and annexation of East Jerusalem, the boundary that had separated Hussein's Hashemite kingdom from Israel and West Jerusalem became nearly invisible. At the same time, all along the old West Bank-Israel border—also known as the Green Line—Israeli soldiers had been redeployed to other fronts to patrol the vastly expanded occupied territories. Therefore, there were far fewer Israeli soldiers along the Green Line. By late June, it had become easier for Palestinian families to cross into their old homeland and touch the soil and stones of earlier days.

This is how Bashir and his cousins found themselves in the West Jerusalem bus station in the summer of 1967, where they climbed onto the 1965 Royal Tiger and rolled west, past the ruins of old Arab villages, past the husks of burned-out Israeli jeeps covered with bouquets, down the hill to the Latrun Valley, past the cement factory, across the railroad tracks, and into al-Ramla, where a young woman named Dalia was sitting in her yard, staring into the leaves of a jacaranda tree.

Nine

ENCOUNTER

T
HE BELL RANG, and Dalia, jolted from her contemplation, got up from the veranda and walked through the house to the front door. She picked up a large key and trotted lightly down the path to the green metal gate.
"Rak rega
—just a moment!" Dalia called out, using both hands to raise the heavy key to the lock. She opened the gate partway and looked out from the open space between gate and pillar.

Three men were standing there stiffly in their coats and ties, in the middle of the stifling Israeli summer heat. It was July 1967, a few weeks after the end of the Six Day War. The men appeared to be in their twenties. Dalia knew immediately that they were Arabs.

"Ken?"
Dalia said. "Yes?"

The men looked uncomfortable, as if they didn't know what to say now that Dalia had asked them their business. For a moment they remained quiet, but Dalia knew why they had come.

"As soon as I saw them," she remembered, "I felt,
Wow, it's them.
It was as if I'd always been waiting for them."

Now the youngest one, the one with a thin face and large brown eyes, opened his mouth.

"This was my father's house," said the young man in his halting English. "And I lived here, too."

Dalia was ready for what came next.

"Would it be possible," the young man asked, "for us to come in and see the house?"

Dalia Eshkenazi knew she had very little time to process this question and respond. Logic dictated she tell the men to come back when her parents were home. If she allowed them to come in, what would that be inviting?

Bashir gazed at the woman. She hadn't responded to his question. Fresh in his mind was the terrible reception Yasser had received at his childhood home only an hour earlier. At least Ghiath, his other cousin, had seen his old house, now converted to a school for Israeli children. This young woman, whoever she was, seemed to be taking her time.

Dalia looked at the three young men. They were quiet and apprehensive. She knew that if she told them to come back later, she might never see them again. Yet if she opened the door, she might not be able to close it. So many thoughts were rushing through her head. She needed to integrate them quickly into a response.

"Yes," Dalia Eshkenazi said finally to the three Arab men at her gate. She smiled broadly. "Please, come in."

Bashir looked at the striking young woman with short dark hair. She was smiling at him, holding open his father's metal gate.

"Please come in," Bashir thought he heard the woman say. He watched as she turned to walk up the stone path toward the house.

Was this possible? Bashir looked at his cousins. Had the Israeli woman really said to follow her? He stood at the gate, frozen, doubting everything. The men remained planted as the woman disappeared into the house. Bashir looked at Yasser. "I am sure she said, 'You are welcome,' " he told his cousin. A moment later, the woman's head appeared again in the doorway.

She was looking at them quizzically.

"Are you sure we can come in?" Bashir managed in his stiff English.

"Yes." The woman laughed. "Please, come up the path."

Bashir would recall stepping gingerly, one stone to the next, taking care not to step on the grass growing between them. He turned back to his cousins, who were still immobile at the gate. "Follow me," he said to Yasser and Ghiath. "Come," he said. "Come into my house."

Dalia stood in the doorway, still smiling as the men came up the path. She knew it was not advisable in the wake of war for a young Israeli woman to invite three Arab men inside her house. This prospect, however, did not unnerve her in the least. Dalia had sensed a vulnerability in these young men, and she was certain they had no intention of harming her. She felt safe.

"Please, give me five minutes," Dalia told the men. "Only five minutes." She wanted the inside of the place to look nice, so that her visitors would have a good image of the house and the people living in it.

Bashir barely heard her. He was taking in the garden: purple and yellow flowers shaped like candles and closed against the sun; the flowering
fitna
tree his mother had told him about, exploding from the branches in brilliant white and yellow; thick, deep red roses from abundant bushes.

Behind the house stood a palm tree, its gray tufts rising into broad green leaves far above the roof. In the backyard, he hoped, the lemon tree would still be standing.

Bashir fixed his gaze upon the wooden front door, the one his father had always knocked on when he came home from work, before July 1948, announcing his arrival and bursting through the door as Bashir raced toward him.

What was taking her so long? It had seemed much longer than five minutes. What was she doing? Could she be calling the police? The cousins grew increasingly wary.

Bashir could see the white Jerusalem stone his father had laid with his own hands thirty-one years earlier. If he were standing a bit closer, Bashir could run his fingertips along its cratered surface, its miniature hills and valleys like the landscape of Palestine itself.

"You can come inside now," the young woman was saying. She had reappeared in the doorway. "You are welcome. Come in, feel at home." It was a universal welcome—Make yourself at home;
Mi casa es su casa; Ahlan wa-sahlan; Baruch habah
—yet these particular words seemed especially strange to Bashir as he approached the front door: Feel at home.

The cousins crossed the threshold: Bashir first, followed by Yasser and Ghiath. Bashir took a few careful steps and looked around, standing in silence, breathing in the large open room, exhaling, breathing it in again. It was much as he had pictured it: spare and clean. He would recall feeling as if he were in a mosque; as if he, Bashir, were a holy man.

Dalia would recall leading the cousins through each room, wanting them to feel welcome and comfortable. After the initial tour, she told them to take their time and experience the house as they wished to. She withdrew, watching them with fascination.

Bashir looked like a man in a trance. He floated down hallways and in and out of doorways, touching tile, glass, wood, painted plaster wall, absorbing the tactile feel of every surface.

"And I had a sense that they were walking in a temple, in silence," Dalia would remember many years later. "And that every step meant so much to them."

Bashir stopped in front of the open door to a small bedroom in the corner of the house, near the backyard. He could hear Dalia's voice behind him. "This is my bedroom," she said.

"Yes," Bashir said. "And it was mine."

Dalia looked up at the wall above her bed. On it she had tacked a picture of a beaming, blue-eyed Israeli soldier from a cover of
Life
magazine—the archetype of the Israeli Sabra. The soldier was standing chest high in the Suez Canal, his Uzi thrust above his head at the end of the Six Day War. To Dalia the image stood for liberation, for warding off a threat, and for survival. Standing with Bashir in the doorway to the bedroom, she suddenly realized, for the first time, that Bashir might see that poster differently.

Bashir would recall Dalia saying, "I think you left the house when you were very young. Maybe the same year we came."

Bashir wanted to explode, to yell,
We didn't "leave" the house! You forced us out!
Instead he said, "We haven't been properly introduced. My name is Bashir Khairi. And these are my cousins Ghiath and Yasser."

Dalia introduced herself and told them she was on summer vacation from Tel Aviv University. She took care not to tell them she was in the officers' training corps for the Israel Defense Forces. This was partly because they were Arabs and she was a Jew; it was also because she had felt, welling up from within her, a surge of
akhrayut
responsibility, or, literally, an ability to respond to the other. Questions from her childhood returned: What was an Arab house? Who had lived here before? Why did they leave? She realized that these men would have answers. She thought:
Finally I have opened a door that has so long been closed.
Dalia would recall this moment as the beginning of her quest toward understanding.

"And now," Dalia said, "will you allow me to treat you as guests? May I offer you something to drink?"

As guests,
Bashir thought.
Should a person be a guest in his own house? "I
don't mind at all," he said quickly to Dalia. "Yes, thank you."

"Let's sit in the garden," Dalia said, pointing toward the backyard. "It's very beautiful. What would you like? Lemonade? Turkish coffee?"

The three cousins sat in the sun in the garden. Bashir's eyes were like the lens of a camera, taking in exterior walls, window frames, roofline. He recorded soil, sand, branches, leaves, fruit. He even recorded the blades of grass growing out between the layers of stone on the house. Now his eyes rested on the lemon tree, standing in the corner of the garden.

"I don't think they changed anything in the house," Yasser said.

"Only the furniture," Bashir replied.

Dalia came with drinks—Bashir would remember small cups of Turkish coffee; Dalia is certain she served lemonade. "I hope that this visit gave you some rest," she said, placing small china cups and saucers—or perhaps it was the glasses of lemonade—before each cousin.

"Of course, of course," Bashir said.

They made quiet small talk and listened to one another sip. After a few minutes, Yasser stood up. "I think it's time to go," he said. Bashir, however, wasn't quite ready.

"Could you give me permission to have another look at the house?" he asked Dalia.

She answered with a smile. "Of course! Feel at home."

Bashir looked at Yasser. "I'm going to go for just a minute," he said.

A few minutes later, Dalia and Bashir were facing each other again at the gate. "I hope we will meet again," said Dalia.

"Yes, of course, Dalia," Bashir said. "I hope to see you again. And one day you must come to visit us in Ramallah."

"How will I know where to find you?"

"When you arrive in Ramallah, ask anyone," said Bashir. "They will show you to my home."

The cousins climbed onto the Israeli bus and sat as before, one behind the other. They rode east in silence, exhausted. They had seen their houses; now what? On the way home, there were no surprises and everything looked more familiar. Bashir gazed out the window at nothing, aware of a new burden resting like stones on his chest.

Bashir climbed the concrete steps to the house in Ramallah. He opened the door and found his sisters and brothers, Ahmad, and Zakia all waiting for the returning traveler. In the middle, in a chair at the kitchen table, sat Ahmad. Bashir couldn't bear it. "I am very tired," he said. "The way was long and the story is longer. Let me rest first, and tomorrow I will tell you everything." It was only 6:00 P.M.

"Sleep, my son," Ahmad said, his eyes watering. "Sleep,
habibi,
my dear son."

In the morning the family was waiting. Bashir took his time, recounting every moment of the journey with his cousins. Everyone pumped Bashir with questions—everyone, that is, except Ahmad, who remained quiet while the others demanded a replay of Bashir's every step, his every touch of stone. Did the light still stream in through the south windows in the afternoon? Were the pillars on the gate still standing straight? Was the front gate still painted olive green? Was the paint chipping? "If it still is," Zakia said, "when you go back you can bring a can of paint to make it new again, Bashir; you can bring shears and cut the grass growing up along the stone path. How is the lemon tree, does it look nice? Did you bring the fruit?. . . You didn't? Did you rub the leaves and smell them, did your fingers smell like fresh-cut lemons? How were the stones of the house, were they still cool and rough to the touch?. . . What else, Bashir, what else? Please don't leave anything out."

Throughout the interrogation, Ahmad had been still as a mountain, his eyes watering. Abruptly he stood, pushing back his chair. Tears streaked his face as he left the kitchen and walked down the hallway. All eyes followed Ahmad, but no one dared call him back. He closed the bedroom door.

"God forgive you, my son," Zakia said. "You have opened our wounds again."

In the summer of 1967, conversations like that of the Khairis were taking place throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Palestinians had made pilgrimages across the Green Line to childhood homes. They came back burdened with bittersweet accounts of a garden in bloom, of a stone archway with the Arabic script scratched out, of a piano out of tune, of a key that still fit the lock, of wooden doors opened and iron doors slammed shut. It hardly mattered whether a refugee was old enough to remember his home; the landscape and the dream of return were imbibed with mother's milk, so that if there was no memory, there nevertheless seemed to be.

Generations unborn in 1948 spoke the details of neighborhoods in villages destroyed before they were born. For these families there was only the earth itself, and occasionally the rubble of an old cornerstone, to visit and record; yet in Jaffa, Haifa, West Jerusalem, Lydda, and al-Ramla, where the old Arab houses still stood, Palestinians could retrieve tactile proof of their memories: a sprig from an olive tree, a stone from the garden, a handful of figs. Later that summer, Bashir and his younger brother Kamel returned from a second visit to Dalia and the house in al-Ramla; Kamel, despite being only a year old in 1948, swore he remembered the home. The younger brother had accepted a gift of four lemons from Dalia, which he delivered into the hands of his father. Ahmad placed one of them in a glass case in the living room.

Such physical proof of loss only deepened the longing and made even more fervent the wish to go home. The Six Day War may have made the return of the refugees less likely than ever; but to Bashir, his family, and hundreds of thousands of refugees in the camps of the West Bank and Gaza, the sudden nearness of the lost gardens made exile even more intolerable. In the summer of 1967, the dream of return was as ferocious as ever.