The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (25 page)

"Well, you realize it's also my country," Dalia insisted.

"No, it's not. It's not your country, Dalia. You stole it from us."

The word
stole
Dalia experienced as a slap; somehow it was made worse by Bashir's utterly placid demeanor. She sat on the couch, silent, feeling insulted and aggravated.

"You are leaving us in the sea," Dalia finally said. "So what do you propose for us? Where shall we go?"

"I'm very sorry, but this is not my problem," Bashir said quietly. "You stole our land from us. The solution, Dalia, is very hard. When you plant a tree and it's not the place for it to live, it's not going to grow. We are talking about the future of millions of people." Bashir then repeated his idea, still prevalent among many Palestinians in the wake of the Six Day War, that Jews born after 1917, or born outside of what was now Israel, would go back to their homeland of origin.

Dalia could hardly believe this was a serious idea. "No, Bashir, no, we don't have anywhere to go back to."

"Yes, you can, you can; it can be arranged. You'd be welcomed back."

"Bashir," Dalia pleaded, leaning forward, "don't try to fix one wrong with another wrong! You want to turn us, again, into refugees?"
What am I doing here?
she thought.
What is the point of continuing this conversation?

Still, she had noticed something: Bashir had never repeated the threats of the Palestinian nationalists to one day take all of Palestine by force. He had never said, We
will
take your house from you—and Dalia had avoided asking him his intentions or his political affiliations. Each had chosen to reside within the contradiction: They were enemies, and they were friends. Therefore, Dalia believed, they had reason to keep talking; the conversation itself was worth protecting. Dalia stood up; Richard seemed immensely relieved as he reached for his coat. "I think I have stayed here long enough," she said to Bashir. "My father must be worried. I have to go."

Dalia reached for Bashir's hand. "Really, I enjoyed spending time with you. And I feel that every time I understand more and more than before."

Bashir's mother and sisters came. Dalia thanked them, and everyone said good-bye. "You are not a guest in this house, Dalia," Bashir said. "It means you have to come again and again, and we're going to do this, too."

Dalia turned as she reached the door. "I'm only one person searching for the truth," she said. "And I found the thread that's going to take me there."

Ten

EXPLOSION

T
HE MORNING OF February 21, 1969, was dry and cold in Jerusalem. A light wind blew down the cobblestone walkway of Ben Yehuda, south across a winter landscape of bare trees and brown grass and down Agron Street, where it swirled around the streetlights on the corner of King George Boulevard. Israel Gefen, veteran of World War II and three Arab-Israeli wars, was running an errand for his wife, a Canadian journalist. Gefen walked into the Supersol market on the corner of Agron and King George just after 10:30 A.M. AS he strode past the checkout counters and toward the coolers in the back, Gefen noticed two young men speaking English with what seemed to be South African accents. That was the last thing his mind recorded before the boom.

Gefen was experienced in booms. In the late 1930s, he had joined a secret Jewish resistance on a kibbutz, manufacturing experimental weapons during the Great Arab Rebellion. In 1941, he'd fought in the British army against Rommel in the Libyan desert. His service as an Israeli soldier included the recent Six Day War, the Suez conflict, and what Israelis knew as their War of Independence, when Gefen was part of Moshe Dayan's Battalion Eighty-nine, which stormed Ramla and Lydda in July 1948.

The boom sounded just as Gefen passed the South Africans on his way to pick up a container of frozen lemon juice. As he was thrown upward, as the force of the blast catapulted him back-first through the false ceiling and into the light fixtures overhead, Gefen knew the explosion had come from a bomb.

He slammed hard onto the supermarket floor and looked up to see the two South Africans—it would later turn out that one was actually an Uruguayan—lifeless on the floor. Beside them a woman lay near death; Gefen gazed for a moment into her wide eyes and open mouth. A fourth victim lay on the floor with one eye hanging out of its socket. Gefen thought she, too, was dead; he would later learn the woman had survived.

Gefen looked down at his left leg to see blood spurting from an artery in his ankle. A seeping red patch, the sign of another wound, was growing larger, oozing from his trousers. As he struggled to stand up, he glanced down at his arms and chest and saw that his coat—light brown suede, he would recall—was shredded beyond repair. Gefen glanced at his ankle again and saw the blood coming out as if from a fountain. He pressed his fingers into his groin, putting firm pressure on the femoral artery at the top of his left leg, to stop the flow of blood. He removed his hand; the blood began to spurt again. He stared at his ankle and saw it was nearly severed at the foot.

"On the spot I decided, I don't want to live," Gefen would remember decades later. "I felt my ankle was cut off, and after one war and another war, I didn't want to go back to the hospital. I just didn't want to."

The old soldier looked around. Smoke and dust were settling, the false ceiling dangled crazily from above, and light fixtures, metal tins, and shattered plastic bottles lay amid pools of blood in a chaos on the floor. As the screams of Israeli civilians filled the market, Gefen noticed the familiar wartime smell of gunpowder—mixed, incongruously, with the unmistakable aroma of paprika.

Israel Gefen reconsidered: He didn't want to die anymore. Pressing one hand into the left side of his crotch, he hopped on his right foot toward the exit. Two men emerged through the smoke and hurried him outside and into a barber's chair next door. They told him to wait. After perhaps two or three minutes—it seemed much longer—one of the men reappeared and helped Gefen into the cab of his pickup truck.

"Talk to me," Israel Gefen told the terrified driver as he raced through the streets of West Jerusalem. The truck darted through red lights, dodging buses, cars, and pedestrians as the driver honked constantly. Gefen wanted the man to keep him awake with conversation; if he passed out, his hand would slip from his groin and the loss of blood would probably kill him. The two men made small talk. A few minutes later, they arrived at the entrance of Jerusalem's Sha'are Tzedek (Gates of Righteousness) hospital. Medics quickly surrounded Gefen and wheeled him toward the emergency ward. It was strange, Gefen thought before passing out: He hadn't been inside this hospital in forty-five years—not since that week in early summer 1922, when he was born.

One day after work, near the end of February 1969, Moshe Eshkenazi walked into the backyard of the house in Ramla, where Dalia was watering the flowers. He had his evening paper,
Ma'ariv,
in his hands. "Look what's in the papers," Moshe told his daughter. "They've been investigating the Supersol bombing in Jerusalem. It says here that your friend Bashir is accused of taking part in this." He raised his eyebrows.

"Bashir?" Dalia asked incredulously. "Bashir Khairi of Ramallah?" She walked slowly toward her father, who gazed at her steadily. She would recall the moment vividly thirty-six years later. The operation, the article said, was conducted by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group committed to "armed struggle," which Israelis considered another name for terrorism. The PFLP and its leader, the Lydda refugee George Habash, had boasted that their attacks were designed to deprive Israelis of their sense of "reassurance and security."

Bashir Khairi in the PFLP? Dalia stood there, the watering can still in her hands. She had opened her home to Bashir and his family, welcoming them whenever they came for a tour of the house and a visit to the garden and the lemon tree. In return she had received warmth and an Arab hospitality she had never experienced before; the family's gratitude to Dalia for simply opening the door came from depths she was only beginning to understand. As the visits had progressed, Dalia had learned more of the history of Bashir's family, especially of the expulsions from Ramla and Lod (Lydda), and Bashir had begun to see that every Israeli was not the enemy. It had seemed to Dalia that a conversation based on common history and mutual interest was not so impossible after all.

Now Dalia came to read the paper over her father's shoulder. Bashir Khairi was accused of involvement in the supermarket bombing and of belonging to an outlawed organization in the West Bank: the Popular Front. The previous July, PFLP guerrillas had commandeered an El Al flight bound to Tel Aviv from Rome, forcing it down in Algiers and holding the mostly Israeli passengers hostage for nearly six weeks before Israel finally capitulated and released sixteen Palestinian prisoners. Six months later, in December 1968, PFLP operatives attacked another El Al airliner in Athens, killing one passenger. And only two days after the Supersol bombing, a PFLP operation targeted an El Al plane at the Zurich airport, killing one person and wounding four. Dalia had watched the spectacles with burning anger; she had heard the PFLP claims that it wanted to liberate Palestine, which to Dalia simply meant the destruction of Israel and the only home she knew.

Bashir Khairi in the PFLP? Could this be true? The article said Bashir would be tried in an Israeli military court; maybe then the truth would come out. Dalia would try to reserve judgment until the trial. But already she was contemplating a disturbing question: Had she befriended a terrorist?

Bashir Khairi sat in a three-by-five-foot cell with stone walls, iron bars, and a low-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. He slept on the cement floor, and for six nights he lay in the dark, shivering without bedcovers. Since his incarceration at Sarafand prison—the old British lockup close to al-Ramla—Bashir had developed a high fever and chills; on the seventh day, Bashir remembered decades later, his Israeli jailers brought him a blanket.

"In the interrogation room at Sarafand," Bashir recounted, "there was a chair and a table, and on the table was a black
shabbah,"
a hood. "You put the hood over your head, and they beat you. They beat me on the hands, they choked me with the hood on. Other times they would chain my hands and legs, blindfold me, and unleash the dogs. The dogs would jump on me and pin me back against the wall. I could feel their breath on my neck." Bashir believed the interrogations were conducted by agents of the General Security Services, or Shin Bet. He would recall the men with a precision and seeming calm of someone remembering a trip to the store the day before. "Their faces," Bashir would say quietly. "To this day I remember exactly their faces."

After the interrogations came psychological operations. "In my cell," he said, "I would hear shots, and then someone screaming. Then the guards would arrive and bring me outside and show me a hole, and say, 'If you don't cooperate, this is where you'll end up.' Then I would be back in my cell, hearing shooting and screaming. You'd think:
They're killing the people who don't confess."
The Israeli interrogators wanted Bashir to admit to having played a role in the supermarket bombing and to describe the internal operations of the PFLP so they could put an end to the El Al hijackings. The young lawyer admitted nothing. He refused to confirm any association with the Popular Front. Consequently, he said, the beatings, dog attacks, and psy-ops continued.

This kind of treatment was not exceptional. In 1969, the year Bashir was arrested, little was known outside of the Shin Bet about Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners. In 1974, the Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer published a memoir,
With My Own Eyes,
detailing her interviews with prisoners who had endured an "ordeal of beatings and humiliation." She described prisoners who showed evidence of blows to the head, hands, and legs; who told of being punched in the face while blindfolded; who arrived for jailhouse interviews in bloodstained shirts; who described hanging from a wall by handcuffs tied to iron bars; who reported interrogations with "electricity and sticks"; whose feet and hands were bound until they bled.

In one case, Langer wrote, a fifty-two-year-old man with a respiratory disease was interrogated naked, and "his hands were tied behind his back; a rope was tied to his hands too, and he was lifted in the air thus. His interrogators beat him also now, and after each beating they ordered him to talk, and since he had nothing to say they went on beating him." Langer also described one prisoner, "blue from the beatings," who died, the authorities claimed, after "he had stumbled and fell down a staircase."

On one of her jailhouse visits, probably in the spring of 1969, Felicia Langer met Bashir. She would remember a pale man with large eyes who seemed "barely alive." "They beat me very badly," Langer recalls Bashir telling her, "until I was barely able to stand up."

Langer's accounts of abuse and torture would be supported by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, whose director, Israel Shahak, wrote in the foreword to
With My Own Eyes
that "nobody . . . whatever his political or philosophical opinions, can deny that the cases of persecution, oppression and torture described in this book are not only true in themselves, but are also characteristic of Israeli rule in the occupied territories."

Three years later, in 1977, the
Sunday Times
of London would publish a detailed investigation of "allegations of systematic torture by Israel of Arab prisoners." The
Times
concluded, "Torture is organized so methodically that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders. It is systematic. It appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy." One of the subjects of the investigation was Rasmiah Odeh, who along with Bashir was jailed in connection with the Supersol bombing. Odeh's father, Josef, whose house was demolished about three weeks after the bombing, described being taken to the prison to witness his daughter's interrogation:

When they took me back . . . Rasmiah couldn't stand on her own feet. She was lying on the floor and there were bloodstains on her clothes. Her face was blue and she had a black eye. . . . They were beating me and beating her, and we were both screaming. Rasmiah was still saying: "I know nothing" And they spread her legs and shoved the stick into her. She was bleeding from her mouth and from her face and from her end. Then I became unconscious."

Israel denied the
Times s
allegations. But the newspaper's five-month investigation concluded that interrogation techniques included "prolonged beatings" and "electric shock torture and confinement in specially-constructed cells," a method that "removes Israel's practice from the lesser realms of brutality and places it firmly in the category of torture." The
Times
charged that torture was overseen by all of Israel's security services, including the Shin Bet, military intelligence, and Israel's Department of Special Missions.

The reasons for the torture, the
Sunday Times
reported, were threefold: to extract information; to "induce people to confess to 'security' offenses, of which they may, or may not, be guilty," so that officials could use those confessions to obtain convictions; and to "persuade Arabs in the occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively. . . ."

The newspaper found that much of the torture took place "at a special military intelligence centre whose whereabouts are uncertain, but which testimony suggests is somewhere inside the vast military supply base at Sarafand. . . ."

Bashir was at Sarafand, and his family hadn't heard from him in a week. Nuha, his older sister, would recall the day he left with acute clarity thirty-six years later. It was 6:00 in the evening. Nuha had just finished cleaning the house. She was fixing her hair when she heard a loud pounding on the door. An Israeli captain demanded to see Bashir. She told him that he wasn't home. When he comes back, the Israeli captain demanded, he must report to the Muqata—the Israeli military compound in Ramallah. Bashir had done as ordered, and the family hadn't heard from him since. Their efforts to obtain any information had yielded nothing.

A week later, there was another knock on the door. It was the captain again, this time with Bashir. He looked pale and weak. Zakia came from the living room, where she had been entertaining guests. The captain told Bashir not to say a word to anyone. "His clothes are dirty," Zakia told the captain. She went quickly to his room and emerged with clean clothes stuffed in a bag.