The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (28 page)

Bashir would live the monotonous routine that defined prison life: up at 6:30, prison count, breakfast of one egg or a piece of bread and cheese, a morning of study, a lunch of thin soup, then an afternoon of more study, discussion, and rest. Exercise was discouraged, prisoners would recall, to prevent them from becoming physically stronger.

Fellowship grew from the common experience of incarceration, visceral hatred of occupation, and the dream of return. Prison study groups pored over Hegel, Lenin, Marx, Jack London, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
and John Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath.
Prison officials carefully screened incoming books to intercept Palestinian nationalist literature, but occasionally some made it through, including the late Ghassan Kanafani's
Return to Haifa,
which prompted renewed discussions about UN Resolution 194. Sometimes a visitor even managed to smuggle in verse from the beloved Palestinian poet-in-exile Mahmoud Darwish.

It was crucial to prison life to find ways to pass the time. The men would listen to Chopin, the great Arabic classical singer Umm Kulthum, and the Lebanese star Fayrouz as they played chess or backgammon on the floor of their cells. They would sit in a big circle, sometimes two or three times a day, to discuss dialectical materialism; the finer points of Soviet versus Chinese Communism; political tensions in Vietnam, South Africa, Rhodesia, or Cuba; Nixon's and Kissinger's ventures in China and the Middle East; the philosophical history of the American Revolution; and the question of Palestine. Often one prisoner would volunteer to study an issue in depth, prepare a paper, and present it at a subsequent meeting. The news of the day came generally from Hebrew-language newspapers, which, over the years, Bashir and his fellow inmates would learn to read.

In the evenings, the prisoners would create their own theater: comedy skits, Shakespeare, Arabic literature, and impromptu compositions about prison interrogations. Other times the men would sing their history: nationalist songs, harvest songs, songs from villages long destroyed; or they would debate whose Palestinian political faction spoke to the people's deepest aspirations and invent new slogans to attach to each faction. Bashir had become a committed Marxist.

Every month, Ahmad would look forward to his prison visit with Bashir. "He couldn't wait," Khanom recalled. Many times, however, the night before the visit, Ahmad would break into cold sweats. "He would get the shakes, like an addiction," said Khanom. "And the next day he would be sick and exhausted. And so often he could not go," leaving Zakia to make the visit without him. On one such occasion, Khanom, who had moved back to the West Bank from Amman in order to visit Bashir every month, told her mother, "You were very happy to have the baby boy. But life has not been easy with Bashir."

Zakia said nothing, but when they got to the prison, she teased Bashir with his sister's words. "Can you believe what your sister is saying about you?" Zakia asked Bashir.

"Bashir was very difficult," said Khanom. "When he was in prison we would send him special food, and he would send it back. We sent him clothes, and he refused to wear them. He forbade us from coming in a taxi. All other families came by public transport in buses, and we would refuse to take a bus. He refused to see us several times when we visited him because we had arrived in taxis—he was tough on us. He wanted to be one of the people, and we did not help him in that. So eventually we took the bus."

During her visits, Khanom noticed that Bashir had become a leader among the prisoners. "He would always ask us to take something to other prisoners' families," she said. "Always he was helping the poor and needy families. He would ask for shoes for this family; clothes and medicine for that family. At the beginning of the school year, he would arrange for books for another family. Every time we visited, he asked us to do this."

As the years passed, Nuha Khairi marked the events in her life that Bashir, her younger brother, hadn't witnessed: her marriage to Ghiath, their cousin who had made the journey to al-Ramla in 1967; the birth of her first son, Firas, a second son, Senan, and a third, Jazwan; birthdays; anniversaries; celebrations. His brother and sister were moving into middle age, and still Bashir remained in prison.

Khanom consoled herself with the thought that Bashir, her modest, undemanding younger brother, possessed the traits of a Muslim holy man, Omar Ibn Khattab, the second caliph, or successor, to the Prophet Mohammad. Omar Ibn Khattab lived in the seventh century. "Decent man, disciplined, serious, responsible, a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Every time I read about Khattab, I would think about Bashir."

For years, Dalia would walk past the Ramla prison on her way to work. Nearly every day, she thought about making contact with Bashir. At least, she thought, she could find out if he was there; indeed, for a time he was. Yet she never inquired about him. Dalia's urge to find out, she would say later, was outweighed by the desire not to know.
Who needs to know all of this?
she would remember thinking.
Why open a wound? Why start all this again?

Dalia still felt "grievously betrayed." For years she had waited for some signal from Bashir, some indication that he was safe and that he was innocent, or sorry.

"Indeed, I was for many years waiting for a letter saying, 'I never did this,' " Dalia said, her voice rising. "Or: 'If I did this, I am very, very
sorry'
But I never received such a letter. But I am his friend,
yesi
Am I his friend or
not?
If I am his friend, he can tell
me frankly.
'I had nothing whatsoever to
do
with it.' And yet he belongs to an organization that puts on its agenda to
destroy Israel,
also through
terror actions
—so-called armed struggle. Bombing buses and so on where also Palestinians are. Where Palestinian
children
can be, because terror is indiscriminate. And /can be on one of these buses,
tool!

"I believed he was guilty. I still believe so. And I would be the happiest person on earth to be disabused of this notion."

At her core, Dalia believed that what Bashir did, if he did it, "was not an answer. And if it is an answer, it is not an answer I can accept."

At times, Dalia would consider entering into a new discussion with the family. But then she would remember the Supersol bombing.

In the fifteen years Bashir spent inside Israeli jails, wars would be fought and lost and leaders would rise and be shot down. In 1973, Egypt launched a surprise attack in what came to be known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War. An American president, Richard Nixon, resigned in disgrace, to be replaced by Gerald Ford, and then Jimmy Carter, who spoke of human rights and peace in the Middle East. Civil war broke out in Lebanon, where the Israelis would launch two invasions. In 1974 Arafat addressed the United Nations in New York, to the fury of Israel and thousands of American demonstrators, but to a standing ovation in the General Assembly, where he offered his dream of the "Palestine of tomorrow," whereby Arab and Jew would live side by side in a secular, democratic state. The Palestinian movement began to show signs of deep divisions over whether to accept the UN resolution recognizing Israel, which meant a possible end to the dream of return. Bashir and his fellow inmates debated these issues without rest. For Bashir, there could never be compromise on the right of refugees to return to their homes.

Bashir began to draw: first political caricatures, then map after map of Palestine, then more expressive renderings—drawings of uprooted trees, demolished houses, and Palestinians under arrest. One painting he made in the 1970s shows a green-eyed Palestinian peasant woman, one hand on an olive branch and the other holding a torch with the colors of the Palestinian flag. With another prisoner, he passed dozens of hours making a strikingly detailed replica of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, gluing three thousand threads and hundreds of tiny blue and yellow squares of fabric to a Styrofoam base.

As Bashir's Hebrew improved, he began to pressure Israeli prison officials for better conditions: bed frames instead of mattresses on the floors; daily exercise; bigger meal portions, instead of the scant protein and bread that would scarcely nourish a child. Frequently Bashir would organize hunger strikes to protest prison conditions.

"When Bashir was in prison, my father used to fall asleep with the radio in his lap," Khanom remembered. "When he heard the prisoners were on a hunger strike, he used to go on a hunger strike with them. We would tell him the strike was over so he would eat, and he would know we were trying to trick him. He would say, 'That's not true, they would have announced it on the radio.' " It would have been hard to deceive Ahmad on this point; at such times, he went to sleep with the radio on beneath his pillow. "Bashir had a special relationship with his father, perhaps because he was the firstborn son," said Khanom. "They had more than a special relationship, they had chemistry. They adored each other."

Despite talks with Israeli corrections officials, Bashir reported no changes, other than those outside the walls, which he saw as disastrous.

On November 19, 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat made an unprecedented trip to Jerusalem, signaling his willingness to make a separate peace with Israel despite the continuing opposition of the rest of the Arab world. Two years later, after intense negotiations with U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David accords, which ended the state of war between Egypt and Israel. It had been twelve years since the Arab world suffered catastrophic losses in the Six Day War and six years since Egypt had regained a measure of military respect in the Yom Kippur War, or what the Palestinians knew as the October War, of 1973; now, following Camp David, Israel would begin its pullout from the Sinai Peninsula.

For many in the West, in Israel, and in Egypt, Sadat was a hero, a statesman who risked his life to make peace across what Rabin would call the "wall of hate surrounding Israel"; it was, for supporters, a necessary first step toward a Middle East finally at peace. Indeed, the Camp David accords envisioned a five-year transition to "full autonomy" for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Yet Palestinians were not represented in the Camp David talks, and the accord did not address the dreams that remained central to millions of Palestinians: the right of return and the future of Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state.

Many Palestinians, including Bashir, believed the Egyptian president had sold them out by negotiating his own deal and not focusing on a comprehensive settlement involving all the parties. Demonstrations against Sadat and Camp David erupted across the occupied territories. In the coming years, the Begin government would refuse to withdraw from the West Bank and instead intensified Israel's construction of settlements in the territories. Led by Ariel Sharon and the religious parties, the ruling coalition of Begin's Likud government rushed to create new "facts on the ground," laying claim to Eretz Yisrael in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians were required to present proof of ownership or make way for bulldozers, barbed-wire fences, and Israeli settlers. Palestinians thus came to see their deepest fears realized: They were still stateless, the occupation was becoming more entrenched, and now they would need to go forward without Egypt, their most powerful ally in their decades-long liberation struggle. In the West Bank, Sadat became so despised among Palestinians that he spawned a new word in the Palestinian Arabic dialect: To this day, to be a
sadati
is to be one who is weak, one who capitulates, one who acts cowardly, or, in the words of an old friend of Bashir's, "someone who is ready to make concessions in exchange for false personal glory." In 1981, the Egyptian president would pay for his courage, or his cowardice, with his life. On October 6, while watching a military parade with foreign dignitaries, he was assassinated by gunmen from Islamic Jihad in Cairo.

Throughout the late 1970s, Dalia would often sit on her veranda in Ramla after work, gazing out at the Queen Elizabeth roses. During this period, she often felt "swept into despair by collective forces clashing against each other" and worried that "my spirit was being crushed by a historic wheel of inevitability." She wondered if the conflict with the Palestinians would ever end. She knew that each side often seemed to want to wish the other away, but her own attempts to block the Khairi family from her mind were not working. "Something within me kept pushing," she wrote years later. "A little nagging voice wished to figure out why it came to me to be involved in this. People came and knocked on my door, and I chose to open it. Is that door now forever shut? Was that a fleeting opportunity, a passing episode?"

Dalia would recall hours of contemplation about the Khairi family and about the house she lived in, "which my father bought as 'abandoned property from the state.' But this house did not belong to the state; it belonged to the family that had built it, that had put its resources into it, that had hoped to raise its children and grow old in this house. I could imagine myself in the Khairis' place."

Is it either us or them?
Dalia thought.
Either I live in their house while they are refugees, or they live in my house while I become a fugitive? There must be another possibility. But what is it?

Moshe and Solia were growing old. "I knew that one day," Dalia said, "I would inherit that house."

In the years Bashir spent in one Israeli prison after another—by his count, he moved seventeen times in fifteen years—he would from time to time talk about a young Israeli woman and the door she had opened for his family. "I told my friends in prison about my visits to the house," he would recall. "And what I saw in Dalia. It seemed she was someone different. I would say, 'She's open-minded, she's different compared with the other Israelis that I met.'

"I hope," Bashir would say, "she is not a lonely candle in a darkened room."