The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan (2006)

One of the incontestable virtues of this remarkable book is that Tolan enters fully sympathetically into the lives of two people, with completely different philosophies, who are the moving forces in the book. Bashir al-Khairi, born while the family was living in their al-Ramla home in the early 1940s, grew up to be a lawyer and an active participant in radical Palestinian causes. Tolan brings us into the depths of his life, more than 1/4 of it was spent in Israeli jails, by showing us the way that his life and heart was deeply rooted in the Palestinian soil and the struggle of the people to be able to return to their ancestral homes. The moving story of his own loss--where an Israeli land mine had exploded in his hand as a boy, blowing it off except for his left thumb, a thumb he always kept "hitched" to his coat pocket so no one could perceive his loss--helps us see that even those who live to full age (Bashir would now be 64) have been scarred deeply by the conflict in the land.

The other protagonist is the beautiful and outspoken Dalia Landau, born just before her Bulgarian Jewish family left that country in 1948 upon news of the newly-gained Independence of Israel. Though she joined the Israeli army when she came of age, she always felt that the story told her about the Palestinians whose home she occupied was not fully true. She found it incomprehensible that a family would just have "up and left" a beautiful home in the mesmerizing West Bank Hills without some kind of provocation or forced eviction. Tolan skillfully portrays her courage at opening her heart and home to three al-Khairis when they came to visit her in 1967, when they wanted to see their ancestral home and the lemon tree planted by their father Ahmad in 1936.

Tolan's Method

What began in the meeting at the ancestral home in 1967 becomes the lens through which Tolan then portrays the history of Israel/Palestine from 1948 to the present. Each decade and event is not given the same attention. As a matter of fact, his treatment of the last 15 years, apart from his detailed treatment of President Clinton's abortive efforts to get the two sides to sign a peace accord in 2000 building on the Oslo accords of 1993, is rather sketchy. But we are given more than enough information on earlier periods to enter deeply into the conundrum of the Holy Land. We meet David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir, Menahem Began, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu. We see how the soldiers, generals and even terrorists of an earlier generation put on suits when they are older to guide the policy of the state in the latter decades of the 20th century. We see the unbearably painful realities for Israel, where they feel they have to become almost as vicious as some of their tormenters in WWII in order to try to guarantee their continued existence in 2000. And, we meet Yasser Arafat, Dr. George Habash and other Palestinian leaders who, knowing that world opinion is against them, nevertheless devise schemes, many of them violent, to try to bring the world's attention to the justice of their cause.

The Gordian Knot of Palestine/Israel

The overwhelming sense you get as you read The Lemon Tree is that both sides are right, both sides have justice on their side, but that there is, figuratively speaking, only one al-Khairi/Landau house which the antagonistic parties can occupy. International bodies since the 1930s have tried to devise a two-state theory, where Israel gets between 50-80% of the land and the Palestinians the rest, and where each side would agree not to violate the integrity of each other's country, but the Palestinians, by and large, balk at these plans. Why? Because many feel, and Bashir is one of them, that the land was originally theirs, and to comply with a proposal which would finalize a division of the land would mean that they were forever giving up their claim to their own land. It was as if a robber came into your house and said, "Hey, let's divide all that you have 75/25 (with the robber getting the 75%), and when you say, "No," it is all mine, the world rises up to condemn you. That is the way the Palestinians feel. And, if they "give up" some of their land, it would be tantamount to encouraging violence as the means by which people can assert and control their destinies.

Bashir and Dalia, Forever Joined

But each of the two protagonists in the book, Bashir and Dalia, realizes that his/her own narrative and opinion isn't the only one to be heard. Each on his/her own is incomplete. Though each is influenced by his/her own ideology and history, each is not determined by them. They feel they are agents of choice, and they want to "choose life," as the Scriptures say. They are inseparably joined because of the "lemon tree," i.e., the house they successively shared in the little Arabic village of al-Ramla, and the heart they share is, on a sense, one. Thus, they could write the most movingly personal notes to each other at the birth or achievements of each other's children. And, they could also speak to each other with words that are so biting, so driven by the pain that each had experienced over the years, that you wonder how they could keep on talking to one another. But they did, and do.

The most moving part of the entire book, for me, was the long letter Dalia had published in the January 14, 1989 edition of the Jerusalem Post shortly after Bashir was expelled from Israel because of his suspected ties with the most radical Palestinian group (George Habash's PFLP). In the letter she wondered how her friend/soul-mate could have been involved in violent activity (he was imprisioned for 15 years upon conviction for the bombing of a store in Israel in which a few people were killed) when they both knew, at least she thought that both agreed, that such activity would be counterproductive. She writes:

"I appeal to both Palestinians and Israelis to understand that the use of force will not solve this conflict on the fundamental level. This is the kind of war that no one can win, and either both peoples will achieve liberation or neither will."

Then she closes with a very personal note to Bashir, despite its being published in a very public venue: the Jerusalem Post.

"Our childhood memories, yours and mine, are intertwined in a tragic way. If we cannot find means to tansform that tragedy into a shared blessing, our clinging to the past will destroy our future. We will then rob another generation of a joy-filled childhood and turn them into martyrs for an unholy cause. I pray that with your cooperation and God's help, our children will delight in the beauty and bounties of this hold land..."

Conclusion

And so the book ends, with a realization that the struggle to define a common future in the land of Israel/Palestine is little closer to being solved than it was nearly 60 years ago. But one has to believe that Sandy Tolan's straightforward narrative, passionately supportive of both sides, will be an important document and moment in the search for a lasting peace in that Holy and wholly-troubled Land.

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