The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan

When Alan Paton published Cry, the Beloved Country in 1948, that heart-rending classic describing the seemingly hopeless racial conditions in South Africa only a year before the imposition of apartheid, I thought that no better narrative, fiction or nonfiction, of the struggles between two ethnic or religious groups within a nation could be written. Now I know I was wrong. In this recently-released work, journalist and professor Sandy Tolan has entered into the heart of the Israeli/Palestinian problem through the hearts of two families, one Jewish (the Eshkenazi Landau's) and one Arab-Muslim (the al-Khairi's), whose stories are inextricably intertwined because of the accidents of history. What results is a gripping narrative, as hopeless as it is hopeful, filled with irony and passion, sadness and longing, as lives are buffeted by common events that often seem beyond not only human but also divine control.

The book is so called because of a lemon tree planted in 1936 on the family property of the al-Khairi's in al-Ramla (Arabic name), in what is now a portion of Eretz Israel, by Ahmad al-Khairi, the patriarch of the Palestinian-Muslim family that lived there. After the 1948 War, following Israel's Declaration of Independence, the al-Khairi's were forcibly deported from their home. A few months later a family of Bulgarian Jews, the Eshkenazis, survivors of the most devastating pogram in the history of Judaism, the Holocaust, moved into the al-Khairi's abandoned home and set up their family.*

[*the Eshkenazi's were not subject to concentration or extermination camps because of the peculiarly Bulgarian religious tolerance that led to Bulgaria's non-cooperation with the Nazis. Tolan tells the Bulgarian story very well].

Over the years the longing to return to their ancestral home never left the al-Khairi's, and the desire to set down roots in their new home never left the Landau's. In this brief fact situation you have, as in a snapshot, the painful history of 20th, and now 21st, century Palestine/Israel. What Tolan does with remarkable skill is to tease out private and personal narratives from family members, centering on Bashir al-Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, extending over more than half a century, in order to force us to look very closely at this most inscrutable of human problems. Whose land is it? And how do these two historic and proud people fashion a life together in the land?

The "Problem" In a Bigger Nutshell

In a nutshell the problem is this. Under the Ottoman Empire (dismembered after WWI) and the early days of the British Mandate for Palestine (say, 1920-30), Jews and Arabs, some of whom were Muslims and some Christians, lived rather peaceably in the land of Palestine. But forces were at work in the world that would quickly change that. The (British) Balfour Declaration of 1917 pledged Britain to work for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The energetic work of Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, began to convince the Western powers that the Jews needed a homeland where they would be secure from the buffetings and vagaries of those same powers. In Herzl's vivid sentence, Palestine would be the appropriate place for a homeland not only because it was the Jews' historic land but because it was "a land without people for a people without land." The only problem with that catchy formulation, however, is that it belied the fact that hundreds of thousands of Arabs, as well as a much lesser number of Jews, were already living in the land of Palestine and had been there for centuries. Nevertheless, the ideology of Zionism caught hold, and emigration of Jews to Palestine picked up in the 1930s.

The trickle turned into a flood as the horrors of the Nazi regime began to come to light. For example, out of the 47,000 Bulgarian Jews in 1940, all but 5,000 decided to leave Bulgaria, many emigrating to Israel, after WWII. This situation could be multiplied manifold. The resultant realities, or "facts on the ground," were not only the gradual alteration of the ratio of Jews to Arabs in the land of Palestine/Israel, but the horrific realities that the Jews carried with them as they set up shop in their new land. The "fear of annihilation," as Tolan calls it, would be as seared into their mind as the numbers on some of their arms were burned into their bodies. When they received land in Israel, they were told a story--that the Palestinian people, who had lived there previously, had voluntarily and willingly just "dropped everything" and departed from their homes, some of them while the soup was still warm on the stove. With this combination of personal history and national mythology in their minds, the recently-moved Jews settled into their new homes, feeling like they not only had a right to be where they were but that they had, as it were, a divine mandate to be there.

A Contrary Story

The experience of the Arabs in Palestine was told and felt differently. Their families had been on the land for generations, even centuries, and they had a legal and moral right to the land. When they were expelled by the Israelis in the wake of the 1948 War, many of them vowed never to rest until they had their own "right of return" to their villages and ancestral homes which they had built and another was occupying. The sorry history of the 2nd half of the 20th century, with important dates such as 1956, 1967, 1973, 1988 (the intifada) and 2000 (a second intifada) being hooks on which to "hang" the pictures of the last century, is thus one large attempt to come to grips with two different histories, mythologies, longings and fears.

In the next essay I try to show how Tolan has handled this tall order in The Lemon Tree.

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