Common ground in a house divided

"The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East"
by Sandy Tolan
Bloomsbury, 362 pp., $24.95

After reading Sandy Tolan's extraordinary new book about the Middle East, it's tempting to conclude that, more than hate or love, greed or selflessness, it's denial that drives human history.

Denial blinded the world to the peril of the Jews in 1930s Europe, when millions were rounded up, ghettoized, shipped to concentration camps and murdered. And denial kept the survivors of the Holocaust who immigrated to Israel from asking the obvious question: who had built and lived in the houses and villages they now claimed for their own?

"The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East" is the story of two people trying to get beyond denial, and closer to a truth they can both live with. By its end, Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi are still arguing, talking — and mostly disagreeing. But their natures — intellectual, questing, passionate and committed — may represent the best hope of resolving one of the most intractable disputes in human history.

"The Lemon Tree" tells the story of two families: the Khairis, who built a beautiful stone house in the village of al-Ramla in 1936, and the Eshkenazis, who moved into the house after the Khairis were driven from it by Israeli troops in 1948. And it vividly re-creates the events that set in motion the intersection of their fates.

Two families, one home

Al-Ramla was founded in 715 A.D. by a Muslim caliph. And though the Khairis traced their roots in the village to the 16th century, events in the 19th and 20th centuries put Bashir and his relatives in history's crosshairs.

As early as the late 19th century, leaders in the Zionist movement called for a home for Jews in Palestine. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, when control of Palestine went to the British, the British government issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which England pledged to help establish a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. As conditions for Jews worsened in Europe, the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine swelled, quadrupling (from 84,000 to 352,000) from 1922 to 1936, while the Arab population increased by about a third, to 900,000.

In 1936, Bashir's father built a beautiful stone house in al-Ramla and planted a lemon tree in its yard. The family lived a largely peaceful life, despite Palestine's turmoil. Arabs revolted against British occupation, the Jews fought the British, Arabs and Jews fought each other, and then in World War II, the area became a staging ground for British military fighting the Germans.

Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, Dalia's family was almost deported to the concentration camps. But Bulgarian political leaders and the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church protested, and the Bulgarian Jews largely escaped annihilation.

In 1948, England declared it was leaving Palestine, and Jews set about to create their own state. In a stunning show of force, Israeli troops embarked on their successful effort to control the country.

The expulsion

It's been almost six decades since Israeli troops invaded al-Ramla, but Tolan vividly re-creates the chaos that ensued: Israeli soldiers banging rifle butts on village doors, yelling at residents to leave; terrified families departing with small bundles of belongings; a forced march in 100-degree desert heat; villagers arriving (with thousands of other displaced Palestinians) at Ramallah, where they slept on the ground, subsisted on 600 calories a day and buried their dead.

The displaced villagers of al-Ramla believed the move was temporary. But Yitzhak Rabin, the future prime minister, would recall later that Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion, when asked what would happen to the civilian population of al-Ramla and Lydda (now Lod), "waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out!' "

The Eshkenazis, who had traveled by boat to Palestine, moved in. As they rode a bus through what would become the Israeli settlement of Ramla, Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi "looked out at a ghost town. Sheep, dogs, chickens and cats roamed the streets ... Stone houses stood open, their contents spilling out onto the yards. One arriving immigrant would remember a donkey tied to a post in a house with no doors. Smoldering mattresses littered the streets." The goods of "absentee owners," state records would later indicate, "were to be 'collected in storehouses' and 'liquidated through sale.' "

"The Eshkenazis and others living in the Arab homes did not give the past owners much thought," Tolan writes. "Instead they focused on building a new society."

A fateful meeting

Nineteen years later, Bashir's family had resettled in Ramallah. Bashir was a lawyer, trained at an Egyptian university, and a Palestinian activist. Dalia was a student at Tel Aviv University. The village of Ramla was firmly in Israeli hands.

In the chaos after the Six Day War of 1967, Bashir and two friends decided at last to visit his childhood home. Dalia, sitting alone in the yard, got up to answer the door. It would have been so easy to view the three Palestinian men as a threat: Dalia let them in.

She gave them a tour of the house. " I had a sense that they were walking in a temple, in silence," Dalia would recall many years later. "And that every step meant so much to them.' "

Bashir stopped in front of a small bedroom in the corner of the house. "This is my bedroom," Dalia said.

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

The rest of "The Lemon Tree" braids the story of Bashir and Dalia through the tragic history of Israel since 1967; endless strikes and counterstrikes, atrocity and reprisals.

Their relationship is sorely tested. Bashir is targeted as part of the Palestinian resistance. He is convicted of complicity in a supermarket bombing and spends years on end in jail. He is tortured, then deported. For years, he and Dalia don't communicate.

But in the end, they talk: "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."

And the two find a strikingly appropriate way to use the house that both of them call home.

It is very tempting to write off the Israeli-Palestinian standoff as insoluble. But one lesson of "The Lemon Tree" is the relatively short span of its history. The conflict between the two peoples is little more than a century old.

Though the sides seem irreconcilable, Dalia tells Bashir, "We need to strengthen those people who are willing to make some compromise." Indeed. However freighted with anger and conflict, talking is so much better than dying.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com