Lemon Tree (Tolan)

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
Sandy Tolan, 2006
Bloomsbury USA
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781596913431


Summary  
In 1967, not long after the Six Day War, three young Arabs ventured into the town of Ramla, in Jewish Israel. They were on a pilgrimage to see their separate childhood homes, from which their families had been driven out nearly twenty years before during the Israeli war for independence. Only one was welcomed: Bashir Al-Khayri was greeted at the door by a young woman named Dalia.

This act of kindness in the face of years of animosity and warfare is the starting point for a remarkable true story of two families, one Arab, one Jewish; an unlikely friendship that encompasses the entire modern history of Israelis and Palestinians and that holds in its framework a hope for true peace and reconciliation for the region. (From the publisher