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

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Author Bio 
• Birth—ca. 1956
• Where—Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA (?)
• Education—New York University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California

Sandy Tolan has produced hundreds of documentaries and features for NPR and is a lead producer for Working, a monthly series of profiles for Marketplace on workers around the world. He is a co-founder of Homelands Productions, an independent production company specializing in radio documentaries about land, natural resources, indigenous issues, and the global economy.

Sandy has reported from more than 30 countries, mostly in Latin America, the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. He is the author of two books, including The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2006), which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award, and which won Booklist’s “Top of the List” award in nonfiction. His other book, Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero, Twenty- Five Years Later (Free Press, 2000), is an exploration of race, sports, and heroism in America.

Sandy was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has won more than 25 national and international journalism awards, including a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, three Robert F. Kennedy awards, a United Nations Gold Medal award, and two honors from the Overseas Press Club.

From 2000 to 2008 he taught international reporting and radio at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he was an I.F . Stone fellow. In 2007, the eleven reporters in Sandy’s climate change class at the Berkeley J-School won the prestigious George Polk award, the first time the award has been given to students.

In early 2008, Sandy moved  from Berkeley to Los Angeles, where he is Associate Professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC.

His ongoing projects include Working launched in January 2007 as a regular feature on Marketplace, public radio’s daily show about business and economics. Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the series consists of intimate, sound-rich portraits of workers in the global economy. Sandy is also faculty advisor and editor for the FRONTLINE/World Fellowship program, designed to nurture new voices in international reporting and widen the spectrum of stories available to the public, using this award-winning PBS Web site as a publishing platform for outstanding work from a new generation of journalists. (From Sandy Tolan's website.)

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Book Reviews 
[An] extraordinary book.... A sweeping history of the Palestinian-Israeli conundrum...Tolan's narrative provides a much-needed, human dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But he also skillfully weaves into this tale a great deal of history, all properly sourced. Despite the complex and controversial nature of the story, this veteran journalist has produced a highly readable and evocative history.
Washington Post

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.... 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.
Seattle Times

No novel could be more compelling...This book...will haunt you long after you put it down. And it will certainly be one of the best works of nonfiction that you will read this year.
Christian Science Monitor

A graceful, compassionate and unmuddied presentation of Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lives of an Arab and a Jew, strangers who forge a connection and a reconciliation while never veering from their passionate desires for a homeland.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Quite simply the most important book I've read for ages...a handbook to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a narrative that captures its essence through tracing the connected lives of two extraordinary individuals. Literally the single work I’d recommend to anyone seeking to understand why the conflict remains unresolved, and why it continues to dominate the region.
Time

The title of this moving, well-crafted book refers to a tree in the backyard of a home in Ramla, Israel. The home is currently owned by Dalia, a Jewish woman whose family of Holocaust survivors emigrated from Bulgaria. But before Israel gained its independence in 1948, the house was owned by the Palestinian family of Bashir, who meets Dalia when he returns to see his family home after the Six-Day War of 1967. Journalist Tolan traces the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the parallel personal histories of Dalia and Bashir and their families—all refugees seeking a home. As Tolan takes the story forward, Dalia struggles with her Israeli identity, and Bashir struggles with decades in Israeli prisons for suspected terrorist activities. Those looking for even a symbolic magical solution to that conflict won't find it here: the lemon tree dies in 1998, just as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process stagnates. But as they follow Dalia and Bashir's difficult friendship, readers will experience one of the world's most stubborn conflicts firsthand.
Publishers Weekly

Journalist Tolan (Me and Hank: A Boy and His Hero 25 Years Later) captures the Arab-Israeli struggle in this story of a house and the two families, first Palestinian and then Jewish, who successively lived in it. Members of both families came to know one another and to seek dialog between Arabs and Jews. This wonderful human story vividly depicts the depths of attachment to contested ground. An excellent choice for general readers.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) To see in human scale the tragic collision of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, Tolan focuses on one small stone house in Ramla—once an Arab community but now Jewish.... Tolan opens the prospect of a new beginning in a concluding account of how Jewish and Arab children have together planted seeds salvaged from one desiccated lemon tree planted long ago behind one stone house. A much-needed antidote to the cynicism of realpolitik. —Bryce Christensen
Booklist

The affecting story of an unlikely truce, even a peace, between Palestinians and Israelis in contested territory. The symbolic center of radio documentarian Tolan's (Me and Hank, 2000) latest could not be simpler: In an old garden in the town Arabs call al-Ramla and Jews Ramla (neither name to be confused with the West Bank town of Ramallah, 20 miles away), a family cultivated a lemon tree that provided shade and refreshment for many years. When the Khairi family left al-Ramla, driven out in the Israeli War of Independence—a time Palestinians call Nakba, "the catastrophe"—a family of Bulgarian Jews took over the property, which, as far as they knew, had been "abandoned." Drawing on interviews and oral histories, Tolan reconstructs the stories each family, Khairi and Eshkenazi, told about their respective displacements, the lands they left behind, those who died and were born. His book begins with the arrival of three young Palestinian men in Ramla shortly after the Six Day War; stopping at houses they had once lived in, they asked the new inhabitants whether they could step inside to see them. Only one woman, a Tel Aviv university student named Dalia Eshkenazi, assented. "She knew," writes Tolan, "that it was not advisable in the wake of war for a young Israeli woman to invite three Arab men inside her house"; yet she did, and from that simple act, a sort of friendship evolved, even as events made Dalia more resolute in her defense of Israel and turned the oldest of the men, Bashir Al-Khairi, into a freedom fighter—or terrorist, if you will—in the Palestinian cause. Through broad sweeps of narrative going back and forward in time, Tolan's sensitively told, eminently fair-minded narrative closes with a return to that lemon tree and its promise of reconciliation. Humane and literate—and rather daring in suggesting that the future of the Middle East need not be violent.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. The book opens with the journey of Bashir and his cousins on a bus to their childhood homes in al-Ramla. What must have been going through their minds during that time? Can you imagine the internal dialogue in their heads, as they rode the bus, then walked around their old hometown? How would you have felt if you were Bashir, approaching the old home, and pressing the bell?

2. Dalia’s very existence, and her arrival as an infant to Israel in November 1948, is the result of remarkable circumstances that combined to save some 47,000 Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust. How much importance would you put on the actions of Dimitur Peshev, the parliamentarian, or Bishops Kiril and Stephan—and how much to other factors? Finally, the book (p. 43) describes Dalia as carrying “an extraordinary legacy” with her to Israel in 1948. What was that legacy?

3. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 is known as the “War of Independence” to Israelis, and the “Nakba,” or “Catastrophe,” to Palestinians. Chapter Four describes how Bashir’s family, and Dalia’s cousin, Yitzhak Yitzkaki, experienced the war. Take the point of view of Bashir, during the first several months of 1948, and tell the group how you experienced those times. Now, do the same with Yitzhaki.

4. Bashir and his family kept their focus on the “right of return,” as promised by U.N. Resolution 194, as their exile extended into the 1950s, and then the 1960s. Why was this such a singular focus for Palestinians during this time? If it were you who had been displaced, would you also demand to return home, or would you, at some point, decide it would be easier to live in peace, if also in exile?

5. Dalia describes herself as growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust (pp. 112-115). Even though her family escaped these atrocities, she nevertheless experienced a young Israel as deeply traumatized. At the same time, she grew up among a new community of Jews who were trying to re-form their identity. On pp. 118-120, a discussion of the Sabra, or “New Israeli Man,” describes a desire among many Israelis to “wash off that old Jew” and “stand tall for the first time.” How much of a role do you think the Holocaust, and reaction to it through the crafting of a Sabra identity, played in the formation of Israel’s national psyche?

6. The emerging trust between Dalia and Bashir was shattered in February, 1969, when a bomb exploded in a Jerusalem supermarket, killing three people. Bashir would later be convicted of complicity in the bombing and sentenced to fifteen years. Is your own view of Bashir transformed by the description of these events? How is this tempered, if at all, by the accounts of his torture and imprisonment? In the meantime, Dalia cuts off all contact with the family. Describe her state of mind during this time, and her own ambivalence about contacting Bashir.

7. After Dalia’s parents died, and Bashir got out of prison, Dalia did indeed get in touch with Bashir. Why? Describe her evolution from being “zealous in the defense of Israel” (p. 180) to meeting Bashir at the home of a Christian minister in Ramallah. At that meeting, Dalia offered to share the home in Ramla. What is the meaning of this gesture? What is the meaning of the agreement Dalia and Bashir forged that day?

8. In 1988, near the beginning of the intifada, Bashir was deported to Lebanon. On the eve of his deportation, Dalia wrote an open letter to Bashir that was published in the Jerusalem Post (pp 200-203). Weeks later, Bashir replied (pp. 216-220). Describe your reaction to both letters.

9. Bashir and Dalia finally meet again, in the midst of rising violence and political tensions, in Ramallah in 2004 (256-262). They find that their political differences are as great as ever, but that their personal relations are as warm as ever. How does one explain that?

10. Near the end of the book (p. 262), Dalia says, “Our enemy is the only partner we have.” What does she mean by that?
(Questions from  the author's website.)

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