The Lemon Tree:
An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
by Sandy Tolan

If there is one book to read that gets to the history and passions of the Jews and Palestinians, it is this one. It will rip your heart out. It's the story a Palestinian who was driven from his home and the Israeli who moved in and their meeting in 1967. It's simply written but manages to put their lives into the context of the history going on around them. It starts with the building of a house in Palestine in 1936 and the survivial of a Jewish family in Bulgaria during WWII. It becomes clear that the Palestinians were the victims of forced ethnic cleansing and that they have no intention of leaving the land that they love. From Aamzon:

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. Built in 1936 by an Arab family but acquired by a Jewish family after the Israelis captured the city in 1948, this simple stone house has anchored for decades the hopes of both its displaced former owners and its new Jewish occupants. With remarkable sensitivity to both families' grievances, Tolan chronicles the unlikely chain of events that in 1967 brought a long-dispossessed Palestinian son to the threshold of his former home, where he unexpectedly finds himself being welcomed by the daughter of Bulgarian Jewish immigrants. Though that visit exposes bitterly opposed interpretations of the past, it opens a real--albeit painful--dialogue about possibilities for the future. As he establishes the context for that dialogue, Tolan frankly details the interethnic hostilities that have scarred both families. Yet he also allows readers to see the courage of families sincerely trying to understand their enemy. Only such courage has made possible the surprising conversion of the contested stone house into a kindergarten for Arab children and a center for Jewish-Arab coexistence. What has been achieved in one small stone building remains fragile in a land where peacemaking looks increasingly futile. But 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.

The Lemon Tree

I’ve read the book during the last Israeli War on Lebanon, and to be honest, it has changed my life. It has shaped and reshaped many thought I had in my mind since I learned the word “Palestine” (Falasteen) in my childhood, and corrected many others I had toward the “good” Zionist.

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"The Lemon Tree" by Sandy Tolan

Very few in the West can honestly claim to have been able to appraise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an objective point of view that takes into account nothing but the facts. In all fairness, until quite recently, it has been tricky to find complete information that was not deformed and manipulated by heavy ideological filters. Surprisingly, that same claim can be made for many who live in the heart of the land itself, neighbours to an “enemy” who has a destiny that is entwined, but without an idea of who this “enemy” is and what motivations drive him. Our beliefs and any actions we might take regarding the conflict are influenced by the version of the story that was made available to us, often without our being aware of how simple it is to distort facts, and usually out of good faith, we in the West have accepted almost entirely the veracity of the version that is dominant in our society. Not going into all the reasons behind the monolithic embracing of the Israeli narrative, we Westerners are only now beginning to see the holes in the thesis that Israel is the home of the “good guys”; that it is just a small, weak country formed from Holocaust survivors who had built an island of democracy and sanity in a sea of blind Arab anger. In part, this is the effect of identification with those who we perceive to be similar to us and who we think share our same values. Perhaps we never took the time to look at the conflicting versions of the same events and stopped to ask ourselves why the narratives are so dramatically different. It boils down to a question of ignorance or indifference. It is possible that the key to coming to a resolution of the conflict will only happen when we are able to suspend our “automatic affiliations” and look objectively at what has actually taken place.

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Here is an excerpt:

"The Lemon Tree"
In the summer of 1967 three Arab men return to their birthplace of Ramla and find themselves in an unrecognizable homeland.

The young Arab man approached a mirror in the washroom of Israel’s West Jerusalem bus station. Bashir Khairi stood alone before a row of porcelain basins and leaned forward, regarding himself. He turned his head slightly, left to right and back again. He smoothed his hair, nudged his tie, pinched his clean-shaven face. He was making certain all of this was real. For nearly two decades, since he was six years old, Bashir had been preparing for this journey. It was the breath, the currency, the bread of his family, of nearly every family he knew. It was what everyone talked about, all the time: return. In exile, there was little else worth dreaming of. Bashir gazed at his reflection. Are you ready for this journey? he asked himself. Are you worthy of it? It seemed his destiny to return to the place he’d mainly heard about and mostly couldn’t remember. It felt as if he were being drawn back by hidden magic; as if he were preparing to meet a secret, long-lost lover. He wanted to look good. “Bashir!” yelled his cousin Yasser, snapping the younger man back to the moment in the bus station men’s room. “Yallah! Come on! The bus is leaving!” The two men walked out into the large waiting hall of the West Jerusalem terminal, where their cousin Ghiath was waiting anxiously. It was nearly noon on a hot day in July of 1967. All around Bashir, Yasser, and Ghiath, strangers rushed past: Israeli women in white blouses and long dark skirts; men in wide-brimmed black hats and white beards; children in side curls. The cousins hurried toward their bus. They had come that morning from Ramallah, a Palestinian hill town half an hour to the north, where they lived as refugees. Before they embarked, the cousins had asked their friends and neighbors how to navigate this alien world called Israel: Which bus should we take? How much is a ticket? How do we buy it? Will anyone check our papers once we board the bus? What will they do if they find out we are Palestinians? Bashir and his cousins had left Ramallah in the late morning. They rode south in a group taxi to East Jerusalem and arrived at the walls of the Old City, the end of the first leg of their journey. Only weeks before, these walls had been the site of fierce combat, leading to devastation for the Arabs and the occupation of East Jerusalem by Israel. Emerging from the taxi, the cousins could see soldiers stationed at Damascus Gate, the northern entrance to the Old City. From there the three men turned west and walked away from the ancient walls and across an invisible line.

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'The Lemon Tree' Tells Mideast History Via Friendship

Fresh Air from WHYY, May 15, 2006 · Sandy Tolan talks about his book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East. The account grew out of a 1998 NPR documentary in which Tolan reported on a friendship between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman that served as an example of the region's fragile history.

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Some more excerpts:

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East