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An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
Bloomsbury Publishing
May 2006
304 pages
ISBN: 1582343438
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The tale of a simple act of faith between two young people -
one Israeli, one Palestinian - that symbolizes the hope for
peace in the Middle East. In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab
men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish
Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their
childhood homes; their families had been driven out of
Palestine nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had a door
slammed in his face, and another found his old house had
been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir
Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called
Dalia, who invited them in. This act of faith in the face of many years of animosity is
the starting point for a true story of a remarkable
relationship between two families, one Arab, one Jewish,
amid the fraught modern history of the regio. In his
childhood home, in the lemon tree his father planted in the
backyard, Bashir sees dispossession and occupation; Dalia,
who arrived as an infant in 1948 with her family from
Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the
Holocaust. As both are swept up in the fates of their
people, and Bashir is jailed for his alleged part in a
supermarket bombing, the friends do not speak for years.
They finally reconcile and convert the house in Ramle into a
day-care centre for Arab children of Israel, and a center
for dialogue between Arabs and Jews. Now the dialogue they
started seems more threatened than ever; the lemon tree died
in 1998, and Bashir was jailed again, without charge. The Lemon Tree grew out of a forty-three minute radio
documentary that Sandy Tolan produced for Fresh Air. With
this book, he pursues the story into the homes and histories
of the two families at its center, and up to the present
day. Their stories form a personal microcosm of the last
seventy years of Israeli-Palestinian history. In a region
that seems ever more divided, The Lemon Tree is a reminder
of all that is at stake, and of all that is still possible.
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