The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East: your purchase benefits LCC programmingFor years, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians has galvanized our attention with sensational headlines and stories of bloody conflict. Frequently lost in media reporting are the human stories of individuals and families on both sides. In Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree, an intimate portrait of a Palestinian and an Israeli family emerge, both sharing a history in the same house in al-Ramla, once a town in Palestine, now an Israeli city south of Tel Aviv.

The protagonists are Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi, each embodying the hopes, dreams and disappointments of the Palestinian and Israeli people. Tolan recounts how the Khairi family was forced, in July 1948, to flee to Ramallah, because the fighting in al-Ramla endangered Ahmad and Zakia Khairi and their children. They expected to stay only a few days until things quieted down, before returning to the beautiful home Ahmad had built in al-Ramla in 1936. Meanwhile, Bulgarian immigrants Moshe and Solia Eshkenazi arrived as refugees off the coast of the newly-forming state of Israel, their nine-month-old daughter Dalia in tow. They were instructed to walk through al-Ramla, which had been freshly cleared of its Arab inhabitants, and choose a place to live. They came upon the seemingly abandoned Khairi home and settled there.

Al-Ramla before the conflictTwenty years later, Bashir Khairi and two of his cousins knock on the door of Bashir’s former home, and meet Dalia Eshkenazi. Thus begins a life-long relationship, filled with curiosity, affection and ambivalence, for Bashir and Dalia each embrace their right to the land that has been the source of dispute since 1948.

Tolan writes like a novelist, using foreshadowing and suspense like the best of them as he interweaves first-hand interviews with history based on countless hours of research. The Lemon Tree is an honest accounting of the expulsions that took place in Lydda and al-Ramla at the hands of then-colonels Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin (the latter, to become prime minister, related his role in these expulsions in his memoir, first published in 1979). Generally, the State of Israel denies its responsibility in the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, but since the 1980s, Israel’s “new historians” have worked with declassified state documents, exposing what really happened when Arab and Jewish forces clashed during 1948 (among the best of these revisionists are Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev and Avi Shlaim).

Author Sandy TolanA journalism teacher and radio documentary producer (PBS, Fresh Air, Marketplace), Sandy Tolan has reported from more than 30 countries, especially in the Middle East, Latin America, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. As co-founder of Homelands Productions, he has produced hundreds of documentaries and features for public radio, and has written for more than 40 newspapers and magazines. He currently teaches journalism at USC, where he is an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication.

In The Lemon Tree, Tolan also recounts the history of Israel’s relations with the Arab world, in particular Jordan and Egypt, as well as the development of the PLO and PFLP and the subsequent peace talks with Arafat at Oslo, Camp David and Taba. Arafat and his negotiators are usually criticized for missing golden opportunities to form their autonomous state in the West Bank and Gaza, but Tolan goes behind the headlines to reveal intimate details about what offers were actually on the table, and why the Palestinians felt forced to walk away just when it seemed they were on the verge of a solution.

This work of nonfiction is a necessary corrective to the myths and misperceptions about Israel’s founding conveyed in such popular works as Leon Uris’ Exodus and James Michener’s The Source. It also counters some of the old saws Alan Dershowitz put forth in his book, The Case for Israel. For some it may be the beginning of a long intellectual and emotional journey to discover the other side of this tragic story, the Palestinian story that has rarely been told to American readers.

At the same time, the Israelis whom Tolan portrays are three-dimensional people, and readers will develop empathy for their status as refugees from Europe seeking a safe haven from the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as the horror and insecurity they experience when suicide bombers rent daily life in Israel. Yet at the same time, it becomes evident that the natives of Palestine paid a heavy price for the creation of Israel.

Dalia Eshkenazi Landau and Bashir KhairiOften the situation seems without hope, for Israel continues to refuse Palestinians the right of return enshrined in U.N. Resolution 194. But the relationship between Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi suggests that these two peoples may find a way to share the land. While Bashir comes to believe in a single state for both peoples, however, Dalia still harbors hope for two states. Over the course of many years and several meetings, Bashir and Dalia express their views candidly. “If national interest comes before our common humanity,” Dalia says, “then there is no hope for redemption, there is no hope for healing, there is no hope for transformation, there is no hope for anything!”

Yet still, Bashir Khairi and his family can never return to their home in al-Ramla. “You, Dalia, remember thirty-seven years ago, when we first met; when I came to visit you…And since then there have been more settlements, land confiscations, and now this wall—how can there be any solution? How can there be any Palestinian state? How can I open my heart, as you say?”

Rather than believe that somehow Palestinians could achieve autonomy on the roughly 22% of historic Palestine that remains in the West Bank and Gaza, Bashir argues for “one state, and all the people who live in this one state are equal, without any consideration of religion, nationality, culture, language. Everyone is equal, has equal rights, has the right to vote and choose his own leadership.”

Both Bashir and Dalia passionately love the land of Israel/Palestine, and it is out of this passion that they or their children will have to develop new solutions to the problem that began sixty years ago.

The Lemon Tree should be required reading for anyone interested in the region, in peace studies, who wishes to understand what Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for.

Read here Sandy Tolan’s story of writing The Lemon Tree. Visit his web site.

Jordan Elgrably is a writer in Los Angeles.