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Israel-Palestine struggle, personalized
'The Lemon Tree' portrays parallel struggle of Arabs, Jews
Date published: 6/11/2006 By NATASHA ALTAMIRANO By NATASHA ALTAMIRANO Every city has its history. The buildings that line its streets, housing shops, offices and homes. The families who inhabited those buildings, who laid the bricks and stones, who planted flowers and vegetables and fruits. Sandy Tolan's "The Lemon Tree" tells the dual history of Ramla, or al-Ramla in Arabic, in what is now Israel but once was Palestine. Tolan tells the story through a building on the city's eastern edge--a stone house with a lemon tree in the backyard. For the Arab Khairi family, the home they built represented hope and faith in the future of their family and its prosperity. Later, after hundreds of thousands of Arabs were forced from their homes by Jewish forces, the Khairis' home became a concrete expression of their belief in the Palestinian right of return. For the Jewish Eshkenazi family of Bulgaria, the former Khairi home in Ramla symbolized hope of a different kind: the Zionist concept of "aliyah," or Jewish emigration to the Holy Land. Tolan follows the lives of two real people he met as a journalist working on an NPR documentary: Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi. The author juxtaposes the Arabs' perceptions of events with those of the Jews: "On November 30, 1947, when word arrived that the Soviets had joined the United States in supporting the UN plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, celebration broke out in cities across Bulgaria," he writes. "This was the same news that the Khairis had greeted with shock and disbelief in al-Ramla." What is celebrated as a victory by one family is a crushing defeat for the other. The Jewish Zionists saw their emigration to then-Palestine as the return to their homeland after 2,000 years in exile, "a chance to fulfill the Talmudic promise 'He who makes four steps in Israel, all his sins will be forgiven.'" The Palestinian Arabs saw the Zionist movement as an invasion of their country. What Israelis remember as the War of Independence in 1948 is remembered by Arabs as Nakba, or "catastrophe." A martyr's revenge to one people is an act of terrorism to the other. And yet, despite the polarizing beliefs about the rights of their respective people, Bashir and Dalia maintained a nearly 40-year friendship.
Date published: 6/11/2006
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