The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (11 page)

The shock battalion was followed quickly into Lydda by the infantry of Israel's regular army, then known as the Palmach, which rumbled down the narrow streets, firing from jeeps. Lieutenant Gefen and the Eighty-ninth moved on toward al-Ramla. There at the edge of town he saw families moving east on foot, carrying bundles in their arms, their donkeys loaded with belongings. Most reports suggest the convoy turned around without firing heavily on al-Ramla. Within hours the Eighty-ninth left the area, moving south into the Negev desert to face the Egyptians.

That morning in al-Ramla, Dr. Rasem Khairi walked under a stone archway and moved quickly toward the wounded. Jewish forces had been attacking the town from the air, strafing neighborhoods and dropping both bombs and leaflets over al-Ramla and Lydda, demanding that the Arabs "Surrender" and "Go to Abdullah." One leaflet showed Arab heads of state in a sinking ship; another demanded that the residents give up. For days the city had been without electricity or running water; rubbish filled the streets and alleys, and food and medical supplies were running out. Bashir's uncle Rasem was forced to work quickly, under increasingly crude conditions.

Sheikh Mustafa had recently returned from an emergency trip to Transjordan. He'd been sent by the townspeople, who had pooled their gold to buy bullets. He brought the ammunition stacked carefully in boxes, but in the face of the current assault it appeared the gold might have been wasted.

At sixteen years old, Firdaws Taji, second cousin of the Khairis, was a "Girl Guide," which in a more normal time would have been an Arab equivalent to the Girl Scouts. In war, Firdaws became more like a nurse, part of the support network for the town's defenders. She had learned to discern the kinds of weapon fire coming from the Arab fighters or their Jewish enemies. "This is a Tommy gun," she would say quietly to herself. "This is a Sten gun." She had watched the town's defenders set up crude rocket launchers on tree branches, adjusting the trajectory with a string before lighting the fuse.

For days, Firdaws stood near the front lines with the Arab volunteer fighters. She would bring them food. She would knit them crude sweaters. As the fighting escalated, however, she spent most of her time tearing bedsheets into long strips and rolling them into bandages for Dr. Rasem Khairi to take to his clinic.

By early June, after Hassan Salameh had died in battle, his troops had drifted away, leaderless. Six weeks later, with al-Ramla and Lydda vulnerable to collapse, there was talk of a full withdrawal by Glubb's Arab Legion troops to defend other positions. If that happened, Firdaws had no idea who could defend the town. The only fighters left would be townsfolk and the Bedouin "barefoot soldiers" against a full-scale army.

Sheikh Mustafa still wanted the residents of al-Ramla to stay put. Firdaws would recall his poise during these hours. He wore a maroon fez with a white imami cloth wrapped around it—the sign of a religious scholar. Sheikh Mustafa had been mayor of this town for twenty-nine years. He had recently ended his long reign, and now the town was governed by the head of another prominent family, but Sheikh Mustafa's influence was still felt throughout al-Ramla. All week, the sheikh had been meeting with concerned townspeople on the large outdoor veranda of his villa. He sat in a cane rocker beside his garden. Some meetings were small; in others, twenty of the town's notables would sit to discuss strategy. Sheikh Mustafa's message was consistent:
Stay in your houses. No one will leave. Our family will stay.
Some townspeople, however, including Mustafa's nephew Ahmad, had already sent their families away.

At his clinic, Rasem Khairi continued to dress the wounded. All morning people kept coming through the shelter's doorway. Some had just come from Lydda and were seeking protection in al-Ramla. Others were leaving al-Ramla, searching for safety in Lydda. Bodies lay on the road between the towns. Leaders in Lydda were sending urgent telegrams to Arab Legion commanders in Beit Nabala six miles to the northeast, requesting help and reinforcements. "Keep your morale up," the response came. "A flood of gold will be reaching you soon."

Reinforcements never materialized. The two towns were falling to the Israelis. Word had come that King Abdullah's Arab Legion would be pulling out its sparse troops, leaving a few civilian defenders, a meager supply of weapons, and the bullets Sheikh Mustafa had brought back from Transjordan. This would be no match for the army of Israel.

Soon more people arrived in the shelters with news from Lydda. Jewish soldiers were pulling people out of their homes, marching them to the mosques or St. George's Church. Others were leaving town to the east, to undertermined destinations. A few resisters were holding out from the police fort, but no one expected them to last much longer. After all their preparations—digging trenches, opening a medical clinic, buying an ambulance, stockpiling months of food, even robbing a train with provisions earmarked for the Haganah—it had come down to a word no one had dared speak: surrender.

On the evening of July 11, shortly after Beethoven's First Symphony played on Radio Jerusalem, the Bedouin soldiers slipped out of town to the south, disappearing into the plain.

At the Khairi compound, the remaining family shuttered the windows and closed all the doors. For as long as they could, they would close themselves in, delaying the inevitable. Their world was coming apart, but perhaps they could hold out a bit longer. There was flour in the storehouse, and they could live on bread for a few more days.

In time it became clear, even to Sheikh Mustafa, that defeat was at hand. On the same evening of July 11, he sent his son Husam, along with the new mayor of al-Ramla, to carry the white flag to the Jews. They went by car to Na'an, the kibbutz near the now abandoned Arab village of Na'ani. Na'an was the home of Khawaja Shlomo, the man who two months earlier had galloped into Na'ani on horseback, frantically warning the villagers.

When the Arab delegation arrived, Israeli soldiers woke up the region's civilian security chief, a man named Yisrael Galili B. (The B was to distinguish him from the other Yisrael Galili, the longtime chief of the national staff of the Haganah.) Galili B greeted the men and proceeded with Palmach troops to a small meetinghouse on the kibbutz. There they ironed out the terms of surrender: The Arabs would hand over all their weapons and accept Israeli sovereignty. "Foreigners"—Arab fighters from outside Palestine—would be turned over to the Israelis. All residents not of army age and unable to bear arms would be allowed to leave the city, "if they want to." Implicit in the agreement was that the residents could also choose to stay.

Galili B would soon learn that other plans were in the works for the residents of al-Ramla: "The Military Governor told me," Galili B wrote, "that he had different orders from Ben-Gurion: to evacuate Ramla." Orders to expel the residents of al-Ramla and Lydda were given in the early afternoon of July 12. The Lydda order, stating, "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age," was given at 1:30 P.M. by Lieutenant Colonel Yitzhak Rabin.

Firdaws heard Israeli soldiers shouting through bullhorns outside: "
Yallah Abdullah! Go to King Abdullah, go to Ramallahr
Soldiers were going house to house, in some cases pounding on doors with the butts of their guns, yelling at people to leave. Firdaws could hear them announcing the arrival of buses to take residents of al-Ramla to the front lines of the Arab Legion. No matter what the terms of surrender or what Sheikh Mustafa said, it looked as if they wouldn't have any choice. The Arab residents of al-Ramla were being forced to leave their homes.

On the afternoon of July 12, Bechor Shalom Shitrit, the Israeli minister of minority affairs, arrived at a junction of roads between al-Ramla and Lydda, where he was greeted by the sight of throngs of people walking east. He was outraged. As the man responsible for Arabs in the new Israeli state, he protested the expulsions in a conversation with the foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. Like Israel Galili B, like the men of al-Ramla who signed the surrender, Bechor Shalom Shitrit had thought the Arabs in the newly conquered towns would be allowed to stay.

Shitrit tried to put a stop to the expulsions. But he was unaware of an earlier meeting between Ben-Gurion, Major Yitzhak Rabin, and Yigal Allon, the commander of the Palmach. Rabin, the future prime minister, would recall later that Ben-Gurion, when asked by Allon what they should do with the civilian population of al-Ramla and Lydda, "waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out!'"

Not only was Shitrit apparently unaware of these meetings and orders; he also did not know that Allon had already considered the military advantages of expulsion. Driving out the citizens of al-Ramla and Lydda, Allon believed, would alleviate the pressure from an armed and hostile population. It would clog the roads toward the Arab Legion front, seriously hampering any effort to retake the towns. And the sudden arrival of thousands of destitute refugees in the West Bank and Transjordan would place a great financial burden on King Abdullah—who by now, the Israeli military was convinced, was an avowed enemy of the Jewish state.

"Regrettably, our forces have committed criminal acts that may stain the Zionist movement's good name," Shitrit would say later. "The finest of us have given a bad example to the masses."

The victorious Israeli troops had been accompanied to al-Ramla by a few American reporters. Bilby, from the
Herald Tribune,
noted that "outdoor prison cages were jammed with young Arabs, whose listless demeanor showed that they had no stomach for a fight." According to Gene Currivan, the reporter from the
New York Times,
"It seemed as if most were of military age, but apparently they had no interest in fighting for Ramie [alRamla], or for that matter, for Palestine."

A short time later, Currivan noted, "There was much excitement as Arab troops [civilian defenders] marched in, their hands high, to give themselves up, and others by the hundred, already prisoners, squatted behind barbed-wire fences in front of the fortress-like police station." Some men of fighting age had managed to escape scrutiny: wearing dark glasses and long cloth coats, they leaned on their walking sticks and limped about in the heat. Family members stared at one another through the barbed wire, and when the women or elderly tried to approach the fence, Jewish soldiers would fire over their heads. Later that day, nine or ten buses pulled up and soldiers ordered the prisoners to board them. One by one the buses drove off; men who rode on them would recall whispering to one another, "Where are they taking us?" The men were destined for a POW camp, and the Israeli soldiers directed other townspeople onto separate buses leaving town to the east.

The morning of July 14 was cloudless and extremely hot. It was the middle of July, the seventh day of Ramadan. Thousands of people had already been expelled from al-Ramla by bus and truck. Some, like Bashir and his siblings, had left well before the Jewish soldiers arrived, taking temporary refuge in Ramallah. Others in the Khairi clan had remained in al-Ramla.

Firdaws and her cousins, aunts, and uncles sat waiting at al-Ramla's bus terminal. There were perhaps thirty-five in all, the Khairis and their relatives, the Tajis. Sheikh Mustafa was among them.

With them they carried a few suitcases, bundles of clothes, and gold strapped to their bodies. Firdaws, the Girl Guide, had also packed her uniform and brought along her knife and her whistle. They had planned for a short trip, in miles and in days; they were certain they would be coming back soon, when the Arab armies recaptured al-Ramla.

At home the Khairis, the Tajis, and the rest of the people of al-Ramla had left behind their couches and tables, rugs, libraries, framed family pictures, and their blankets, dishes, and cups. They left their fezzes and gallabiyas, balloon pants, spare keffiyehs, sashes, and belts. They left their spices for
makloubeh,
grape leaves in brine, and the flour for the dough of their date pastries. They left their fields of wild peas and jasmine, passiflora and dried scarlet anemone, mountain lilies that grew between the barley and the wheat. They left their olives and oranges, lemons and apricots, spinach and okra and peppers. They left their silk and linen, silver bracelets and chokers, amber, coral, and necklaces with Austrian coins. They left their pottery and soaps, leather and oils, Swedish ovens and copper pots, and drinking goblets from Bohemia. They left their silver trays filled with sugared almonds and sweet dried chickpeas; their dolls, made with glued-together wood chips; their sumac; their indigo.

The bus came; the Khairis and the Tajis boarded it. So did the village idiot. He was carrying two watermelons. Firdaws saw her aunt give two sacks to her mother: one with vitamins for the baby, another with a glass water pipe and tobacco. With all the things left behind, Firdaws wondered, why would it occur to anyone to bring a water pipe?

The bus rolled out of al-Ramla toward the front lines of the Arab Legion at Latrun. There, they were ordered off the bus and told to march north, toward Salbit. It was only four kilometers, but by now it was one hundred degrees. There was no shade and no road, just a steep rise across cactus and Christ's thorn. This is what the people would later call "the donkey road"—if the donkey can make it, perhaps people can, too.

The earth was baked hard. Firdaws looked ahead: A line of humanity moved slowly up the hills in the waves of heat. For many of the people of al-Ramla, it was their first glimpse of Khairi women, who had almost never left the family compound. Some of the women were pregnant, and there, in the heat, a woman's water broke. She had her baby on the ground.

The families climbed out of Latrun and back toward Salbit, where there was word the Arab Legion would drive people in trucks to Ramallah. The refugees bent forward under the sun, stumbling over rocks, thorns, and sharp wheat stalks cut short from the recent harvest.

Firdaws caught sight of the village idiot carrying his two watermelons. Wordlessly she took one from him and with her Girl Guide knife sliced into the red flesh. The Khairi families and their neighbors gathered impatiently. The melon was gone quickly, save for the small piece Firdaws held back for herself; but then a young mother came to her, begging the last piece for her son.