The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (15 page)

Israeli officials indeed refused to discuss the return of refugees. The reason, they stated, was that their new state was still at war with several Arab armies. Yet it appeared that Israeli officials had already made up their minds not to allow refugees to return. On June 16, 1948, during the four-week truce with the Arab states, David Ben-Gurion had announced at an Israeli cabinet meeting, "I do not want those who flee to return . . . I will be in favor of them not returning even after the war." At the same meeting, Ben-Gurion's foreign minister Moshe Sharett added: "This is our policy: They are not coming back."

Two months later, in the wake of the conquest of al-Ramla and Lydda, Israeli officials would not acknowledge that forced expulsions had taken place. In an August 1948 report submitted to the International Red Cross conference in Stockholm, the Israeli delegate declared "that approximately 300,000 Arabs left their places of residence in the territory occupied by Israeli forces,
but not one of them has been deported or requested to leave his place of residence
[emphasis in original]. On the contrary, in most of the places the Arab inhabitants were given to understand that there is no reason whatsoever for their flight . . . "

It was increasingly clear, however, that the people of al-Ramla had been forcibly expelled. "According to the Red Cross representative who had been in Tel Aviv," declared a confidential U.S. State Department air gram, "the Jews on capturing [al-Ramla] forced all the Arab inhabitants to evacuate the town, except Christian Arabs, whom they permitted to remain. This information was partially confirmed in a recent report from a Controlled American Source."

At summer's end in al-Ramla, several hundred Arabs were still locked behind a barbed-wire fence. Most of the families were Christian; they were considered less of a threat to the new Israeli state than the Muslims of al-Ramla. The families that remained were held inside a few square blocks of the Old City, in what was now called the
sakne,
or Arab ghetto. It was near the Khairis' old street, down which Ahmad had walked to his furniture workshop.

Ahmad's house stood in silence, part of an empty neighborhood. Doors were agape and belongings scattered about after looters had their pick. Shop merchandise lay rotting on the street. Military trucks rolled back and forth, laden with beds, mattresses, cupboards, couches, and drapes.

Soldiers from Moshe Dayan's Commando Battalion Eighty-nine, having little to patrol, had been among those looting. "The men of Battalion 89 residing in our neighborhood in Ben-Shemen have wreaked havoc on roadblock sentries, pointing weapons toward them at Ben-Shemen roadblocks and breaking through them with trucks laden with different goods they collected in the cities of Ramla and Lod [Lydda]," declared an Israeli military field officer in a written report. "Battalion 89's outrageous behavior peaked when they threatened our inspector with a bullet unless he left the area while they were collecting their loot. . . ."

In the late summer and early fall of 1948, Arab men tried to return to their villages from exile in Ramallah and elsewhere. Many crossed porous front lines—Bashir believes his father was among them—entering their villages and fields at night to gather belongings or harvest what they could. The Israeli government considered them "infiltrators," and some were shot on sight. Others returned to find their crops burned. To Israeli leaders, the prospect of Arabs working the conquered fields was alarming. If hungry villagers were allowed to return for the harvest, an Israeli intelligence report warned, the next step could be "resettlement in the villages, something which could seriously endanger many of our achievements during the first six months of the war." Consequently, eight days later the chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces had called upon Jews to work the Arab fields, declaring: "Every enemy field in the area of our complete control we must harvest. Every field we are unable to reap—must be destroyed. In any event, the Arabs must be prevented from reaping these fields." Control was turned over to local kibbutzim.

A few Israelis raised their voices in alarm. "We still do not properly appreciate what kind of enemy we are now nurturing outside the borders of our state," the agriculture minister, Aharon Cizling, warned in a cabinet meeting. "Our enemies, the Arab states, are a mere nothing compared with those hundreds of thousands of Arabs [that is, Palestinian refugees] who will be moved by hatred and hopelessness and infinite hostility to wage war on us, regardless of any agreement that might be reached. . . ."

In mid-September, Bashir and his family remained in the single room near the Quaker School. The prospect of immediate return was fading, and Bashir began to hear his parents talk about moving out of Ramallah to some other place where they could live more comfortably until they were able to move back to al-Ramla. In the two months since the expulsions, the refugee crisis in Ramallah had improved only slightly, if at all. Every day, Transjordan sent twenty-two thousand half-pound loaves of bread to the refugees, but this still wasn't enough. Red Cross officials determined the refugees could survive indefinitely with adequate supplies of flour and sugar and with milk for the children.

On September 16, as relief officials expressed growing alarm over malnourished children, UN mediator Count Bernadotte reported progress on his request for emergency supplies to be diverted for the Arabs of Palestine. Australia had sent 1,000 tons of wheat; France, 150 tons of fruit; Ireland, 200 tons of potatoes; Italy, 20 tons of olive oil; the Netherlands, 50 tons each of peas and beans; Indonesia, 600 tons of rice and sugar; Norway, 50 tons of fish; South Africa, 50 tons of meat. The United States was finalizing plans to ship large quantities of wheat, meat, cheese, butter, and 20 tons of DDT. The American Red Cross had dispatched two ambulances and $250,000 in medical supplies; Christian charities contributed 500 bales of clothing, 175 pounds of vitamins, and $25,000 toward the purchase of flour in Egypt. The Arab American Oil Company (Aramco) donated $200,000 toward the purchase of baby food; the Bechtel Corporation sent $100,000. Other agencies shipped first-aid boxes, syringes, typhoid and cholera vaccines, two trainloads of wheat, and a boxcar full of milk. His Majesty's government in London, only four months after departing Palestine, released $100,000 for the purchase of tents.

Count Bernadotte continued to advocate a division of historic Palestine between Israel and Transjordan, "in view of the historical connection and common interests of Transjordan and Palestine." Under this plan, the Khairis and other refugees would go home to al-Ramla and Lydda—not to an independent state, as many Palestinian Arabs had fought for, but to an Arab state that would fall under the rule of Abdullah and his kingdom of Jordan. (After the war, the "Trans" was dropped and Abdullah's kingdom was known simply as Jordan.) Large parts of the Negev would be returned to the Arabs; the Jews would keep the Galilee and Haifa. The Lydda airport would be "a free airport" for all; Jerusalem, as the November 1947 UN resolution had outlined, "should be treated separately and placed under effective United Nations control." As for al-Ramla and Lydda, Bernadotte's blueprint declared that the towns "should be in Arab territory."

The mediator's proposals were based on what he saw as the political realities of the day. "A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine," he wrote, "and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so." Bernadotte also stressed another point that would have been of great interest to Ahmad, Zakia, and the tens of thousands of refugees sleeping on the ground in Ramallah: "The right of innocent people, uprooted by the present terror and ravage of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return."

The next day, Count Folke Bernadotte was killed in the Katamon quarter of Jerusalem. An assassin walked up to Bernadotte's UN vehicle, thrust an automatic pistol through the window, and shot him at close range. Six bullets penetrated, one to his heart. A statement from the extremist Jewish militia group the Stern Gang claimed responsibility, calling UN observers "members of foreign occupation forces." David Ben-Gurion, Israel's prime minister, detained two hundred members of the Stern Gang, including one of its leaders, future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, and ordered the other extremist Jewish militia, Irgun, led by another future premier, Menachem Begin, to disband and turn over its weapons to the Israeli army. The Irgun ceased to function as a separate military unit, and Ben-Gurion's fight to consolidate the militias was now virtually complete. Begin, no longer in charge of his own militia, began to convert the Irgun into a political party, the Herut, which two decades later would form the basis of the Likud Party.

In the wake of Bernadotte's assassination, international pressure mounted on Israel to accept what amounted to the mediator's final wish. This would have required Israel to give back conquered territory in the Negev and in al-Ramla and Lydda. Soon, however, battles resumed in the Negev, with Israel and the Egyptians accusing each other of violating the terms of a truce. As the fighting in the desert continued, Count Bernadotte's proposal, like countless other "peace plans" that would follow, dissolved into history.

In late 1948, Sheikh Mustafa traveled to Jericho, away from the cold and chaos of Ramallah. He was not in good health, and the family thought the warm air of the Jordan Valley might make him feel better. At about the same time, relief officials called for ten thousand tents and one hundred thousand blankets and the establishment of a massive tent camp in Jericho, so that many of the refugees would not have to pass the winter in Ramallah. Families there searched for firewood, denuding the Ramallah hills to warm themselves with the heat of olive, almond, and pear trees. Some refugees, unaccustomed to campfires and tents, decided to heat their temporary homes from the inside; before long they could not see the front of the tent from the back, and their neighbors could hear them coughing and shouting for help.

Near the end of 1948, Ahmad and Zakia, unable to find decent work and overwhelmed by the misery around them, decided to move the family to Gaza. It would be much warmer on the Mediterranean coast. Ahmad had better job prospects there, and the family had relatives with property who could help them find a modest home to live in rent-free.

The Khairi family arrived in Gaza in December 1948 and moved into a one-room house with bare walls, cement floors, and a roof of corrugated tin. Ahmad and Zakia gathered a few mattresses, borrowed pots and pans and a camping stove, found an old icebox from some distant cousins, and started looking for work.

In the span of a few months in 1948, two hundred thousand refugees had poured into this narrow band of sand dunes and orange groves along the Mediterranean, more than tripling its population. Two thousand people per square mile were crowded onto a strip of land surrounded by Israel, Egypt, and the sea. All supplies had to travel three hundred miles through the Egyptian desert and cross Gaza's only border with the Arab world—the Sinai Peninsula, to the southwest. "It is therefore hardly surprising that conditions very rapidly deteriorated," a UN report stated. Wages plummeted by nearly two-thirds. Refugees scoured the landscape, collecting "every movable object that could be burnt" for fuel. Thousands of refugees camped in long rows of tents on the Gaza sands.

The Khairis had come to Gaza in the midst of war and political turmoil. Bashir and his family could hear constant shelling as Israel and Egypt clashed near Gaza City and east toward the Negev. Though the Egyptians controlled the Gaza Strip, there were frequent incursions by both sides across battle lines. Egypt, led by King Farouk, was fighting for territory not just with Israel; the king was also worried about his counterpart, Abdullah of Jordan, and his own quest for territory. Palestinian nationalists, meanwhile, still aspired to establish an independent, Arab-majority state across the whole of Palestine, and in the fall of 1948, Egypt allowed a small Palestinian independence group to establish a government-in-exile in Gaza. This was less an Egyptian support of Palestinian sovereignty than King Farouk's attempt to thwart Abdullah's ambitions. Abdullah's response, in December 1948, was to crown himself "King of United Palestine," which included not all of Palestine, but what he now called the "West Bank" of his kingdom.

As Arab governments jockeyed and maneuvered, the refugees never stopped longing for home. The right of return originally advocated by Count Bernadotte was enshrined by the United Nations in December 1948. UN Resolution 194 declared that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return." The resolution—known simply as "one-nine-four"—generated tremendous hope for the Khairis and refugees across Arab Palestine. It was already clear, however, that Israel had no intention of implementing Resolution 194 and that the United Nations had no power to enforce it.

The next year, 1949, a weakened UN acknowledged the reality on the ground and created UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, to generate jobs and housing for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza. Soon crude cinder-block buildings were rising from the sands of Gaza amid the tents and dug-out latrines. Alongside stood mud-brick houses with roofs made out of reeds, empty asphalt barrels, and milk cartons. The "streets" of the refugee camps—narrow dirt lanes separating long rows of low block housing—took on the names of the refugees' onetime homes, like Yaffa, Acca, Haifa, Majdal, Lydda, and al-Ramla.

The poorest of the Gaza refugees survived on a UNRWA diet of 1,600 calories a day, including a standard monthly ration of twenty-two pounds of flour; about a pound each of sugar, rice, and lentils; and milk for children and pregnant women. Without meat or vegetables, the diet contained just enough nutrients and calories to stave off starvation.