The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (36 page)

On January 1, 2001, a suicide bomber struck in Netanya, injuring more than forty Israelis. It was three weeks before the end of Clinton's second term and a month before Israelis would choose between Barak and Sharon. Barak briefly suspended the Taba discussions but said he would send representatives to Washington if the Palestinian leader put an "end to terror. . . . We truly have deep doubts about the seriousness of his intentions." The talks came closer still, and at one point the two sides appeared close to an actual agreement. In the end, they foundered, in part on the issue of right of return. "We cannot allow even one refugee back on the basis of the 'right of return,' " Barak would say. "And we cannot accept historical responsibility for the creation of the problem."

As time ran out, the Taba discussions collapsed, and Sharon was elected by a landslide.

Bashir awoke to the sound of loud banging. It was a familiar sound, and Bashir, now fifty-nine years old, walked quickly to the door, sensing what he would find: Israeli soldiers surrounding the house. He estimates there were two hundred of them. It was 5:30 A.M. on August 27, 2001.

"Why are you making so much noise?" Bashir asked angrily of the officer in charge, his left hand thrust in his pocket. "You'll wake up all the sleeping people! Who do you want?"

"We want Bashir Khairi," the officer replied.

"I am Bashir."

"We want you. If you move, we will shoot you. You people make trouble for us."

"Who is 'you'?" Bashir asked.

"You, PFLP."

"I'm not PFLP," Bashir insisted.

The soldiers surrounded Bashir and escorted him into a waiting olive jeep. He was taken to a tent prison outside Ramallah surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers and dogs. The moment he arrived, he spotted some men playing chess and went to join them.

The same day, Israeli helicopters fired two missiles into the Ramallah headquarters of the PFLP, killing the organization's leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, also a prominent member of the PLO and a friend of Bashir's. Mustafa was the highest-ranking target killed to date in an Israeli policy of assassination of Palestinian militants.

Revenge for Abu Ali Mustafa's death was taken in October, when Rehavam Zeevi, the Israeli minister of tourism who advocated expelling Palestinians from the West Bank, was shot twice in the head after finishing breakfast at the Hyatt Hotel in Jerusalem. The PFLP claimed responsibility, and Sharon vowed to launch "a war to the finish against the terrorists."

Six weeks later, on Monday December 3, Ariel Sharon returned from a meeting with President Bush in Washington and declared war on the Palestinian Authority. It was nearly three months after September 11 and eight weeks since the United States launched the invasion of Afghanistan. Sharon pledged his solidarity with the U.S. war on terror. Over the previous two days, a car bomb and three human bombs had exploded in Jerusalem and Haifa, killing 25 Israelis and wounding 229.

At dusk on Monday, American-made F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopter gunships unleashed a barrage of rockets and missiles on Palestinian Authority headquarters and police buildings in Gaza and the West Bank, bombing the Palestinian airport and Arafat's helicopters in Gaza and rocketing a Palestinian fuel depot, from which a massive cloud of smoke rose over the Gaza coast. Israeli tanks rolled into towns across the West Bank, reoccupying the territories. On December 13, following new suicide bombings, Israeli shells slammed into the Voice of Palestine, toppling the antenna and taking out the station. Helicopter gunships shelled Arafat's Ramallah offices, leaving only part of the compound standing. Arafat, a statement from Sharon's cabinet declared, was "irrelevant." The man who had driven Arafat out of Lebanon twenty years earlier was now intent on dismantling his Palestinian Authority. All but officially, Oslo was dead.

In February 2002, Arafat published an appeal on the op-ed page of the
New York Times,
declaring that "the Palestinians are ready to end the conflict" and have a "vision for peace . . . based on the complete end of the occupation and a return to Israel's 1967 borders, the sharing of all Jerusalem as one open city and as the capital of two states, Palestine and Israel. It is a warm peace," Arafat added, "but we will only sit down as equals, not as supplicants; as partners, not as subjects; as seekers of a just and peaceful solution, not as a defeated nation grateful for whatever scraps are thrown our way." Sharon and his cabinet were unmoved. They believed Arafat was orchestrating much of the violence and that he never intended to make peace at Camp David. In late February, the Israel Defense Forces launched additional rocket attacks on Arafat's headquarters in Gaza and in Ramallah, where he was now confined; the Ramallah compound, or Muqata, was reduced largely to rubble. The Palestinian leadership declared that "our people will continue their steadfast resistance until the military occupation and settlers are kicked out, to ensure the freedom, independence, and dignity of our people." Arafat, whose support had been dwindling, enjoyed a sudden surge in popularity. A tattered Palestinian flag fluttered from amid the smoking ruins.

In some areas, Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank met with little Palestinian resistance. Occasionally resistance was peaceful: In Ramallah, doctors at the Arab Care hospital sat down in front of Israeli tanks approaching the casualty ward. When Israel attacked Jenin in April, however, gunmen from the Jenin refugee camp fired back, and a major battle ensued. Israeli soldiers abandoned their armored vehicles and chased the gunmen down the narrow alleys of the Jenin refugee camp, where Palestinian fighters hid, waiting to ambush them. In response, armored IDF bulldozers plowed into the camp, demolishing more than 130 homes, shops, and refugee offices and burying some people alive under the rubble. At least fifty-two Palestinians were killed, twenty-two of them civilians. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers died in the fighting. The uprising was crushed, but in the process the fighters from Jenin became heroes among Palestinians. In Ramallah, where resistance to the reoccupation had been light, a joke circulated: A Muslim woman walks past a group of men on the street. Her head scarf is tied loosely, and her hair is exposed. "Fix your
hijab,"
one of the men admonishes. "There are men here."

"Oh, is that so?" she replies. "Why, did the Israelis lift the curfew in Jenin?"

In the summer of 2002, Sharon intensified a policy of demolishing Palestinian houses in the occupied territories���a policy initiated by the British during the Great Arab Rebellion of the 1930s. The Israeli policy was carried out against families of suicide bombers and other militants; for "military purposes," primarily in Gaza; and against Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem who had built without the permits Israel required of them. Human rights groups estimated that between ten thousand and twenty-two thousand Palestinians lost their homes as a result of the policy and hundreds of acres of their olive groves and other crops were uprooted as part of a military strategy to improve the nation's security.

A growing number of voices in Israel rose in protest. One of the most prominent belonged to a young Israeli sergeant, Yishai Rosen-Zvi, an observant Orthodox Jew and son of the late dean of Tel Aviv University Law School. "I won't take part in a siege enforced against hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children," Sergeant Rosen-Zvi declared in a letter to a superior officer. "I won't starve entire villages and prevent their residents from getting to work each day or to medical checkups; I won't turn them into hostages of political decisions. A siege against cities, like bombing raids from helicopters, does not stop terror. It is a sop to placate Israel's public, which demands 'Let the IDF win.'" Israel's policies, the young "refusenik" declared, were creating "nurseries of terror."

Just before 7:00 A.M. on November 21, 2002, Nael Abu Hilail crept through tall grass and up a hillside toward the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Menachem. Abu Hilail was twenty-three, from the West Bank village of Al, Khader, near Bethlehem. He wore a bulky coat, which, if pulled tight, would have revealed a large bulge around his midsection.

A few blocks away, Raphael Landau was leaving the fourth-floor apartment where he lived with his parents, Dalia and Yehezkel. It was a school day; Raphael, fourteen years old, slung his heavy book bag over his shoulder and trotted down the stairway and toward his bus stop.

Nael Abu Hilail boarded the number 20 bus at about 7:00 A.M.. It was filled with commuters, mostly working-class Jews and immigrants, and children traveling to school. At 7:10 A.M., the bus rolled to a halt at the Mexico Street stop in Kiryat Menachem. The doors opened, and more workers and students began to board. At that moment, Abu Hilail reached under his coat and detonated the bomb he had strapped to himself. The explosion ripped the bus apart, sending human limbs flying through the gaps where the windows had been. A man's torso toppled out of the bus and onto the street, where it lay amid shattered glass and the hot screws released by the detonated bomb. Children's schoolbooks and sandwiches were scattered about.

At 7:20, the phone rang in the Landaus' apartment. Dalia and Yehezkel were asleep; Yehezkel had just returned from a trip to the States and was still contending with jet lag. Yehezkel answered to hear the worried voice of his friend Daniel, calling from his home just west of Jerusalem.

"I just wanted to make sure you're all right," Daniel said. "I heard on the radio that a bus had exploded near your home, on Mexico Street."

Raphael's bus, Yehezkel knew, had just passed through the neighborhood. He hung up and rushed to the television, where he learned that the explosion occurred on a municipal bus, the number 20 line, not on the school bus Raphael rode. As he watched the live scene on Israeli television, his immense relief turned to horror. A dead man's blood-smeared arms hung outside the bus window. Rescue workers in white masks and gloves were lining up bodies in a row of black plastic bags along Mexico Street. Someone had covered the torso with a blue-and-white-checkered blanket. Eleven people were dead, Yehezkel would learn; four of them were children. Ambulances were rushing most of the forty-nine injured Israelis to the hospital.

Reporters in Bethlehem found Abu Hilail's father, Azmi, who told them he considered his son a martyr. "This is a challenge to the Zionist enemies," he said.

The next day, Prime Minister Sharon ordered Israeli troops back into Bethlehem, where they reoccupied the city, imposed a military lockdown, conducted house-to-house arrests, and blew up five homes, including the house where Nael Abu Hilail had lived with his parents and siblings. Since Sharon had come to power less than two years earlier on a pledge to increase Israelis' security, bombers had struck Israel nearly sixty times; this was nearly twice the number of attacks of the previous seven years. Sharon's spokesman blamed Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for the attacks, saying that "all our efforts to hand over areas, and all the talk about a possible cease-fire, that was all window dressing because on the ground there was a continuous effort to carry out as many terrorist activities as possible."

Arafat condemned the suicide bombing, saying civilians "are normal people who are living their daily lives, and targeting them is a condemned act ethically and politically." The bombings, he added, make even "legitimate resistance" to the occupation look like "blind terrorism."

With the Israeli incursion into Bethlehem, the military reoccupation of all major West Bank towns except Jericho was complete.

The bus had exploded during the Jewish celebration of Chanukah, which is marked by the lighting of candles on eight consecutive nights. One night after the bombing, Dalia visited the bus stop at Kiryat Menachem and met a neighbor, a teenager whose eight-year-old brother and grandmother had been killed in the explosion. The old woman had been accompanying her grandson to school. "His friends were with him," Dalia remembered of the teenager. "All very silent. Just being." They struck a flame and repeated the Chanukah prayer: "Blessed are You, our God, master of the universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light the candle of Chanukah."

In the coming days, Dalia and Yehezkel made regular trips to the bus stop, where residents and visitors had erected a shrine of candles, wreaths, newspaper clippings, photos of the dead, prayer books, handwritten poems, and letters. Alongside the expressions of grief were signs promising to avenge the killings: "No Arabs, No Terror"; "O People of Israel! This will not end until we cry out a great cry!!! And only then, God will hear and answer us"; "The way to true peace: If someone comes to kills you, thwart him by killing him first!"

The day after the attack, an Arab resident living near the Landaus was stabbed in the back by three Jewish youths. A Palestinian bakery down the road was stoned by an angry mob and its glass cases smashed. For several nights, police were called in for protection, and Yehezkel came to the baker's family to show his solidarity and to try to reason with the group's leaders. They insulted him and questioned his Jewishness. "I could share their anger over the incessant terror attacks," Yehezkel wrote later in the Jewish magazine
Tikkun,
"but I vehemently rejected their racist and hateful attitudes. . . . My heart has broken many times as I confronted the deeply painful reality of my fellow Israelis, including my Jerusalem neighbors, being overwhelmed by fear, anger, and grief."

The "toxic atmosphere" of the intifada and the suicide attacks propelled Yehezkel toward a new kind of reconciliation work. Especially in the wake of 9/11, he believed his calling was in addressing what he considered a "global spiritual crisis." Healing, he said, "has to come from within
and
without, and my leverage point is from without." He began spending more time in the States and eventually took a position at the Hartford Seminary, where he continued his interfaith work. "It was increasingly clear," he said, "that I was meant to be here, at Hartford, and Dalia was meant to be there," in Jerusalem.