The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (37 page)

Dalia watched as other families left Israel, seeking safe haven in Europe, the United States, or Australia. "Many people are leaving Israel to find a place of safety elsewhere, to protect their children," Dalia wrote in her journal in the late fall of 2002. "But isn't that what our enemies want? Yet, on the other hand, Raphael too could have been on that bus. What is the responsible thing to do under the circumstances? There are many people in Israel who have no family or friends in other parts of the world. They do not have the luxury of the choices that I have here. Am I going to abandon them?"

Dalia made her decision. "My choice is to stay here," she wrote. "I will not be able to look myself in the face if I leave when it gets difficult. I am going to stay present for the pain, and for the hope. I am an integral part of it all. I am part and parcel of this complexity. I am part of the problem because I came from Europe, because I lived in an Arab house. I am part of the solution, because I love."

Thirteen

HOMELAND

E
LAL FLIGHT 551 approached Sofia airport from the south, swooped low over the Balkan Mountains, and set down in the Bulgarian capital. It was twilight on July 14, 2004. Jews of Bulgarian descent peered out through the airliner windows. Most were residents of Israel returning to their birthplace or that of their parents. Many were children. Some were coming back for the first time.

Dalia Eshkenazi Landau stepped slowly down the portable stairway, grasping the handrail and adjusting the large red bag slung over her shoulder. She walked in the fading light to the small terminal building, built during Communist times. Dalia had not stood on Bulgarian soil since October 26, 1948, nearly fifty-six years earlier. On that day, Moshe's brother, Jacques, and his wife, Virginia, had come to the Sofia railway station to bid farewell to the family as they set off for the new state of Israel.

Dalia pulled her suitcase off the belt, rolled it past the Bulgarian customs officers, and scanned the line of faces in the waiting hall just beyond. She was looking for a man about her age whom she had never met: Maxim, the son of Jacques and Virginia. During Communist times, Jacques, despite his high rank in the Party, was always required to leave his children at home when visiting his brother in Israel. Consequently Maxim, though a fierce defender of the Jewish state, had never been there and didn't know what his cousin looked like. He had come dressed all in white and held a sign in Bulgarian bearing Dalia's name. Virginia, now eighty-three years old and widowed, was at home, awaiting the reunion.

Three days later, after emotional meetings with Virginia, Maxim, and other relatives she had never met, Dalia rode in a taxi leaving Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city, toward a monastery in the Rhodope Mountains. In the backseat beside her sat Susannah Behar, whose father had been the rabbi of Plovdiv in March 1943 and who had waited out the hours with hundreds of other Jewish families in the Plovdiv school yard. At that same moment six decades earlier, Dalia's parents were in Sliven, several hours to the east. "My mother thought,
This is the end,"
Dalia told Susannah.

The yellow Fiat snaked up the two-lane road and along the Chepelare River through thick pine forest. Susannah, eighty-three years old, looked out the window, telling Dalia she had nearly escaped the school yard on that March morning to join the Partizan fighters roaming these same hills. If she had, Dalia suggested, perhaps she would have met Uncle Jacques Eshkenazi, who had escaped the work camps to join the Partizans fighting the pro-Fascist government of King Boris.

The taxi arrived at Bachkovo, the Bulgarian Orthodox monastery built in the late twelfth century, burned to the ground by the Ottomans, and rebuilt again in subsequent decades. Dalia and Susannah got out and walked past the stalls of vendors selling rugs, buffalo yogurt, and religious trinkets. They passed under the broad eaves of a two-hundred-year-old lotus tree and toward their destination.

Inside, Dalia and Susannah walked under a low arch and into a room adorned with flowers, chandeliers, and centuries-old Christian frescoes painted on the walls. Hundreds of candles burned from every corner of the room. At first they couldn't see what they had come for. Then Dalia realized she was standing right beside them: the marble tombs of Kiril and Stephan, the Orthodox bishops who had vigorously fought Bulgaria's attempts to deliver the nation's Jews to the Nazis in 1943. Recently, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, had declared the two Christian bishops "Righteous among the Nations for saving Jews during the Holocaust." Trees, in memory of the two bishops, were planted in the "Forest of the Righteous."

Dalia touched her fingertips to the marble, first of Stephan's tomb, then of Kiril's. Her lips were moving silently. Later she would try to find the words in English for her feeling of
hityakhadoot:
being alone and intimate with the soul of another and making space in your heart for that soul.

Dalia approached a bearded priest, who smiled and handed her candles. She lit them and prayed some more. Susannah stood in the center of the room, holding her unlit candles and gazing upward at the slowly rotating crystals of an antique chandelier.

Near the end of her pilgrimage, a few days before she returned to Israel, Dalia sat on a wooden bench in the back of the Sofia synagogue. Considered one of the most beautiful in the Balkans, it was unlike any synagogue Dalia had been in. Moorish arches rose to domed ceilings of dusky blue, with stars of painted gold. A magnificent chandelier, imported a century ago by train from Vienna, hung by heavy chains from wooden beams high overhead; it was said to weigh eighteen thousand pounds. Dalia gazed at a spot in the front of the synagogue, just before the ark, where Theodor Herzl had addressed fervent Zionists in 1896 and where her own parents had stood for their marriage forty-four years later. Dalia imagined the moment: her mother in white, ravishing, with raven hair flowing over her shoulders; her father, stiff and nervous in his suit, a future life of responsibility weighing heavily on his shoulders.

Sixty-four years later, their daughter sat quiet and still on the synagogue bench, thinking of the possibilities.

Bashir was struggling with the propane heater he had rolled in to warm his guests. Repeatedly he clicked the button to ignite the pilot light, but every time he released it, the flame went out. It was an early winter's day in 2004. Bashir kept pressing the button with his right index finger, until finally, after many clicks, the fire ignited; tiny waves of heat began to fill the room. He flashed a momentary, toothy smile and rose to offer his guests cookies and sweet Arabic tea.

The previous year, Bashir had been released from the Ramallah jail where he had spent more than a year beginning in August 2001. He had lost count of the number of times he'd been imprisoned, but it was safe to say that Bashir, now sixty-two years old, had spent at least a quarter of his life in a cell. This time, Bashir said, he was not convicted of anything, or charged, or even questioned. He had spent most of his "administrative detention" playing chess and trying to keep warm in the outdoor tent prison.

A friend had told a story of the day Bashir left jail. Israeli prison officials required that he sign a pledge not to commit any future acts of terror. What Israel called terror, however, Bashir often saw as legitimate resistance. He did not accept the legitimacy of the Israeli justice system, and he had never been told why he was in jail; consequently he refused to sign the document. "If you don't sign," the guard said, "we will send you back." Bashir told the guard to send him back. It was then, according to Bashir's friend, that the Israeli guard asked Bashir for a favor: Could he wait there a few minutes to make it
appear to
the other guards that he was cooperating? This could solve both men's problems. Bashir, suppressing a smile, agreed, and a few minutes later he was released.

Or so the story went; Bashir would not talk about it. "Whenever I go into the prison I feel as though I'll never leave," he would say. "And every time I leave I feel as though I've never been there."

Bashir's reluctance to confirm the story of his release was not simply a matter of refusing to humanize his Israeli jailer; it was instead part of a broader reticence to evoke memories or feelings. There were times when a visitor could detect emotion—in the hardening of his expression, the arching of his eyebrows, and the flush of his face when he talked about the Palestinian resistance; in the softness of his voice when he spoke about
the fitna
or lemon trees in the garden of the house in al-Ramla; in his smile or the narrowing of his
eyes,
when he talked about Dalia. But he was uncomfortable discussing politics in detail, or personal relations with his family, or memories from his childhood. The one memory that seemed most powerful, and least discussed, involved the loss of his hand. His thumb was forever hooked over his pocket, making the hand look normal; visitors or friends might go for months, or even years, before they learned that his hand was missing, and invariably they would learn of the tragedy from someone else. "Bashir, why don't you get an artificial hand?" his cousin Ghiath once said when the two young men were studying law in Cairo. "His face turned
this
color," Ghiath said, grabbing his purple shirt. "The incident made him complicated."

Bashir returned to the sitting room with a tray of cookies and a teapot with three tiny glasses. He wore pressed gray slacks, a gray V-neck sweater, and a blue windbreaker, and he sat beside a bookshelf filled with Arabic literature and political thought and two volumes in English:
The Age of Reason
and
The Age of Enlightenment.
Gamal Abdel Nasser's image stared down from the white walls, alongside a black-and-white framed photograph of the house in al-Ramla. The picture was taken in the 1980s, around the time Bashir was deported to Lebanon, and showed the one-story home with its fourteen layers of white Jerusalem stone and a television antenna on the roof. A large palm tree grew out of the frame. Two beat-up cars were parked in front. Children were walking past the gate Ahmad Khairi had placed there in 1936.

Ahmad's son spooned three teaspoons of sugar into his steaming glass, and as he stirred, he asked his visitors what was on the agenda for today, one of many days of long interviews. The visitors had just returned from al-Ramla, and Bashir sat expressionless as he heard the new Israeli names of his old streets. Omar Ibn Khattab, the street named after the second caliph, whom Khanom liked to compare to Bashir, was now called Jabotinsky, named after a founding father of the Israeli right wing. "Do you have any idea," he asked after a while, "how it feels that you can go there and I can't?" In fact, Bashir found it difficult to go even to Amman, where he wanted to visit Khanom, Bhajat, and other family but was unable to get the necessary permits from the Israelis. "I really miss Bashir very much,"

Khanom had told a visitor to Amman. "He is not able to come to Amman. He is in his prison again, in Ramallah. An open prison, a big prison. I am now getting old, and I'm not able to go there very much." Bashir rose again and returned with photocopies of the family tree—encircled names in Arabic script with arrows and dates going back four centuries—from Khair al-din al-Ramlawi through fifteen generations to the twenty-first-century Khairi diaspora in the West Bank, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Canada, and the United States. Khairis across the globe, Bashir said, still have claims to the
waqf
lands of Khair al-din, in what is now Israel. "There are documents from the Ottoman period," Bashir said, his left hand in his pocket. "You can go to the Islamic law court in Istanbul to find these documents."

For many Palestinians like Bashir, such claims, grounded in a 1948 United Nations resolution, remained paramount; for others they were less important than ending the occupation, now in its thirty-eighth year. Since the outbreak of the second intifada, more than 550 Palestinians under the age of eighteen had been killed. This was five times the number of Israelis of that age. One of the most recent victims was Iman al-Hams, an unarmed thirteen-year-old Palestinian girl. She was shot and killed by an Israeli officer, who then, according to accounts from his fellow soldiers, fired a stream of bullets into her body. Dozens of the deaths were of children under ten years old; thirteen were babies who died at checkpoints as their mothers gave birth. "With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very burdensome for every Israeli," an Israeli columnist wrote. "Who would have believed that Israeli soldiers would kill hundreds of children and that the majority of Israelis would remain silent?"

Daily humiliation was unavoidable for Palestinians traveling out of their own town or village. Bashir himself had been waiting for months for the Israeli authorities to grant him the permission to travel to Jordan for medical treatment. Numerous reports documented ambulances denied passage at checkpoints. Other Palestinians endured lengthy waits in long lines at muddy, potholed crossings or on foot at the checkpoint turnstiles. In one incident, a young Palestinian man on his way to a violin lesson was told by Israeli soldiers to take out his instrument and "play something sad" before he was allowed to pass. For many Israelis, the incident evoked memories of Jewish violinists forced to play for Nazi officers at concentration camps, and it created a national outrage. Many of the commentators believed the checkpoints were essential for protecting Israel from suicide bombers, but they believed the humiliation of the young Arab violinist, Wissam Tayem, had undercut Israel's moral authority and disgraced the memory of the Holocaust.

For Palestinians, the effects of the intensifying occupation fueled a growing rage and sharpened the debate about the best course of political action. The disagreements were pronounced, even within Bashir's own family.

"If you want to get the land back," Ghiath Khairi was saying, "we will need generations and generations. An entire cycle of history. A new balance of power." Ghiath was at home in Ramallah, sipping a cola in the family's living room. Ghiath was a few years older than his cousin Bashir; he had left al-Ramla shortly after Bashir in 1948; he had attended law school in Cairo with Bashir in the early 1960s; he had traveled back to Ramla with Bashir and cousin Yasser on the bus in 1967; he had married Bashir's sister Nuha after Bashir's imprisonment for the Supersol bombing. The couple had three children.

After all the suffering he had witnessed, of his cousin and of others around him, Ghiath had adopted what he considered a patient and practical attitude. "I can't draw the map of the world in two hundred years," he said. "Before one hundred years there was no Soviet Union. Two hundred years ago, Ottoman troops were in Vienna. Before two hundred years, there was nothing called Germany. Who is to say what the next hundred years will bring? Now Israel rules America. But I don't know what happens after one hundred years. It is the Israeli opinion that for the time being I cannot go back. So I yield up: I don't plan for coming generations. We can't do anything."