The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (14 page)

In the end, however, World War I would bring about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain's entry into Palestine, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with its promise to help establish a "Jewish national home."

Three decades later, in May 1948, as David Ben-Gurion declared independence for the new state of Israel, the dreams of the "Jewish Jules Verne" had become reality.

The train reached the bluffs of the Dalmatian coast at dusk on October 27, 1948. To the west, at the horizon of the Adriatic, the sky was ablaze with color. Behind Solia and Moshe in the darkened east lay Zagreb, Lubljana, Belgrade, and Sofia. Somewhere in Bulgaria the family's precious belongings—about 440 pounds of them, or 100 kilograms for each adult—lay in crates. Solia had packed a hope chest made of straw; wool blankets and a Bulgarian kilim; special wedding china from Czechoslovakia, the color of cream, with tiny red flowers along the rims; a soup tureen and bowls; etched purple crystal, for sipping Bulgarian brandy; pillow covers, doilies, and other knitted handwork; and a pink bedroom set: two wardrobes, bedboard, and frame. Solia and Moshe weren't the only Jews separated from their belongings. Four thousand tons of crates would soon be stacked up in the Sofia synagogue, where Moshe and Solia had been married, as workers scrambled to find foreign freighters to haul the crates to Israel.

The train hissed to a stop near the port of Bakar. Inside, Solia and Moshe prepared their bags and got Dalia ready in her basket as they waited to disembark. Through the windows, perhaps three hundreds yards away, they could see a great masted ship floating at the pier, its lights shining against the night sky.

The
Pan York
was as long as a football field, its three masts towering over the deck; below, its cargo holds, with a capacity of eleven million pounds to haul bananas and phosphates, had been converted to carry 3,694 Bulgarian Jews: 42 Alcalays, 68 Aledjems, 68 Barouhs, 124 Cohens, 20 Daniels, 7 Danons, 4 Djivris, an Elias, an Elder, an Ephraim, and 54 Eshkenazis.

Solia, Moshe, and Dalia followed the line of emigrants up the gangplank. As they stepped into the ship, they were hit by the strong odor of disinfectant. Before them loomed a huge metal cargo hold painted sea green. Wooden bunk beds were stacked three high for as far as the eye could see. This would be their home for the next eight days.

In the ship's storehouses, the crew had stacked thousands of cans of supplies, paid for by the JDC. For the next week, Moshe, Solia, and the rest of the
Pan York's
passengers would survive on tinned meat and fish, canned milk, juice, bread, margarine, grapefruit marmalade, and small pieces of dark chocolate. The JDC also supplied soap and emergency medical supplies. Passengers would later recall no serious ailments, though many Bulgarians would spend the balance of their journey bent over the rails, vomiting into the high seas. Dalia, her parents would claim in the coming years, was the only one on the ship who didn't get sick. She slept through nearly the entire journey.

Slowly, the Yugoslav coast disappeared from view. The
Pan York,
at maximum speed of fourteen knots, cut south through the Adriatic. From the bow there was only the sky, the horizon, and the late-October seas.

Moshe could only look ahead. He had no idea where his family would live or exactly what awaited them upon their arrival in Haifa. He knew the war was still going on, though Israel had the advantage and new truce talks suggested a settlement soon. It was obvious to Moshe that some kind of Jewish state would survive.

Despite the conflict, many Jewish intellectuals in Palestine had argued that Israel's long-term survival depended on finding a way to coexist with the Arabs. Moshe was part of a Zionist organization that had advocated a binational democratic state for all the people of Palestine. The binational idea had taken root in the 1920s with the formation of Brit Shalom, or Covenant for Peace, which advocated "understanding between Jews and Arabs . . . on the basis of the absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples. . . . " Part of this philosophy was based on a desire to preserve "the ethical integrity of the Zionist endeavor"; part of it was practical. Arthur Ruppin, a founder of Brit Shalom, declared, "I have no doubt that Zionism will be heading toward a catastrophe if it will not find common ground with the Arabs." The spiritual father of coexistence was Martin Buber, the great religious philosopher from Vienna, who had long advocated a binational state based in part on "the love for their homeland that the two peoples share."

Jewish advocates for a binational state came together in the 1940s in the leftist political party Mapam. In 1947, Mapam leaders had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet representative to the UN, to support their single-state effort. Two separate states, they argued, could lead to greater tensions in the future. This was a nice idea, Gromyko told them, but unrealistic. After the Soviets voted for partition, one Mapam leader, Victor Shemtov, a Bulgarian who had emigrated to Palestine fifteen years before Moshe, thought to himself:
This is the beginning of a long war.
Still, Shemtov celebrated the birth of Israel with the rest of Mapam, dancing in the streets of Haifa. For his part, Moshe would soon come to embrace Mapam's rival, Mapai, the mainstream, centrist party of Ben-Gurion.

Before dawn on the eighth day, lights appeared in the distance. The passengers began to stir and climb up on deck. As land grew closer, they could see that some of the lights appeared to be sitting on top of others. The scattered jewels hanging in the air were actually lights from houses on different elevations of the hillside. This was Carmel, the bluff overlooking Haifa. They were almost there. As light broke on November 4, passengers were crowded toward the bow as the boat powered into Haifa port. Some were crying. They began to sing "Hatikva," for sixty years the anthem of the Zionists and now of the new state of Israel. "A Jewish soul yearns," they sang.

And towards the east

An eye looks to Zion

Our hope is not yet lost,

The hope of two thousand years,

To be a free people in our land

The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

It felt to many that after all their struggles, they had finally come home.

Onshore, officials of the Jewish Agency sat at tables behind a roped line, processing the passengers family by family. They took names and years of birth; Dalia's birth year was recorded, incorrectly, as 1948. The Eshkenazis received an identity card and were told to proceed to the large metal building just ahead. There, workers with pump sprayers were dousing the Bulgarians with a substance that turned everyone's hair stiff and white. Children were running around, laughing and pointing to one another's DDT hairstyles.

Next they were given sandwiches. Some families were put on buses, others on a yellow narrow-gauge train chugging south along the coast. The Eshkenazis rode toward Pardes Hannah, an old British military barracks about thirty miles away. Just beyond a row of barracks stood lines of tents erected to shelter the waves of new arrivals.

Thus the Eshkenazis began life in Israel. For about ten days, Moshe and Solia lived in a tent alongside a thousand others in the ingathering of nations—dark, curly-haired, Arabic-speaking immigrants from Morocco; pale, dazed Yiddish speakers from Romania, Hungary, and Poland. It was a crowded, smelly place, hot for early November and muddy from the rains.

Soon Moshe and Solia grew restless. Like many others, they were anxious to settle somewhere. Tel Aviv had little space, and Jerusalem was still too dangerous. After ten days, Moshe noticed people sitting at a table, signing up immigrants to move to a town somewhere between this immigrant camp and Jerusalem.

Moshe had never heard of the town.
But why not? he
thought.
Let us try this place called Ramla.

Six

REFUGE

T
HE FLATBED TRUCK rolled to a halt near the center of Ramallah. Idling in the mid-July heat, the lorry of King Abdullah's Arab Legion discharged its load of refugees. They had come from al-Ramla by way of the Arab village of Salbit.

Sheikh Mustafa Khairi, in his black
abaya
cape and fez wrapped in the white imami cloth, emerged from the bed of the truck to stand in the glare of a scorching day. Firdaws Taji, the teenage Girl Guide with her whistle and her knife, stood nearby with other members of the Khairi and Taji families. They could scarcely believe the scene laid out in front of them. Entire families camped on the ground, huddling around large metal dinner plates to spoon a few fava beans and lentils into their mouths with scraps of bread. Refugees were sitting and lying beneath trees, in doorways, and beside the road. Families had been split up; many family members had left al-Ramla at different times, and now they didn't know where to find one another.

Sheikh Mustafa walked through the city center and toward the Grand Hotel, where he managed to find a small room. Then he set out to find his nephew and family. Ahmad and Zakia had arrived earlier with Bashir and the other children and had rented a room near the Quaker School. Over the last two months, Ahmad had been going back and forth to al-Ramla, bringing food, a few clothes, and other household items from the house back to the family in Ramallah.

In the middle of July 1948, Ramallah, meaning "Hill of God" in Arabic, had been transformed from a quiet Christian hill town in northern Palestine to a depository of misery and trauma. One hundred thousand refugees crowded into school yards, gymnasiums, convents, army barracks, and any other space they could find in the town and surrounding villages. The more fortunate shared quarters with relatives; family homes now packed ten or fifteen people into each room. Most of the newly homeless families slept in the open air, in olive groves, caves, corrals, barnyards, and on bare ground along the roadside.

"Conditions appalling," warned a telegram from the American consulate in Jerusalem on August 12, a month after the Israeli army had conquered Lydda and al-Ramla and ordered the expulsions. "Majority destitute possessing only what they could wear . . . entirely dependent on meager relief assistance available. . . . Refugees entirely dependent [on] springs for water, standing in line hours for turn fill cans. . . . Definitely possible that water supply may give out completely before end of Aug. . . . Diet [of] six hundred calories per day in effect approximately three weeks and insufficient sustain life for long . . . malnutrition is everywhere evident . . . families bury own dead within their camps without report to health officer. . . . Local authorities overwhelmed by problem and admit own inability cope with situation."

The scant water supply, according to United Nations investigators, stood "unprotected and unorganized, infected and a menace to health . . . an epidemic of typhoid is almost inevitable." Red Cross nurses struggled to immunize refugees against such an epidemic, but "only ten thousand doses vaccine available at present," according to the American consulate. Officials warned of possible outbreaks of cholera, diphtheria, and meningitis. The refugees hadn't bathed in weeks, and some began to complain of eye and skin ailments.

Sheikh Mustafa arrived at the house near the Quaker School to find Ahmad, Zakia, and their ten children sharing a single room. At home in al-Ramla, Bashir had his own room and bed; now he slept together with his parents and siblings on a pair of mattresses. In other rooms, other Khairis slept. Now, instead of the walled compound in al-Ramla where members of the clan could walk from house to house across orchards and open grounds, dozens of Khairis were jammed into a single house. Under the circumstances, this represented relative comfort, made possible by family connections and resources.

Bashir watched his mother stave off the family's hunger by selling her jewelry in exchange for bread, olives, cooking oil, and vegetables. Gold had long been the resource of emergency for the Arab women of Palestine, and many women, hearing stories of searches and confiscation by the occupying Israeli soldiers, had left al-Ramla and Lydda with their jewelry strapped to their bodies. Zakia's gold held off the worst of the hunger, and Bashir understood that his mother had become the family bank and, for now, its main source of sustenance. She was not alone. In desperation, many women took to Ramallah's chaotic streets. Bashir would watch as women returned from the springs with jugs of water balanced on their heads or hawked handmade sweets at a makeshift street market.

A few people found work from local villagers in the olive harvest: The men would bang the branches with sticks; the women would crouch on the ground and gather the fruit. Others went begging from house to house when there was no other alternative. "We have lost our homes," they would say. "Can you help us with some oil, lentils, flour, fava?" Their families had been reduced to drinking tea from old tobacco tins and fashioning trousers from blankets and burlap sacks. Occasionally the beggars suffered the abuse of an increasingly angry local population, who themselves were overwhelmed by the unfolding calamity. "You sold your land to the Jews and came here!" they would taunt. "Why couldn't you defend yourselves?" The crisis brought out the worst in some people. One refugee would recall a wealthy woman and prominent citizen of Ramallah standing on her balcony, tossing out handfuls of sugar-coated nuts, watching with evident pleasure as the new arrivals fought over the sweets.

Among the dispossessed, the men in particular had been shocked literally into silence, their defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Jews compounded by the disdain of many locals. Bashir would remember the peasant men with glazed eyes, sitting on burlap sacks in the shade of olive trees. At home, it was harvest time for the sesame, melons, grapes, cactus fruit, and summer vegetables. This was the men's life work and what they knew how to do; in sudden exile in Ramallah, they were idle and their families hungry. Their spouses endured endless waits at food distribution centers as trucks rumbled up the narrow road from Amman, fifty miles to the east, to deliver large flat biscuits, unleavened loaves, and the occasional sack of tomatoes or eggplants, courtesy of the Red Cross and King Abdullah of Transjordan. The minuscule rations were intended to prevent starvation. Refugees were mostly left to live off their wits. They begged and stole food from the locals, stripped the fruit trees bare, and, in some cases, scoured the army trash bins for scraps of food left by Abdullah's Arab Legion troops.

The Khairis were not enduring hunger on this scale, in part because Zakia was selling her gold, but Bashir began to understand the humiliation of the refugee. For a six-year-old boy, a seemingly simple deprivation would take on enormous meaning: One day Bashir's father told Zakia in frustration that he didn't even have enough to buy his friends a cup of Arabic coffee. For an Arab man, Bashir knew, inviting friends for coffee was an elementary gesture of hospitality—a fundamental expression of the meaning of being at home—and the inability to do so represented a profound humiliation. Bashir would remember this shame for the rest of his life.

On August 16, Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator, dispatched telegrams to fifty-three countries, appealing to them "to divert to me at Beirut . . . any such stocks" of meat, fruit, grains, or butter already on the high seas. The UN considered the situation in Palestine a "large scale human disaster." By this time, the UN estimated, more than 250,000 Arabs had "fled or have been forcibly expelled from the territories occupied by the Jews in Palestine." (Later figures would be three times the early UN estimate.) "Never have I seen a more ghastly sight than that which met my eye here, at Ramallah," Bernadotte wrote in September. "The car was literally stormed by excited masses shouting with Oriental fervour that they wanted food and wanted to return to their homes. There were plenty of frightening faces in the sea of suffering humanity. I remember not least a group of scabby and helpless old men with tangled beards who thrust their emaciated faces into the car and held out scraps of bread that would certainly have been considered uneatable by ordinary people, but was their only food."

Anger built as the refugees recovered from their shock. A few days after the Khairis arrived, John Bagot Glubb, the British commander of the Arab Legion, had rolled into Ramallah, only to be stoned by furious refugees. His troops had been called "traitors" and "worse than Jews!"; on Glubb's journey from Amman through Arab Palestine, his car had been spat on repeatedly. Demonstrations against Glubb, the Arab Legion, and the British had erupted in Nablus, north of Ramallah, and in Amman and Salt, east of the Jordan River. Many of Glubb's Arab soldiers, sickened by the sight of refugees dragging their way through Legion positions, had angrily demanded retaliation against Jewish forces.

Glubb was shocked by the refugees' rage toward him. He continued to believe his troops had done more than any other Arab force: They had fought for East Jerusalem, saving it for the Arabs; and they had held the line at Latrun "against five times their numbers. . . . I knew that they would go on to the last man—to save that country whose people were now calling them traitors."

Glubb, however, would also recall a sleepless night on the front lines, tossing and turning in bed after news reached him of the thousands of refugees flooding toward Ramallah. "Admittedly I had never foreseen that the operations in Lydda and Ramie [al-Ramla] would have led to a human catastrophe on this scale," he recalled. "But even if I had known, what else could I have done? To have rushed troops impulsively forward to Lydda would have allowed the enemy to break through to Ramallah." Glubb knew that a redeployment toward al-Ramla and Lydda would have thinned Arab Legion positions in Latrun, which were holding the line against an Israeli advance. "And then these scenes would have been enacted—not only in Lydda and Ramie, but twenty times magnified over the whole of Palestine. I could not see that I could have taken any other course."

Many of the Khairis, however, along with other refugees from the two towns, recalled promises of protection sent by King Abdullah through the Bedouin brigade and other soldiers. They felt betrayed by Glubb and by Abdullah. Even Sheikh Mustafa, who had been on good terms with Abdullah, apparently grew angry with the king. "King Abdullah had told my grandfather before he left al-Ramla that we would be allowed back," said Samira Khairi, Bashir's cousin and a granddaughter to Sheikh Mustafa. "So we were under the impression that there had been a behind-the-scenes agreement that we would be able to return."

Even without such an agreement, Khairi family connections could have delivered them from the disaster in Ramallah—if not back home, at least into Abdullah's kingdom. Abdullah, according to Khairi family oral history, contacted Sheikh Mustafa with a personal offer. "Cousin," the king told Sheikh Mustafa, evoking their distant relations going back centuries, "I cannot allow you to be miserable refugees. Bring your whole family and I will give you a palace in Amman to stay in."

Mustafa, the longtime mayor of al-Ramla, was not inclined to ignore the thousands of other refugees. "I am not alone with my family," Sheikh Mustafa reminded the king. "I have all the people of al-Ramla to take care of. Shall I bring them, too?"

"Stay where you are," came the king's reply.

In Amman, King Abdullah was under siege. The desert oasis of Transjordan, which Glubb had only recently considered "one of the happiest little countries in the world," was now besieged by tens of thousands of refugees from al-Ramla and Lydda, driven out of their homes and demanding accountability. Enraged wives and parents of Arab Legion soldiers had even tried breaking into Abdullah's palace in Amman.

On July 18, several days after Sheikh Mustafa arrived in Ramallah, the king had angrily faced down demonstrators in Transjordan. Sir Alec Kirkbride, the British minister in Amman, had watched with apparent disdain as "the tide of miserable humanity" reached the capital of Transjordan. Kirkbride wondered if the refugees could have stayed home "had they had a little more courage." The Englishman recounted the same "ugly mass protest" directed at the king, with about two thousand men "screaming abuse and demanding that the lost towns should be reconquered at once." The king appeared on the steps, protected by royal bodyguards quickly thrusting cartridges into their rifles. "It seemed to me a bloodbath was imminent," Kirkbride recalled. Instead Abdullah waded into the crowd, smacked one screaming refugee on his head, and demanded that the demonstrators either enlist to "fight the Jews" or "get the hell down the hillside!" Most of the protesters, Kirkbride wrote admiringly, "got to hell down the hillside."

Despite his bravado, King Abdullah was rattled, just as the Israeli military had hoped and predicted. Abdullah had already summoned Glubb to a meeting at the palace, glowering at the Arab Legion commander as aides accused him of refusing to fight hard enough to defend Palestine. In fact, Glubb's superiors in London were more to blame. British efforts to enforce the UN arms embargo—in particular, the refusal to resupply the Arab Legion with weapons and ammunition—would contribute, more than Glubb, to the fall of al-Ramla and Lydda and the inability of Arab forces to recapture the towns. Most important of all, from Glubb's perspective, was that the Arab Legion was made up of only 4,500 troops—insufficient to wage battle in Jerusalem and at Latrun while simultaneously protecting Lydda and al-Ramla.

In Ramallah, fifty miles to the west, the Khairis and thousands of other refugees still assumed they would be returning home soon—if not on the backs of Arab armies, then as the result of a political agreement.

"Return," Bashir said, "was the issue, from day one."

Strong signs, however, already pointed to Israel's determination not to surrender the two towns and dozens of other villages in Arab Palestine. "There may be little prospect for the several hundred thousand Arab refugees from Palestine to return to their former homes in Israel," stated a confidential air gram sent from the American embassy in Cairo to Secretary of State George Marshall in Washington. The dispatch cited "reported Jewish measures designed to prevent their return and to take over Arab property . . . those who had left as refugees had lost their property and would have nothing to return to. In addition, much of their property [is] under the control of the Israeli Government, which . . . would not relinquish it willingly to the Arabs."