The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (21 page)

At 7:45 A.M. on Monday, June 5, 1967, French-built Israeli bombers roared out of their bases and crossed into Egyptian airspace. Flying below radar, the jets angled toward Egyptian bases in Sinai, the Nile delta, and Cairo. Fifteen minutes later, tanks and infantry of Israel's Seventh Armored Brigade moved west into Gaza and toward the Sinai frontier. The war with Egypt had begun. No action at that hour was taken against Jordan, Iraq, or Syria. At 9:00 A.M., Prime Minister Eshkol sent a message to King Hussein through the chief United Nations observer: "We shall not initiate any action whatsoever against Jordan. However, should Jordan open hostilities, we shall react with all our might, and the king will have to bear the full responsibility for the consequences."

A few hours later, Bashir stood up from the plaintiffs table in the Ramallah courtroom. It was late on the morning of June 5, a moment after the young man had come into the courtroom and whispered something important into Bashir's ear.

"Your Honor!" Bashir bellowed. He was surprised how loud his voice sounded. The other lawyer stopped in midsentence; everyone in the courtroom stared at Bashir. "I have just received word that the war has begun on the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts."

"Stop the proceedings!" exclaimed the judge. "And someone bring in a radio!"

Bashir left the courtroom in excitement and raced home. On the streets, people were dashing in and out of shops, stocking up on canned food, candles, kerosene, and tape for the windows. Others waited in long lines outside the flour mills. On the sidewalks, men crowded around tables beneath overhead speakers, smoking from water pipes and straining to hear the radio. The city was expectant, not only of war, but of the annual throngs of summer visitors that would flock here after the victory. Nineteen years after the Nakba had transformed Ramallah, the city had again become a summer haven for the Arab world, with twenty-one hotels and an annual musical theater festival attended by families from Libya to Kuwait. During high season, the restaurants would stay open until 2:00 A.M. and reopen two hours later. Preparations for the festival were almost finished, and now it seemed the revelers would mark a more profound celebration: Palestine would again be in the hands of the Arabs.

At home Bashir found Ahmad, Zakia, Nuha, and other siblings transfixed before the radio. Egyptian antiaircraft fire had shot down three-quarters of the attacking Israeli jets, the Voice of the Arabs reported from Cairo. The deep, trusted voice belonged to Ahmad Said, who assured his rapt listeners that the Egyptian air force had launched a counterattack against Israel. Israeli forces had penetrated Sinai, but Egyptian troops had engaged the enemy and taken the offensive. Jordan, the Voice of the Arabs announced, had captured Mt. Scopus, a strategic hill in Jerusalem.

The Arabs were winning, Bashir thought.
The Arabs were winning.
Incredible as it seemed, the family would be going home. Umm Kulthum, the Arab world's most beloved singer and, next to Nasser, the biggest living symbol of Arab unity, would soon be singing in Tel Aviv.

"We thought the victory was in our hands," Bashir would say thirty-seven years later. "That we would be victorious and we would be going back home. After nineteen years we really had the very strong feeling that we were going back to our lands, houses, streets, schools—to our lives. That we would get our freedom back, that we would be liberated, that we would get back to the homeland. Sorry to say, that was not the case. It was an illusion."

By the time Bashir and his family heard the reports of the Egyptian advances, Gamal Abdel Nasser's entire air force lay smoking on tarmacs in Cairo, Sinai, and the Nile delta. Israel's surprise attack of five hundred sorties had destroyed virtually all of Egypt's Soviet-built fighter jets, and now the Jewish state had the sky over Sinai all to itself. During the attack, begun as Egyptian air force command personnel were finishing breakfast and driving to work, the chief of Egypt's armed forces sent a coded message to his counterparts in Jordan, describing early Egyptian victories. Jordanian radar analysts, seeing planes flying toward Tel Aviv, concluded the Egyptian claims were accurate: The intense radar activity, they believed, showed Egyptian jets on the attack, not Israeli fighters returning to base to refuel. Invoking the mutual defense pact, the commander in chief of the Egyptian forces authorized the next step in the plan: the Jordanian offensive against Israel.

By this time, King Hussein had received Prime Minister Eshkol's message promising that Israel would not attack Jordan first and warning of the consequences should Jordan fire the first shot. The king, however, was bound to the pact with Egypt and believed the message from Eshkol was a ploy to help Israel dispense with Egypt first. Only then, Hussein feared, would Israel turn its full military attention to Jordan and the West Bank.

At 11:00 A.M., Jordanian forces began firing long-range artillery toward Israeli suburbs near Tel Aviv and at an airfield at Ramat David. Fifteen minutes later, Jordanian howitzers began firing thousands of shells on neighborhoods and military targets in Jewish parts of Jerusalem. Within an hour, Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi fighter jets were slicing into Israeli airspace as Jordanian infantry churned forward toward Israeli positions.

"Brother Arabs everywhere," promised a broadcast from Jordan, "the enemy this morning has launched an aggression on our Arab land and air­space." "The Zionist barracks in Palestine," declared Ahmad Said from Cairo, "is about to be destroyed." Such triumphal messages would have thrilled Bashir's family and terrified Dalia's; Egyptian claims that its troops had crossed Israel's border and were marching toward the Negev desert actually prompted some Israelis to hang white flags in surrender.

The facts told a different story. By midafternoon of June 5, the air forces of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt had all been demolished. Israeli pilots now patrolled the entire region virtually unchallenged and were free to attack Egyptian ground troops in Sinai or Jordanian infantry moving toward Jerusalem. From this point, the outcome of the war was written. The Six Day War was essentially decided in six hours.

Bashir could hear explosions. The headquarters of the Jordanian army in Ramallah was crumbling under Israeli fire. Then, another series of thunderous booms: the sound of Ramallah's main radio transmitter going down. And two more, ripping into the soccer field at the Quaker School up the road. Bashir and his family assumed these attacks would soon be answered and that reinforcements—Iraqis or more troops from Jordan—would fortify the city. Surely the Arab armies understood the strategic importance of Ramallah, a key transport hub and center of West Bank communications. Army officers, it was said, had been ordered to defend Ramallah at all costs. Soon, however, there would be reports of Jordanian troops wiped out when they tried to reach Jerusalem from Jericho, as Israeli flares lit up the road and fighter jets obliterated an entire infantry battalion. Word would come of desperate fighting in Jerusalem. Some accounts said the Israelis had the Old City completely surrounded. It wasn't clear where the reinforcements for Ramallah would be coming from. Bashir listened to the explosions continuing through the night and into the next day, shaking the city and its confidence.

At noon on Tuesday, June 6, General Riad, the Egyptian in charge of the eastern front forces, sent an urgent message from Amman to his counterparts in Cairo. "The situation in the West Bank is rapidly deteriorating," Riad warned. "A concentrated attack has been launched on all [points], together with heavy fire, day and night. Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi air forces in position H3 have been virtually destroyed." Riad had been consulting with King Hussein. The general posed a series of terrible choices to the command headquarters in Cairo: cease-fire, retreat, or fighting for one more day in the West Bank, "resulting in the isolation and destruction of the entire Jordanian Army." The cable requested an immediate reply.

Half an hour later, an answer came from Cairo, advising the Jordanians to withdraw from the West Bank and arm the general population. As this reply was coming in, the king sent a telegram to Nasser, underscoring the unfolding calamity on the Jordanian front and asking the Egyptian president for his advice. Nasser replied that evening, repeating the counsel of his men in uniform. The Jordanian army, Nasser urged, should vacate the West Bank while Arab leaders pressed for a cease-fire.

In the light of the early evening of June 6, Bashir stood on the roof of an apartment building in Ramallah, facing south. It was warm and clear but for the dark pillars of smoke rising from the direction of Jerusalem and the haze around the Mount of Olives just to the east. Bashir squinted through the smoke, out past the Amari refugee camp that had grown after 1948 and toward the tower at the Qalandia airstrip, where he had landed from Gaza with his father ten years earlier. There he could see a line of tanks and jeeps moving north. As news of the approaching troops reached the streets below, some Palestinians joyfully began preparing to greet them. They assumed these would be the Iraqi reinforcements. Bashir remained on the roof, his left hand characteristically in his pocket, and fixed his gaze on the road to the south. Slowly, as the tanks came closer, he surmised that they were not Iraqi.

Ramallah fell on the night of June 6 as Israeli ground forces moved in from the south and west. There was little resistance; eyewitnesses would later say many Jordanian troops had retreated well before the Israelis ever arrived. In some cases, the departing Arab soldiers forgot to leave keys for the weapons storehouses, ostensibly stocked with English rifles for the people of Ramallah to repel the invading Israelis. The Jordanian army's main accomplishment in Ramallah, Bashir would remember wryly, was in urging people to get out of the line of fire. "The Jordanian army was asking people to go inside their houses," he said. "That was the extent of their contribution. We didn't feel that they were really fighting."

In fact, from Jenin in the northern West Bank to Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Hebron farther south, the Jordanian army was without air cover or radar and defenseless to repeated bombings of its ground troops from Israel's French-built fighter jets. The Jordanians had suffered devastating losses, and because of the constant air attacks they were unable to send supplies or reinforcements to the front lines. By late on June 6, as Israeli troops penetrated the West Bank and stood poised at the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, King Hussein's forces were in retreat across the Jordan River, to what was left of his kingdom.

By late on June 6, Dalia knew that the war was won. She experienced it not with elation—not yet, since the fighting was still going on—but rather with a sense that a miracle was taking place in Israel.
How could this have happened?
she thought again and again.
Did God save us? How can this be?

With the news the previous day that Israel had destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces, Dalia felt a profound relief such as she had never experienced, just as before the war she had never felt such horror. For Moshe and Solia, the feeling tapped something old, from twenty-four years earlier: the moment when they learned that the Bulgarian authorities had suspended the deportation orders for the Jews and that they would not be boarding train cars for Poland.

On the morning of Wednesday, June 7, Bashir and his family woke up to a city under military occupation. Israeli soldiers in jeeps were shouting through bullhorns, demanding that white flags be hung outside houses, shops, and apartment buildings; already balconies and windows fluttered with T-shirts and handkerchiefs.

Bashir was in shock from the surreal and the familiar. Another retreating Jordanian army had been replaced by another occupying Israeli force.
In 1948,
Bashir thought,
we lost 78 percent of our land. And now all of Palestine is under occupation.
The taste was bitter and humiliating. Not only did the Israelis capture and occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they now held the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Perhaps most shocking of all was that East Jerusalem, and the Old City with its holy sites, was now in the hands of the Israelis.

On the evening of June 10, Solia was visiting with Dora and Stella in the addition that had been built onto the house for the two aunts. The women sat at the kitchen table, eating their traditional supper of garlic and Bulgarian cheese, when Dalia burst into the room.

"Get up, get up!" she shouted to her mother and her aunts. "The war is over!" Moshe heard the commotion and joined them. In the final phase of the war, Israel had captured the Golan Heights from Syria. At 6:30 that evening, the United Nations imposed a cease-fire; the shooting and shelling had stopped. Everyone began jumping wildly, laughing and hugging and kissing one another.

In the evening, Dalia gathered her family and began to dance: slowly at first, arms extended, neck tilted, head back, eyes half-open, loose skirt shifting softly around her. She spun slowly between the walls of Jerusalem stone. Gradually the other women of the family joined Dalia, and they formed a circle, hands on one another's shoulders, moving to the hora, the Israeli national dance. Solia and Dora and Stella and Dalia swayed through the open house, out to the yard, past the jacaranda tree and the lemon tree, laughing and weeping.

As they circled through the yard, Dalia looked up at the night sky and sang: "David the king of Israel is alive. Alive and present. David is alive . . . " She would always remember this night and its abiding sense of miracle and liberation.

Within a week, refugees began arriving in Ramallah from villages near Latrun. Every villager from Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalo had been ordered out of their homes and sent north toward Ramallah; those who tried to return were blocked by a line of tanks and soldiers shooting in the air. Nineteen years earlier, Israeli soldiers commandeering buses had dumped the people of al-Ramla at the edges of these villages as they began their march in the punishing sun to Salbit. Now the villages themselves were emptied and several thousand of the ten thousand residents had taken refuge in Ramallah—a small portion of the more than two hundred thousand Palestinians who would be displaced by the 1967 war.