The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (27 page)

Through her encounter with the Khairis, Dalia, now twenty-one years old, had begun to question the stereotypes she was raised with: the stories of mistrust, suspicion, and hatred. "It was generally believed that an Arab can befriend you, but if their national interest dictates otherwise, they will stab you in the back with a knife," she said. "That was a very prevalent thing. One had to fight against that, to prove that it's not true." Now, Dalia feared, Bashir's perceptions of his own national interest had clashed completely with hers.

At the core of Dalia's faith was the conviction that personal dialogue was the key to transformation. If Bashir was in fact part of the PFLP, if he was connected to the Supersol bombing, it showed that "personal relationships meant nothing in the face of collective forces. If national interest comes before our common humanity," Dalia said, "then there is no hope for redemption, there is no hope for healing, there is no hope for transformation, there is no hope for
anything!"

One morning as pretrial preparations dragged on, Ahmad, Zakia, and Nuha Khairi decided to visit Bashir in jail. Prison officials had moved him repeatedly, and now he sat and waited in a cell in al-Ramla. Ahmad's eyesight, always poor, had begun to fail him—it was part of a long, slow decline that would eventually blind him—but as the three Khairis passed through the gates and into the visitors area, he realized where he was. "Bashir," Ahmad said when his son was finally sitting in front of him, "did you notice where this prison is? This is exactly where our olive trees used to be."

Ahmad said the land had been bequeathed to Khair al-Din al-Ramlawi by the Ottoman sultan in the sixteenth century. The
waqf land
had remained in the family for at least twelve generations, until 1948. Bashir realized the symbolic was also the literal: He was being imprisoned on his own land.

Nuha was constantly worrying about her brother. "We don't know how long he will be in jail, we don't know what will happen with Bashir," she would say. "So many questions, so many uncertainties. He's twenty-eight years old, and still, he's not married. And now he is in prison for I don't know how long. How will this affect his future?"

In 1970, Bashir's trial began at a military court in Lod (formerly Lydda), a few miles from his old home in al-Ramla. His sister Khanom, who was living in Kuwait, had not seen Bashir since his arrest. She came to see him, but there were no family visiting hours during the trial. Bashir's lawyer told her she could pretend to be his assistant, "just so I could see him. But he told me that I would not be allowed to talk to him and that if I did, there would be consequences." When the jailers brought Bashir from the courthouse lockup, however, Khanom could not control herself. "When I saw him, I shouted. I yelled out,
'Habibi Bashir!My
darling Bashir!' I was expelled from the courthouse. But at least I saw him."

One afternoon during a recess in the trial, Ahmad decided he could no longer stay away from the house in al-Ramla. For more than three years, he had resisted a visit to Dalia and her family, telling his children, "I would have a heart attack before I reached the front door." Now, a few minutes removed from the military court and the prison where his son passed his days and nights, Ahmad stood with Zakia and Nuha at the door of the house he had built in 1936. He was barely able to see, but he could make out the figure of a Jewish man in his mid-fifties: Moshe Eshkenazi, from Bulgaria. The two men stood facing each other across the threshold: Ahmad and Moshe, two fathers of the same house.

They went through the house and outside again, to the garden in back. Ahmad walked forward slowly, touching the stones of the house, as Nuha and Zakia helped him along. Moshe invited his guests to sit. Dalia and Solia were out on an errand, soon to return. When they did, as Nuha recalls, Dalia asked all about Bashir. Before leaving, Ahmad asked Dalia if he could take one of the flowers from the
fitna
tree. Dalia told Ahmad, "You can take it right from the tree."

Dalia, three decades later, has no such memories; she doesn't believe she was at the house during the Khairis' visit that day, nor does she believe she ever met Ahmad Khairi. She does, however, remember her father telling her about the visit, and especially about what Bashir's father said to Moshe. On this point, her memory is identical to Nuha's.

"There was a lemon tree here," Ahmad said to Moshe. "I planted it. Is it still here? Is it still alive?"

Nuha and Moshe rose and stood on either side of Ahmad. They led him slowly to the corner of the garden. Ahmad extended his arms, running his fingers up the smooth, hard bark, over the soft knobs on the tree's base, and along the slender, narrowing branches, until, between his hands, he felt the soft brush of leaves and, between them, a small, cool sphere: a lemon from the tree he had planted thirty-four years earlier. Zakia watched from the table in silence, tears in her eyes.

Ahmad's head was among the lower branches, and he was crying silently. Moshe plucked a few lemons and placed them in Ahmad's hands. The men returned to the table and sat down. Moshe rose again and returned with a pitcher of lemonade, which he poured in silence into waiting glasses.

"It was nice," Nuha would recall in another century, as a woman in her sixties still in exile in Ramallah. "Very nice. Of course it was nice! We planted that tree with our own hands. Dalia's family—they were all very kind. But what does that matter? They were the people who took our house."

Ahmad brought the four lemons back with him to Ramallah. "As a gift," Dalia would say. "And a memory."

In 1972, Bashir Khairi was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for complicity in the February 1969 bombing of the Supersol market on Agron Street in West Jerusalem and for membership in an outlawed organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Israeli witnesses and Palestinian informants had testified that Bashir had served as a liaison between the bomb makers and the two members of the PFLP who hid the explosives on the spice rack at the market.

As the judge announced the sentence, Khanom Khairi began to scream. "Bashir! Bashir!" she cried out as her younger brother locked eyes with her. Nuha was in shock, at the beginning of what she would later describe as a nervous breakdown. The court was in an uproar, and Khanom's enraged cries cut through the din.

Bashir had been expecting the conviction. He stood up and faced the judge. "I don't recognize this court," he said. "I'm innocent." At no point would Bashir admit any role in the bombing or acknowledge any membership in the PFLP. He considered the entire military trial a "charade" conducted by an illegitimate government. "I did not confess," Bashir would recall in 1998, twenty-six years after his conviction. "They could not extract a confession from me. They were false accusations. Because if they had been able to prove it, I would have been sentenced to life in prison, not for fifteen years. However, I am Palestinian. I have always hated the occupation. And I believe that I have the right to resist it by the means that are available to me. Yes, at one stage the means were violent. But I understood them. I understood the actions of the Palestinian fighters who were ready to sacrifice themselves. I still understand them."

Bashir's co-defendants received harsher sentences: Khalil Abu Khadijeh was sentenced to twenty years; Abdul Hadi Odeh got life. In a separate trial, sisters Rasmiah and Aisha Odeh also received life sentences. "When the sentences were read out," Khanom recalled, "the mother of Abdul Hadi fainted. We all ran towards her and got her water, and someone splashed some perfume on her to wake her up."

Bashir's aunt Rasmieh left the court and closed herself in her room at home. There she recited the sura of Yassin, from the Koran: "A sign for them is the night. From it we draw out the day and they are plunged in darkness."

She repeated the verse forty times.

"We say it has to do with faith and fate," Khanom said. "This we believe saved him, in the end."

The convictions of some of the defendants rested in part on the testimony of Israel Gefen, the Israeli veteran. The explosion in the spice rack had embedded paprika with such force into Gefen's skin that he had reeked of the stuff for weeks; three years after the explosion, every time he took a bath, he would still find tiny silvers of plastic—from the spice bottles—resting in the bottom of the tub. As for his foot, doctors at the Gates of Righteousness hospital had managed to sew it back to his ankle, but even after several operations it would never be the same. For the rest of his life, on especially cold or hot days, or when he felt especially tired, he would feel again the heat of the blast in his ankle.

After Bashir's conviction, Dalia immediately cut off all contact with the Khairi family. "I felt very betrayed," she would recall. Dalia had attached her deepest faith to the unfolding dialogue with Bashir. Now that was shattered, and along with it Dalia's belief in the power of "person-to-person relationships" to "touch the deeper humanity that goes beyond all national and political differences—a deeper humanity from which transformative miracles are created." Dalia's "natural, inborn faith" dictated that "together we can find a solution. That was a central component, a central part of my being. That personal relations hold the key for transformation." Bashir's commitment to his own cause, Dalia believed, meant that he was "determined that we should 'go back where we came from.' It meant that we were not wanted here. We were not going to be accepted." Alongside this anguish, there was a deep sense—more emotional than rational, Dalia would conclude later—that Bashir had confirmed a prejudice inherent to many Israelis: Arabs kill Jews simply because they are Jews.

"Yeah, everything stopped," she said twenty-six years after Bashir's conviction. "No contact. It was too much for me." The door she had opened was closed.

Dalia grew cynical about the future of Arab and Jew living side by side. She became zealous in the defense of Israel and participated wholeheartedly in the nation's defense as an officer in the Israeli army.

When she got out of the service, Dalia plunged into her new work as an English teacher at the Ramla-Lod High School. The school stood adjacent to the Ramla prison, so close that the bricks of the two buildings actually touched.

In September 1972, as Bashir began serving his time, eight Palestinian gunmen snuck into the Olympic village at Munich, shooting two Israeli athletes dead and capturing nine more. In a subsequent shoot-out at a military base with German police, fourteen people died, including all of the Israeli hostages. The gunmen were part of the Black September organization, a splinter group of Fatah born after the civil war in Jordan. One of Black September's first operations, in 1971, had been the assassination of Jordan's prime minister—as revenge for his role in the attack on the Palestinian factions in September 1970. To this day it is not clear whether Black September acted independently in the Munich assassinations or whether Fatah chief Yasser Arafat knew of the operations in advance. At the time, Arafat defended such actions. "Violent political action in the midst of a broad popular movement," he declared, "cannot be termed terrorism." Many Palestinians agreed. They believed, twenty-four years after the 1948 war, that Israel was occupying their lands and homes and that desperate times required desperate measures: No one would pay any attention to their struggle unless they forced their way onto the international stage. "Humans must change the world, they must do something, they must kill if needs be," Habash had declared. "To kill, even if that means we in our turn become inhuman."

Israelis responded to the Munich assassinations with air strikes against suspected Palestinian bases in Syria and Lebanon, killing at least two hundred people, including many civilians. Within days, a series of assassinations and maimings rocked the Palestinian movement, part of Israel's Operation Wrath of God. The Israeli general who directed the operation called the assassinations "politically vital" and said they were driven by "the old Biblical rule of an eye for an eye." Operation Wrath of God, however, did not represent an entirely new policy, but rather an intensification of Israeli reprisals in the era of Palestinian hijackings. On July 8, a car bomb had killed revered Palestinian novelist and PFLP spokesman Ghassan Kanafani and his twenty-one-year-old niece as they drove to enroll her at the American University of Beirut.

Two and a half weeks later, Kanafani's PFLP colleague Bassam Abu-Sharif would receive a book-size package in a plain brown wrapper marked INSPECTED FOR EXPLOSIVES.

"Bassam," the postman called to the young man, "you've got a present—looks like a book. . . . " The young rebel tore off the wrapper and saw he had been sent a book about Che Guevara, one of his longtime heroes. "Casually," he would recall in his memoir twenty-three years later, "I began leafing through the pages to see what it was like. . . . Underneath, I saw that the book was hollow. There were two explosive charges in this hollow space, wired to go off when the uncut section of the book was lifted

"I had just lifted it."

The explosion blew off a thumb and two fingers of Bassam's right hand, broke his jaw apart, smashed his lips and teeth to pieces, opened large wounds in his chest, stomach, and upper right thigh, blinded him in his right eye, and severely impaired his hearing in both ears. Like Israel Gefen, the rebel would be sewn back together and would carry the explosion around with him for the rest of his life. From that day forward, family, colleagues, friends, and visitors would be required to sit close to Bassam Abu-Sharif and shout their greetings, their intimacies, and their questions.

Bashir would spend the next twelve years in several Israeli-run prisons, mainly in Jenin, Tulkarm, and Ramallah. His prison mates were other Palestinian men convicted of armed insurrection, or of membership in banned political groups, or of demonstrating against the occupation, or were simply those who waited for formal charges to be filed against them. In the eighteen years following the Israeli occupation in June 1967, an estimated 250,000 Palestinians—or 40 percent of the adult male population—had seen the inside of an Israeli jail.