The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (30 page)

"I had been in prison six times," Jabril Rajoub would remember. "For me, deportation was worse than any of that. I was born in Palestine. My parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and my great-great-grandparents are all from Palestine. My memories are in this country. I feel I am a part of this country. I feel I have a right to live in this country. With my family, with my friends, in my homeland."

The helicopter crossed Israel's northern border and set down on a road in southern Lebanon. Bashir, Jabril, the two other activists, and the Israeli soldiers guarding them were in the Israel Defense Forces' "security zone," a twenty-five-mile south-to-north buffer established in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon to crush the PLO. Israel had remained in southern Lebanon ever since, declaring its intent to stop incursions and rocket attacks into the northern Galilee, but the occupation had grown increasingly unpopular, both in Lebanon and at home. Already the conflict was becoming known as "Israel's Vietnam."

Bashir stepped beneath the helicopter blades and felt someone take off his blindfold. He could see Jabril and the other two men. The four activists looked out to see two waiting black Mercedes sedans.

An Israeli officer gave Bashir $50 and looked him in the eye. "If you even try to come back," he recalled the officer saying, "we will shoot you."

The four men climbed into the black sedans driven by masked Lebanese militiamen and sped north, out of the "security zone" and deeper into Lebanon's Beka'a Valley.

ISRAEL DEFIES UN AND DEPORTS FOUR PALESTINIANS, read a headline in the January 14 edition of the
Times
of London. "Israel defied the United Nations Security Council openly yesterday and deported four Palestinians to southern Lebanon, as its inner cabinet met to approve even tougher measures to put down the disturbances which are continuing unabated throughout the occupied territories," the dispatch stated.

The same day, under the headline FOUR EXPELLED SECRETLY, the
Jerusalem Post
reported on its front page that Bashir and the three other activists accused of "inciting riots in the administered territories" were "shuttled secretly by helicopter to the northern edge of the Southern Lebanon Security Zone at noon yesterday, without a word of notice to their families or lawyers." The deportations, the newspaper indicated, were widely denounced around the world as a human rights violation and antithetical to a peaceful solution to the conflict. Even the normally reserved U.S. State Department issued a statement of "deep regret" about the actions of its ally. Israel's UN ambassador, a young politician named Benjamin Netanyahu, replied that the deportations were "totally legal" and that the United Nations Security Council could not be a fair arbiter because it "condones any violence on the Arab side, while condemning all Israeli countermeasures."

Israeli society was increasingly divided over the deportations, the occupation of southern Lebanon, and the treatment of Palestinians during the intifada. On the Right stood the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir, which advocated a continuation of the hard-line policy against the Palestinians. Netanyahu, the UN ambassador, had forged many of his own convictions after the death of his brother, Yonatan, during an Israeli raid against a PFLP hijacking in Entebbe, Uganda.

Toward the Israeli political center, representing the conservative wing of the Labor Party, stood Yitzhak Rabin, who, on the eve of Bashir's deportation, had recognized the "despair" of Palestinian refugees. "As a soldier, I feel that these people have fought with a courage that deserves respect," he would tell Mustafa Khalil, the former Egyptian prime minister and an architect of the Camp David accords. "They deserve to have an entity. Not the PLO, not a state, but a separate entity." Rabin believed that Israel could not agree to the Palestinians' central political demand—recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and to Yasser Arafat as their leader. To do so, Rabin argued, would require Israelis to compromise on the right of return for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and that, the defense minister argued, would be "national suicide."

At the center of Israel Defense Forces policy under Rabin remained the iron fist: crushing the intifada with military force and deporting PLO and PFLP operatives to Lebanon. Other Israelis, however, had already begun to rethink this logic. In the same January 14 edition
of the Jerusalem Post,
at the back of the paper on the editorial page, a quiet voice emerged amid the international furor over the deportations and the Israeli crackdown in the occupied territories.

The voice belonged to a forty-year-old woman who had grown up in Ramla. Her article was titled "Letter to a Deportee."

"Dear Bashir," wrote Dalia. "We got to know each other twenty years ago under unusual and unexpected circumstances. Ever since, we have become part of each other's lives. Now I hear that you are about to be deported. Since you are in detention at present, and this may be my last chance to communicate with you, I have chosen to write this open letter. First I want to retell our story."

Dalia had initially dismissed Yehezkel's suggestion that she write about her history. Afterward, she would remember, "an inner voice, an inner conviction" rose up, "welling up in a wave, saying,
Yes, it's right to do it.
You've got to do it.
At that moment it came with the courage. And I knew: Yes, I'm going to be out there."

Dalia recounted for Israeli readers the story of the Eshkenazis, the Khairis, and the house in Ramla: Bashir's visit to the house after the Six Day War; Dalia's visit to Ramallah and the "warm personal connection" they established across the gulf of political differences; and her understanding, ultimately, that the house she, Moshe, and Solia moved into in November 1948 was not simply "abandoned property":

It was very painful for me, as a young woman 20 years ago, to wake up to a few then well hidden facts. For example, we were all led to believe that the Arab population of Ramla and Lod had run away before the advancing Israeli army in 1948, leaving everything behind in a rushed and cowardly escape. This belief reassured us. It was meant to prevent guilt and remorse. But after 1967,1 met not only you, but also an Israeli Jew who had personally participated in the expulsion from Ramla and Lod. He told me the story as he had experienced it, and as Yitzhak Rabin later confirmed in his memoirs.

"My love for my country," Dalia wrote, "was losing its innocence . . . some change in perspective was beginning to take place in me." She then recounted the "unforgettable day" of Ahmad Khairi's only visit to the house he had built and the moment when he stood at the lemon tree, tears rolling down his face, as Moshe Eshkenazi plucked a few lemons from the tree and placed them in Ahmad's hands.

Many years later, after the death of your father, your mother told me that, whenever he felt troubled at night and could not sleep, he would pace up and down your rented apartment in Ramallah, holding a shriveled lemon in his hand. It was the same lemon my father had given him on that visit.

Ever since I met you, the feeling has been growing in me that that home was not just my home. The lemon tree which yielded so much fruit and gave us so much delight lived in other people's hearts too. The spacious house with its high ceilings, big windows and large grounds was no longer just an "Arab house," a desirable form of architecture. It had faces behind it now. The walls evoked other people's memories and tears.

Dalia described a "strange destiny" that connected her family to Bashir's. Though the plans for turning the house into a kindergarten and a center for Arab-Jewish dialogue had been long delayed, this "destiny" was still on her mind. "The house with which our childhood memories were connected," she wrote, "forced us to face each other." But Dalia then questioned whether genuine reconciliation could be possible across a chasm as wide as the one between herself and Bashir. She recounted Bashir's conviction and prison term in the aftermath of the explosion that killed three civilians in the Supersol market—"My heart aches for those murdered even now"— and then pleaded with Bashir to transform his politics.

Dalia told Bashir that his support of George Habash and the PFLP—support he had never acknowledged, but which she assumed—represented a "refusal to accept a Jewish state in even part of Palestine," a position she said "will alienate all those Israelis who, like myself, are prepared to support the Palestinian struggle for self determination."

People like yourself, Bashir, bear a great responsibility for triggering our anxieties which are well justified, given the PFLP's determination to replace Israel with a "secular democratic state" and to use terror to achieve this aim.

If you could disassociate yourself from your past terrorist actions, your commitment to your own people would gain true moral force in my eyes. I well understand that terror is a term relative to a subjective point of view. Some of Israel's political leaders were terrorists in the past and have never repented. I know that what we consider terror from our side, your people considers their heroic "armed struggle" with the means at their disposal. What we consider our right to self-defense, when we bomb Palestinian targets from the air and inevitably hit civilians, you consider mass terror from the air with advanced technology. Each side has an ingenuity for justifying its own position. How long shall we perpetuate this vicious circle? . . .

Dalia then turned to the actions of her own government in deporting Bashir, which she called a "violation of human rights," which "create[s] greater bitterness and extremism among the Palestinians" and allows the deportees "greater freedom to plan actions against Israel from abroad." Yet Dalia understood that at the heart of Bashir's deportation was something beyond politics:

You, Bashir, have already experienced one expulsion from Ramla as a child. Now you are about to experience another from Ramallah forty years later. You will thus become a refugee twice. You may be separated from your wife and your two small children, Ahmad and Hanine, and from your elderly mother and the rest of your family. How can your children avoid hating those who will have deprived them of their father? Will the legacy of pain grow and harden with bitterness as it passes down the generations?

It seems to me, Bashir, that you will now have a new opportunity to assume a leadership role. By its intention to deport you, Israel is actually empowering you. I appeal to you to demonstrate the kind of leadership that uses nonviolent means of struggle for your rights . . .

I appeal to both Palestinians and Israelis to understand that the use of force will not resolve this conflict on its fundamental level. This is the kind of war that no one can win, and either both peoples will achieve liberation or neither will.

Our childhood memories, yours and mine, are intertwined in a tragic way. If we can not find means to transform that tragedy into a shared blessing, our clinging to the past will destroy our future. We will then rob another generation of a joy-filled childhood and turn them into martyrs for an unholy cause. I pray that with your cooperation and God's help, our children will delight in the beauty and bounties of this holy land.

Allah maak.
May God be with you.

Dalia

Bashir would not read Dalia's open letter for weeks. The morning it appeared in print, he and the three other deportees were well inside Lebanese territory at a PFLP training camp in the Beka'a Valley.

The next day, they were driven in an ambulance operated by Salah Salah, the PFLP leader in Lebanon, to the village of Ksara near the "security zone" border. The Israelis controlled most of the zone, aided by a force they had financed and organized, the South Lebanon Army, but the area was far from pacified. Hostile villages chafing under the Israeli occupation had spawned the Army of God, or Hezbollah. Their objective was to expel the Israelis from southern Lebanon, to which end they began firing Soviet-made Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.

Israel had occupied southern Lebanon for six years, since its 1982 invasion and attack on Beirut. After Black September in 1970, Arafat's PLO, Habash's PFLP, and other rebel factions had left Jordan and set up operations in Lebanon. From their virtual state within a state, they launched attacks against Israel, just as they had in Hussein's kingdom. Israel funneled tens of millions of dollars to Lebanese Christian militias who were alarmed at the militant Palestinian presence and the rapid growth in Lebanon's Muslim population. The militias fought a proxy war for Israel against the Palestinian factions, but with little
success, and in
1982, General Ariel Sharon and his Israeli forces laid siege to Beirut. Tens of thousands of shells rained down on the Lebanese capital as Sharon declared that south Beirut should be "razed to the ground." Sharon's central goal was to drive Arafat and the Palestinian forces out of Lebanon and farther away from Israel. PLO forces put up stiffer resistance than expected, but by late July, Arafat and the PLO leadership began to consider the inevitable: evacuation from Lebanon to a safe haven deeper into exile.

On August 21, 1982, the first four hundred Palestinian guerrillas left Lebanon for Cyprus, an island off the Lebanese coast that was divided between Greek- and Turkish-controlled territories. Over the next two weeks, fourteen thousand more would follow them into exile. Arafat himself would quit Lebanon on August 30, boarding a Greek merchant ship under the protective shield of the U.S. Sixth Fleet. By September 1, the PLO would be establishing its third home in exile: Tunisia, the North African nation on the Mediterranean coast, where Arafat and his
cadres
would consider their new options. Left behind in Lebanon were nearly half a million Palestinians living in squalid refugee camps. They had arrived in Lebanon in 1948, fresh with the promise they would be going home "after fifteen days." Thirty-four years later, they still taught their children the names of streets in villages long since destroyed. None had been given Lebanese citizenship, which they assured their hosts they didn't want anyway. Their only wish, they insisted, was to exercise their UN-sanctioned right of return.