The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (38 page)

Nuha sat erect on the couch across from Ghiath. "We have the right to go back to our homeland," she said. "We can't be scattered all over. And meanwhile, they [Israelis] come from all over to live in our home." She crossed her arms. "Someone has to convince America of our right of return. Everybody should go back to his house. What about us these last fifty-six years? Whoever cares about us? Everybody cares only about them. They should go back where they came from. Or they could go to America. There's plenty of space there."

"These are dreams,
dreams
Ghiath exclaimed.

"This is justice," Nuha replied. "And the solution."

Ghiath would not back down. The problem of the day, he believed, was not return, it was the occupation. "Every day, every night, the Israelis are coming here," he told his guests. "We went to a wedding last week, and the Israelis arrested the groom! Nevertheless, George Bush says Sharon is a man of peace. This is a joke, my dear sir. We are
les miserables.
We can't do anything! We are weak, and they are strong, and because we are weak, we should never have made this intifada. I don't believe in it. Hamas named it the 'Al-Aqsa intifada.' The PLO named it the 'intifada for the liberation of Palestine.' Israel named it the 'intifada of the security wall.' And who succeeded?"

"The Israelis," Nuha said quietly.

"The intifada brought us this wall," Ghiath proclaimed. He shrugged. "I'm a practical person. Since I can do nothing, I'm sad for nothing. If what you want does not happen, want what happens."

Ghiath no longer believed that radical Palestinian politics served the people's interests. "In 1984, a few months before Bashir was released, I went to the prison," he said. "I said, 'Look, Bashir. You spent fifteen years in an Israeli prison. Now, Bashir, it is enough for you.'"

Bashir looked at his older cousin. He made something clear: He would never give up his right of return or his intention to fight for it by any means necessary. "I told him, 'You are talking nonsense,'" Ghiath recalled.

"I'm very proud of being Bashir's sister," Nuha said. "I believe in resistance. The way the Israelis are treating us today, we can't sit silent." She paused and looked at her husband. "I wish you were like Bashir."

"I will
never
be like Bashir," Ghiath replied. He turned to his guests. "There is a competition between me and bashir," he said with a little smile. "And we are cousins."

Nuha reached for the television remote.
The Bold and the Beautiful
flickered on the screen, with subtitles in Arabic.

"We have to go back to our homes," she said.

Dalia sat in the passenger seat of the rental car, staring straight ahead and trying to look casual, as if she, too, were a journalist and that it was normal for her to cross the Israeli military checkpoint heading north from Jerusalem to Ramallah. In fact, it was forbidden for Israeli civilians to travel to the occupied territories, and Dalia knew she risked being turned back. The soldier, however, checked only the driver's American passport, and surprisingly, the gamble paid off: Dalia was through the checkpoint and on her way to Ramallah. This was Qalandia, where Bashir and Ahmad had landed in the plane from Gaza in 1957; where, a decade later, Bashir had spotted the Israeli tanks from his rooftop in Ramallah.

"Oh, my God," Dalia gasped. To her left, a long line of vehicles pointed south, nearly frozen in place. Young Palestinian men and boys passed between the cars, offering gum, cactus fruit, cucumbers, kitchen utensils, and soap to frustrated, immobile drivers. "The Palestinian duty-free," said Nidal Rafa, the Palestinian journalist who was accompanying Dalia.

Just behind the cars and the hawkers stood the subject of Dalia's exclamation: a towering curtain of concrete, stretching out of sight to the north. This was Israel's "security barrier" separating the West Bank from Israel and, in some cases, the West Bank from itself. Construction for the barrier had begun in 2002 and would include six thousand workers digging trenches, stringing razor wire, erecting guard posts, laying concrete, and installing tens of thousands of electronic sensors. Part wall, part electrified fence, the construction project would cost $1.3 billion, or more than $3 million per mile. "The sole purpose of the fence," Israel declared, "is to provide security" in response to "the horrific wave of terrorism emanating from the West Bank."

"They are building the wall," said Nidal, "so they don't have to look into our eyes."

Palestinians called the barrier the "apartheid wall" and accused Israel of grabbing more land in the West Bank under the guise of security. The barrier did not follow the 1967 border, or Green Line, and in some cases it carved deep into West Bank lands to incorporate settlements. In the summer of 2004, the UN's International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled, "The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law." The court suggested Israel was creating a "fait accompli" on the ground by annexing West Bank lands in lieu of a political settlement. Israel rejected the court's ruling, declaring, "If there were no terror, there would be no fence." Further, Israel said, the international court had no jurisdiction in the matter. The White House concurred, saying the UN court was not "the appropriate forum to resolve what is a political issue." John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, called the barrier "a legitimate act of self-defense" and said it "is not a matter for the International Court of Justice."

The rental car bumped along potholed roads, passed under a banner welcoming visitors to Ramallah, went left at the first traffic light, and stopped near a shop selling Palestinian crafts. Dalia got out and waited at the entrance to the building. Nidal, who would translate for Dalia, stood beside her.

"You go first," Nidal said.

"No, please, you first," Dalia said. "Let me hide a little bit. It's been seven years." They walked up the stairs.

Bashir stood waiting at the second-floor landing.

Bashir and Dalia stood in the hallway outside Bashir's office and shook hands for a long time, smiling broadly and looking straight into each other's face. "
Keef'hallek?"
Bashir said. "How are you, Dalia?"

Dalia handed Bashir a white paper bag with green lettering in Hebrew. "A little lemon cake, Bashir," she said.

Bashir led Dalia into his office, and they faced each other again, still standing. "How is Yehezkel?" Bashir asked in English. "And Raphael? How is your son?"

"Raphael is sixteen now. He's in high school. He likes computers. And I heard Ahmad is eighteen and going to Harvard!"

"It's only for four years."

"The years mean nothing to him," Dalia remarked, looking at Nidal. "He was fifteen years in prison."

Bashir nodded; his silver hair matched his steel-framed glasses. He wore khaki pants and a khaki windbreaker. "Now I'm getting old," he said. "I'm sixty-two."

"The gray looks good on him," Dalia said. "Tell him, Nidal. Good, wonderful!" As Nidal translated, Bashir's face turned red.

Bashir had been smiling from the moment Dalia arrived; now his face changed. "I'm eager to see you, but I was very afraid for you. Especially with the news of each day. The wall, the arrests, the house demolitions, the way it is. The situation is not quiet. You can see people tense. You never know what could happen."

Bashir had not expected Dalia, or he would have received her at his house. When she hadn't confirmed, he explained, and given the difficulty of passing the checkpoints, he had assumed she wasn't coming.

There was a pause; Bashir disappeared for a moment to heat water for tea, and then the two old friends moved into padded chairs across a coffee table in the tiled, spare office.

"Everything's all right?" Bashir asked.

"What shall we say?" Dalia replied. "I cannot answer this question."

"Is Raphael doing well in school?"

"Yes."

"Of course, this is natural. He comes from his father and you."

Dalia rubbed her hands together and looked around the office. On the wall to her left was a picture of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP and PLO official assassinated by Israeli helicopter rockets in 2001.

"Was he a friend?" Dalia asked after a long pause.

"Yes, a good friend. He was killed by two rockets from an Apache."

Bashir got up for a moment and returned with steaming Styrofoam cups of tea. The subject turned to prison. Dalia wanted to know if Bashir was in Ramla when she was teaching high school next door in 1971.

"Maybe I was there, in solitary confinement," Bashir replied. "I was there less than one year. I was in seventeen prisons."

"So you were moving around. Getting the grand tour. A prison tourist!" Dalia laughed uncomfortably. "Did any of the guards treat you well?"

"There was a Romanian guard. He was a good guy."

Bashir looked at his watch. Dalia knocked over her teacup, splashing herself and looking flustered.

"Don't worry! Don't worry!" Bashir exclaimed as Dalia mopped herself with a tissue.

"The Romanian guard," Bashir continued, "he kept letters from my nephew because the warden was coming to confiscate them."

"Didn't you tell me once that Rabin came to visit the prison?"

Yes, Bashir said, it was when he was at Jneid prison near Nablus, before he was deported to Lebanon. Bashir was the prisoners' representative. "I told Rabin that even Haim Levy"—the prisons commissioner—"said that a dog couldn't live in these conditions."

"It's interesting that he would come as minister of defense to sit with the prisoners," Dalia remarked.

"I was a prisoner. He was minister of defense. Nothing changed."

Dalia was thinking of Rabin and Oslo. "But Bashir—don't you think that someone like that, who did something to change—made some progress, as much as he could in changing his position, to move a little bit—to make a compromise and extend his hand to your people . . . ?" Her question was left unfinished.

Bashir leaned forward. "For Palestinians it didn't change the daily life. It went from bad to worse. I didn't go back to al-Ramla. We don't have our independent state, and we don't have our freedom. We are still refugees moving from one place to another place to another place to another place, and every day Israel is committing crimes. I can't even be on the board of the Open House. Because I'm Palestinian, not Israeli. If somebody comes yesterday from Ethiopia but he's Jewish, he will have all the rights, when I'm the one who has the history in al-Ramla. But for them I'm a stranger."

Dalia's arms were folded tightly across her chest. She unfolded them and took a breath.

"Bashir. Maybe I have no right to say what I'm going to say. We need to make sacrifices if both of us are to live here.
We need to make sacrifices.
And I know it is not fair for me to say that. I know. I mean, you cannot live in your house in Ramla. I know it's not fair. But I think we do need to strengthen those people who are willing to make some compromise. Like Rabin, who paid with his life. And so for your own country, you need to strengthen the hand of those who are ready to make a compromise and ready to make space for us here. By not accepting the state of Israel or by not accepting the state of Palestine, I think none of us has a real life here. Israelis don't have a real life here, either. But if you're not okay, we're not okay. And if we're not okay, you're not okay."

Dalia took another long breath. She slipped off her sandles and tucked her feet beneath her on the office chair. "I was passing through the checkpoint today," she said. "I could see the wall—it is like a wall in the heart. You said you're in your prison here in Ramallah. Who am I to say that people like you who find themselves in a situation like this, that they need to sacrifice so much, so that my people will have a place? I mean, it's unfair, I understand, from your point of view. But you know from me from the past, how attached I am to the state of Israel. And how can I even ask you to make space for this state? But if I knew or if we knew that you could make space for the state of Israel, first of all in your heart, then we could find a solution on the ground. How much less threatened my people would feel. I say this understanding that I don't even have a right to ask you for this. I'm just asking this. That is my plea."

As Nidal translated, Dalia and Bashir gazed across the room at each other, not smiling, not frowning, not blinking, eyes locked. The lemon cake sat forgotten in the white bakery bag on the table. A refrigerator hummed in the next room, and the voices of children at play drifted through the window.

"You, Dalia, remember thirty-seven years ago, when we first met; when I came to visit you," Bashir said finally. "And since then there have been more settlements, land confiscations, and now this wall—how can there be any solution? How can there be any Palestinian state? How can I open my heart, as you say?" For Bashir, of course, the solution was not simply dismantling the wall and making a Palestinian state on 22 percent of old Palestine; it remained "having one state, and all the people who live in this one state are equal, without any consideration of religion, nationality, culture, language. Everyone is equal, has equal rights, has the right to vote and choose his own leadership." At the core of this solution was return.

Bashir's views were supported by many Palestinians, but they stood on one side of a divide that had grown since Oslo. He was among those considered unrealistic and fixated on what his cousin Ghiath would consider an impractical dream. In recent years, however, a movement based on return had grown up in the Palestinian diaspora, from the refugee camps to young, more affluent Palestinians in Europe and the United States, who had been raised with the stories of villages long since destroyed. Bashir believed the right of return was both sacred are practical. Like an increasing number of Palestinians opposed to Oslo-type solutions, he believed that without return, the conflict will be eternal. "And it will be a tragedy for both people," he told Dalia.

Bashir believed "it's the strong who create history," but his years in prison and in exile had helped forge a longer-range view. "We are weak today," he said. "But we won't stay this way. Palestinians are stones in a riverbed. We won't be washed away. The Palestinians are not the Indians. It is the opposite: Our numbers are increasing."