Sandy Tolan: The Lemon Tree

The full title of Sandy Tolan's book is The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (2006, Bloomsbury). The Arab is Bashir Khairi, who was born into a prominent Palestinian family in al-Ramla, an Arab town that was forcibly evacuated by Israeli soldiers in 1948, its residents made to march as refugees to Ramallah, a West Bank town controlled by Jordan until 1967, when it too was occupied by Israel. The Jew is Dalia Eshkenazi, born in Bulgaria, her family emigrating to Israel in 1948, where they moved into the same house that the Khairis had been forced from. The lemon tree grew in the backyard of the house, planted by Bashir's father, a familiar bond for both. In 1967, Bashir was finally able to briefly return to al-Ramla, find his family house, and find Dalia in the house. They two people provide a prism through which Tolan tells the story of the conflict. Like everything else, the pair are not true mirrors of each other. They share a common bond, but their experiences are profoundly asymmetric. Dalia comes off as a well-reasoned member of Israel's peace block. Bashir, on the other hand, finds himself allied with militants, and spends most of the post-1967 years in jail or in exile.

The quotes hardly do justice to the book, especially to the personal aspects of the story. By focusing as he does, Tolan brings the story down to human scale, but in reducing it the story becomes one arbitrary thread among many. The book does not achieve, or even suggest, a happy ending, but then neither does history. But the point is to understand the problem, not to make it easier than it is. Dalia's Einstein quote seems to be thrown out as a challenge, not achieved in the book, but out there waiting for someone to rise to it.

I started putting these quotes together shortly after reading the book, then got sidetracked and resumed much later, leaving the later quotes rather bare. Doing a fair job would entail much re-reading, and would no doubt result in many more quotes. This is one of the best books to read on the subject. Comes with extremely meticulous notes at the end.

In 1937 Britain's Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab regions, with the separation enforced by forced transfer. The Zionist leadership embraced those recommendations. The Arab leadership rejected them, and soon launched an armed revolt, which lasted from 1937-39 until the British crushed it. Afterwards, Britain treaded more carefully, discarding the Peel Commission recommendations and instituting policies to forestall further revolt by limiting Jewish immigration -- the change of policy was detailed in the famous "White Paper." As it turned out, 1939 was a very bad time to shut down one of the few avenues open for Jews to escape from Nazi-dominated Europe. The Zionist debate in 1937 prefigured much of the ensuing history (pp. 18-19):

The Zionist leadership accepted Lord Peel's recommendations despite internal dissension. Many Jewish leaders did not want to give up the idea of a Jewish homeland across the whole of Palestine, and some leaders even considered Transjordan,t he desert kingdom across the Jordan River, as part of an eventual Jewish state. For them, acceptance of the Peel Commission's report was a major compromise, and their disagreement reflected ideological divisions that would manifest for decades. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Mapai Party and the most influential of the Zionists in Palestine, had argued in favor of the plan. At the core of the Peel Commission plan was the idea of transferring the Arabs, a concept that had been advanced for decades by fellow Zionists. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, had written that in purchasing land from the indigenous Arabs for a Jewish homeland, "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Forty years later, during Lord Peel's investigation, Ben-Gurion had instructed Jews who met with the commission to recommend the transfer plan. After the release of the commission's report, the Zionist leader wrote: "We have to uproot from the roots of our hearts the assumption that it is not possible. Indeed it is possible. . . . We might be losing a historical chance that won't return. The transfer cause, in my view, is more important than all our demands for additional territory . . . with the evacuation of the Arab population from the valleys, we get for the first time in our history a real Jewish state." A year later, Ben-Gurion would declare, "I support compulsory transfer." Others sympathetic to the Zionist cause had warned against such measures. Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, for example, had long advocated what Einstein called "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic peoples," who "may have a great future in common."

The Arabs were as stunned by the Peel Commission's proposal as Ben-Gurion was excited. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, promptly rejected it, not only because of the transfer plan, but because of the partition itself. The Arabs would fight for a single, independent, Arab-majority state.

The note about Buber and Einstein points out a missed opportunity to forge a compromise between Jews and Arabs in favor of a state that would respect both while rejecting British colonial rule. One thing I don't know what to what extent such an understanding may have been supported by Palestinian Arabs. In some ways it was implicit in their one-state position, which at the time would have been a little less than one-third Jewish. Such a state could even have welcomed fairly large-scale Jewish immigration without becoming majority Jewish. But two things worked against any such position: continued British rule depended on keeping Jews and Arabs in opposition, and the Zionists were overwhelmingly dominated by people like Ben-Gurion who desired a Jewish-majority state on as much land as possible with as few Arabs as possible.

At the end of the 1937-39 revolt (p. 21):

In May 1939, it appeared to some Arabs that the sacrifices of their rebellion had brought a political victory. With British forces still heavily engaged with the rebels, and with the situation in Europe creating tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, the British government released its White Paper, accepting many of the demands of the Arab Rebellion. The British agreed to strictly limit Jewish immigration and to tighten restrictions on land sales in Palestine. Most important, the White Paper called for a single independent state. Many Arabs in Palestine saw in the White Paper a practical solution to their problem. But Hajj Amin al-Husseini, speaking for the Arab Higher Committee, rejected the White Paper. His word carried the day in Arab Palestine, even though it was made from exile: the ex-mufti had fled Palestine nearly two years earlier, wanted by the British at the height of the Arab rebellion. The ex-mufti's decision was unpopular with many Palestinian Arabs, who believed they had missed an opportunity.

The new British policy marked a sharp change from the Peel Commission plan of only two years earlier. The White Paper was a major concession to the Arabs. For the Jews of Palestine, it was an abandonment of British support for a Jewish national homeland promised in the Balfour Declaration, at a time when the situation for Jews in Europe was growing more perilous. Within weeks, the Jewish paramilitary squads were attacking British forces, planting explosives in Jerusalem's central post office, and carrying out attacks on civilians in Arab souks. The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine. "Satan himself could not have created a more distressing and horrible nightmare," David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary.

By the turn of 1940, the British authorities had finally defeated the Arab Rebellion through what they called "severe countermeasures": tens of thousands jailed, thousands killed, hundreds executed, countless houses demolished, and key leaders, including the mufti, in exile. In the cities, Arab men had taken off their keffiyehs and replaced them once again with the fez. The Palestinian national movement was deeply divided and utterly unprepared for any future conflict.

But the "single independent state" was promised some ten years in the future, and in the end was not delivered. During the White Paper period, the Zionists were able to build their militias to the point where they were able to prevail in the civil war of 1948. Britain not only did nothing to stop them; Britain furthered the partition by encouraging Transjordan to occupy the West Bank, and Britain had a hand in implementing transfer by shipping Palestinians, especially from Jaffa, as refugees to Lebanon.

Britain's strategy was lose-lose, with Jews turning on them for abandoning the Zionist dream, while keeping the Arabs in opposition by denying them any political power. Yet Britain never could abandon its colonial mentality, so they kept helping the Zionists even as they were assaulted by major acts of terrorism. Britain was so committed to divide-and-conquer rule that they never considered trying to reconcile the two groups. Nor did they consider the alternative of permitting Jewish emigration to anywhere else in Britain and its empire where it would have been much less politically charged.

(pp. 45-46):

By the end of the war in 1945, Bashir had turned three and the battle for the future of Palestine had reawakened. A quarter million Jewish refugees flooded the Allied displaced persons camps in Europe, and tens of thousands of Jews were smuggled out of the DP camps to Palestine by the Mossad, predecessor of the present-day Israeli spy agency. Most of this immigration was illegal under the British rule in Palestine. The authorities began to intercept boatloads of European Jews and intern them at Cyprus, off the coast of Lebanon. With its White Paper six years earlier, the British had imposed strict immigration limits in the face of the fears, demands, and rebellion of the Palestinian Arabs.

As the details of the atrocities in Europe began to emerge, however, the image of stateless, bedraggled Holocaust survivors in the Cyprus internment camps was seared into the mind of the Western public, and Britain was pressured to loosen its policy. U.S. president Harry Truman pressed Britain to allow one hundred thousand DPs into Palestine as soon as possible, and to abandon restrictions on land scales to Jews -- measures to increase tensions with the Arabs of Palestine. Arabs argued that the Holocaust survivors could be settled elsewhere, including in the United States, which had imposed its own limits on settlement of European Jews. The Zionists, too, were intent on settling the refugees in Palestine, not anywhere else. In February 1947, when the ship Exodus arrived in Palestine's Haifa port, British authorities refused to bend their immigration limits, denying entry to the 4,500 Jewish refugees and forcing them to board other ships and return to Germany. A French newspaper called the ships a "floating Auschwitz." The incident shocked the Western world and deepened support for the Zionist movement.

(pp. 49-50):

On the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, the UN General Assembly had voted, thirty-three states in favor, thirteen opposed, with ten abstaining, to partition Palestine into two separate states -- one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. A UN minority report, which recommended a single state for Arabs and Jews, with a constitution respecting "human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction as to race, sex, language or religions," was rejected. [ . . . ]

The Khairis were in shock. Under the UN partition plan, their hometown of al-Ramla, along with neighboring Lydda and the coastal city of Jaffa, was to become part of an Arab Palestinian state. The plan stipulated that 54.5 percent of Palestine and more than 80-percent of its cultivated citrus and grain plantations would go to a Jewish state. Jews represented about one-third of the population and owned 7 percent of the land. Most Arabs would not accept the partition.

If the partition plan went forward, al-Ramla would lie only a few kilometers from the new Jewish state. At least, Bashir's parents thought, it could have been worse; under the UN plan, the family would not be strangers on its own land. Still, what would happen tot he Arabs in what was now to be Jewish territory? The partition would place more than four hundred thousand Arabs in the new Jewish state, making them a 45 percent minority amid half a million Jews.

The Palestinians rejected the UN Partition Plan. The Zionists saluted it, but when Israel declared independence, they did so without recognizing the UN Partition Plan borders, and immediately went on the offensive to expand its territory and to drive many Arabs into exile. Israel's offensive was to include Jaffa, al-Ramla, and Lydda.

(p. 56):

After the massacre by Irgun forces in Deir Yassin, the specter of that militia penetrating al-Ramla had city leaders in a state of near panic. They sent urgent cables to King Abdullah and to the commander of his Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb, pleading for immediate help and invoking fears of another slaughter. One voice cried, "Our wounded are breathing their last breaths, and we cannot help them."

Abdullah, however, had received similar pleas from Arabs in Jerusalem, begging him to "save us!" and warning that Jewish forces were scaling the walls of the Old City. The king wrote Glubb that "any disaster suffered by the people of the city at the hands of the Jews, whether they are killed or driven from their homes, would have the most far reaching results for us." He ordered his commander to Jerusalem. On May 19, Glubb rolled into the Holy City to confront Israeli forces with a force of three hundred men, four antitank weapons, and a squadron of armored cars. On Arab-run Radio Jerusalem, commentator Raji Sahyoun had promised "our forthcoming redemption by the hand of Transjordan" and the "scurrying" and "collapse" of the "Haganah kids."

Abdullah's secret agreement with the Jews did not envision this fighting. It was designed to accept a Jewish state within the UN partition boundaries while the king took over the West Bank and most of the state designated for the Arabs, including al-Ramla and Lydda. Now fighting on the ground made all of this uncertain. Yet Arab Legion forces did not cross into territory allotted by the UN partition resolution to the Jewish state.

Ben Shemen served as a gateway for Moshe Dayan's assault on al-Ramla (p. 61):

The battalion was coming from Ben Shemen, the Jewish settlement just to the north. For weeks the open community with access to its Arab neighbors in Lydda had been transformed into a fortress surrounded by barbed wire and concrete pillboxes. Earlier, Dr. Ziegfried Lehman, the Ben Shemen leader, had objected to the militarization of his community. The people of Ben Shemen had purchased cows and even bullets from their Arab neighbors as recently as May. But Lehman's opposition was in vain, and he had left Ben Shemen in frustration.

(pp. 64-65):

When the Arab delegation arrived, Israeli soldiers woke up the region's civilian security chief, a man named Yisrael Galili B. (The B was to distinguish him from the other Yisrael Galili, the longtime chief of the national staff of the Haganah.) Galili B greeted the men and proceeded with Palmach troops to a small meetinghouse on the kibbutz. There they ironed out the terms of surrender: The Arabs would hand over all their weapons and accept Israeli sovereignty. "Foreigners" -- Arab fighters from outside Palestine -- would be turned over to the Israelis. All residents not of army age and unable to bear arms would be allowed to leave the city, "if they want to." Implicit in the agreement was that the residents could also choose to stay.

Galili B would soon learn that other plans were in the works for the residents of al-Ramla: "The Military Governor told me," Galili B wrote, "that he had different orders from Ben-Gurion: to evacuate Ramla." Orders to expel the residents of al-Ramla and Lydda were given in the early afternoon of July 12. The Lydda order, stating, "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age," was given at 1:30 P.M. by Lieutenant Colonel Yitzhak Rabin.

(p. 78):

The new Soviet support for a Jewish state meant that the Bulgarian government would back emigration of those Jews wishing to leave. Georgi Dimitrov had just returned from a meeting int he Kremlin, where Stalin had reminded him, "To help the Jews emigrate to Palestine is the decision of the United Nations." Dimitrov immediately conveyed this message to Jewish Communists who saw the UN partition vote as a defeat. "The Jewish people, for the first time in their history, are fighting like men for their rights," Dimitrov told his Jewish comrades in a Politburo meeting in March 1948. "We must admire this fight. . . . We used to be against emigration. We were actually an obstacle to it. Which made us isolated from the masses."

(pp. 83-84):

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 [Eshkenazi] 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."

(p. 89):

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 fervor that they wanted food and wanted to return to their homes. There wer 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.

(pp. 95-96):

Count Bernadotte continued to advocate a division of historic Palestine between Israel and Transjordan, "in view of the historical connection and common interests of Transjordan and Palestine." Under this plan, the Khairis and other refugees would go home to al-Ramla and Lydda -- not to an independent state, as many Palestinian Arabs had fought for, but to an Arab state that would fall under the rule of Abdullah and his kingdom of Jordan. (After the war, the "Trans" was dropped and Abdullah's kingdom was known simply as Jordan.) Large parts of the Negev would be returned to the Arabs; the Jews would keep the Galilee and Haifa. The Lydda airport would be "a free airport" for all; Jerusalem, as the November 1947 UN resolution had outlined, "should be treated separately and placed under effective United Nations control." As for al-Ramla and Lydda, Bernadotte's blueprint declared that the towns "should be in Arab territory."

The mediator's proposals were based on what he saw as the political realities of the day. "A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine," he wrote, "and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so." Bernadotte also stressed another point that would have been of great interest to Ahmad, Zakia, and the tens of thousands of refugees sleeping on the ground in Ramallah: "The right of innocent people, uprooted by the present terror and ravage of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return."

The next day, Count Folke Bernadotte was killed in the Katamon quarter of Jerusalem. An assassin walked up to Bernadotte's UN vehicle, thrust an automatic pistol through the window, and shot him at close range. Six bullets penetrated, one to his heart. A statement from the extremist Jewish militia group the Stern Gang claimed responsibility, calling UN observers "members of foreign occupation forces." David Ben-Gurion, Israel's prime minister, detained two hundred members of the Stern Gang, including one of its leaders, future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, and ordered the other extremist Jewish militia, Irgun, led by another future premier, Menachem Begin, to disband and turn over its weapons to the Israeli army. The Irgun ceased to function as a separate military unit, and Ben-Gurion's fight to consolidate the militias was now virtually complete. Begin, no longer in charge of his own militia, began to convert the Irgun into a political party, the Herut, which two decades later would form the basis of the Likud Party.

(p. 126):

Throughout 1965 and 1966, Fatah, along with a new group called Abtal al-Awda (Heroes of Return), launched dozens more attacks from the West Bank and Lebanon on mostly isolated targets inside Israel. The attacks sharply raised anxieties in the Jewish state, and, as designed, sparked tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors.l By late 1966 these attacks and the Israeli reprisals, had drawn a reluctant King Hussein deeper into the conflict, and closer to the point of no return.

Before dawn on November 13, 1966, Israeli planes, tanks, and troops attacked the West Bank village of Samu, blowing up dozens of houses and kiling twenty-one Jordanian soldiers. The invasion, especially in its massive scale, shocked even some supporters of Israel. U.S. officials immediately condemned the attack. In Washington, the head of the National Security Council, Walt Rostow, in a memo to President Johnson, declared that the "3000-man raid with tanks and planes was all out of proportion to the provocation" -- in this case, a Fatah land mine that had killed three Israeli soldiers on November 11. Rostow said of the Israelis, "They've undercut Hussein. We're spending $500 million to shore him up as a stabilizing factor. . . . It makes even the moderate Arabs feel fatalistically that there is nothing they can do to get along with the Israelis no matter how hard they try. It will place heavy domestic and external political strain on King Hussein's regime. . . ."

(p. 140):

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.

(p. 161):

"Okay, Bashir, I live in your home," Dalia said finally. "And this is also my home. It is the only home I know. So, what shall we do?"

"You can go back where you came from," Bashir said calmly.

Dalia felt as if Bashir had dropped a bomb. She wanted to scream, though as his guest she knew she couldn't. She forced herself to listen.

"We believe that only those who came here before 1917" -- the year of the Balfour Declaration and the beginning of the British Mandate in Palestine -- "have a right to be here. But anyone who came after 1917," Bashir said, "cannot stay."

Dalia was astounded at the audacity of Bashir's solution. "Well, since I was born and came here after 1917, that is no solution for me!" she said with an incredulous laugh. She was struck by the total contradiction of her situation: complete disagreement across a seemingly unbridgeable gulf, combined with the establishment of a bond through a common history, in a house where she felt utterly protected and welcomed. At the base of it all, Dalia felt the depth of the Khairis' gratitude for her having simply opened the door to the house in Ramla. "And this was an amazing situation to be in," she remembered. "That everybody could feel the warmth and the reality of our people meeting, meeting the other, and it was real, it was happening, and we were admiring each other's being, so to speak. And it was so tangible. And on the other hand, we were conversing of things that seemed totally mutually exclusive. That my life here is at their expense, and if they want to realize their dream, it's at my expense.

(pp. 211-212):

Dalia, flat on her back in her hospital bed, followed the debate with her eyes. She was struck that Ghiath could not understand her people's longing for the ancient homeland.

"But they were not born here," Ghiath protested. "For example, my Jewish friend, Avraham, he and his father and his forefathers were born here. Their family is from Jaffa. He is a true Palestinian."

So that means, Dalia thought, that I'm not?

"It's a different kind of self-understanding," countered Yehezkel, the religious scholar. "What are you going to do about that? Why do you think Israelis are afraid of you? We are not as afraid of the entire Syrian army with all its weaponry as we are of you. Why do you think that is?"

Ghiath looked at Yehezkel in amazement. Nuha and Dalia remained silent as Yehezkel continued: "Because you are theonly ones who have a legitimate grievance against us. And deep down, even those who deny it know it. That makes us very uncomfortable and uneasy in dealing with you. Because our homes are your homes, you become a real threat."

"Why can't we all live in the same state, rogether in peace?" said Ghiath. "Why do we need two states?"

"Then you think you would be able to go back to your father's house?" Yehezkel asked.

Dalia shifted in her bed. "And what would happen to the people already living in those houses?" she asked.

"They will build new homes for them," Ghiath replied.

"You mean," Dalia said, "they will be evacuated for you to return to your original homes? I hope you can understand why Israelis are afraid of you. Israel will do everything to prevent the implementation of these dreams. Even under a peace plan you will not return to your original homes."

"What do we want? Only our rights and to live in peace."

"Justice for you is receiving back what you lost in 1948. But that justice will be at the expense of other people." [ . . . ]

Dalia said, "I'm not going to explain to you what the yearning for Zion means to us. I will just say that because you see us as strangers in this land, that is why we are afraid of you. You should not think that I myself am free of fear. I have a good reason to be afraid: The Palestinian people as a collective have not accepted the Jewish home in this land. Most of you still consider us a cancerous presence among you. I struggle for your rights despite my fears. But your rights have to be balanced against our needs for survival. That is why you cannot be satisfied. For you, every viable solution will always be lacking in justice. In a peace plan, everybody will have to do with less than they deserve."

(pp. 226-228):

Bashir's first days back in Ramallah were bittersweet. Arafat's embrace of Oslo, together with his pledge to control "terrorism and other forms of violence," had begun to pit the champion of Palestinian liberation against the disparate Palestinian factions that had grown increasingly unsettled about Oslo. To them, accepting Oslo represented a surrender of 78 percent of historic Palestine; even the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, which represented the other 22 percent, Israel didn't seem prepared to hand over. Already the Israeli government had announced plans for thousands of new housing units in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisioned as their capital, and Israeli construction crews were building new "bypass" roads to better facilitate the travel of settlers from the West Bank to Israel. These plans were being undertaken within the Oslo framework, and many Palestinians worried that the new facts on the ground would permanently alter their chances for a viable, sovereign state. These fears were made more acute with the sudden surge in political violence and assassination, which had begun less than six months after the famous handshake on the White House lawn. [ . . . ]

Arafat condemned each suicide attack and, under pressure from Israel and the United States, ordered the arrest of suspected members of militant groups. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were in Palestinian jails, many by order of a secret Palestinian military court for state security established under the Oslo framework. In the first year of the court, several men died during interrogations; many Palestinians accused Arafat of doing the dirty work for Israel. The chairman responded to criticism by closing several newspapers and detaining prominent Palestinian human rights advocates. Edward Said, the Columbia University professor and leading Palestinian intellectual, wrote that "Arafat and his Palestinian Authority have become a sort of Vichy government for Palestinians."

Anger at Arafat deepened as he began granting favors to loyalists who had come with him from Tunis. The chairman himself continued to live modestly, but some of his longtime cohorts in exile built mansions in Gaza, all the more striking for their juxtapostion against the squalor of the refugee camps on one of the most crowded places on earth. One of the mansions, estimated to cost $2 million, was built for Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, who would later succeed Arafat as the leader of the Palestinians. "This is your reward for selling Palestine," a graffiti artist scrawled on the mansion stones. The poor of the refugee camps, whose young men formed the basis of the resistance to Israeli rule and whose casualties during the intifada numbered in the thousands, now chafed under the rule of the elite of Tunis. "Every revolution has its fighters, thinkers, and profiteers," one Gazan would say. "Our fighters have been killed, our thinkers assassinated, and all we have left are the profiteers."

Bashir Khairi is arrested on suspicion of being involved with George Habash's PFLP (pp. 167-168):

Bashir Khairi sat in a three-by-five-foot cell with stone walls, iron bars, and a low-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. He slept on the cement floor, and for six nights he lay in the dark, shivering without bedcovers. Since his incarceration at Sarafand prison -- the old British lockup close to al-Ramla -- Bashir had developed a high fever and chills; on the seventh day, Bashir remembered decades later, his Israeli jailers brought him a blanket.

"In the interrogation room at Sarafand," Bashir recounted, "there was a chair and a table, and on the table was a black shabbah," a hood. "You put the hood over your head, and they beat you. They beat me on the hands, they choked me with the hood on. Other times they would chain my hands and legs, blindfold me, and unleash the dogs. The dogs would jump on me and pin me back against the wall. I could feel their breath on my neck." Bashir believed the interrogations were conducted by agents of the General Security Services, or Shin Bet. He would recall the men with a precision and seeming calm of someone remembering a trip to the store the day before. "Their faces," Bashir would say quietly. "To this day I remember exactly their faces."

After the interrogations came psychological operations. "In my cell," he said, "I would hear shots, and then someone screaming. Then the guards would arrive and bring me outside and show me a hole, and say, 'If you don't cooperate, this is where you'll end up.' Then I would be back in my cell, hearing shooting and screaming. You'd think: They're killing the people who don't confess." The Israeli interrogators wanted Bashir to admit to having played a role in the supermarket bombing and to describe the internal operations of the PFLP so they could put an end to the El Al hijackings. The young lawyer admitted nothing. He refused to confirm any association with the Popular Front. Consequently, he said, the beatings, dog attacks, and psy-ops continued.

This kind of treatment was not exceptional. In 1969, the year Bashir was arrested, little was known outside of the Shin Bet about Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners. In 1974, the Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer published a memoir, With My Own Eyes, detailing her interviews with prisoners who had endured an "ordeal of beatings and humiliation." She described prisoners who showed evidence of blows to the head, hands, and legs; who told of being punched in the face while blindfolded; who arrived for jailhouse interviews in bloodstained shirts; who described hanging from a wall by handcuffs tied to iron bars; who reported interrogations with "electricity and sticks"; whose feet and hands were bound until they bled.

In one case, Langer wrote, a fifty-two-year-old man with a respiratory disease was interrogated naked, and "his hands were tied behind his back; a rope was tied on to his hands too,a nd he was lifted in the air thus. His interrogators beat him also now, and after each beating they rodered him to talk, and since he had nothing to say they went on beating him." Langer also described one prisoner, "blue from the beatings," who died, the authorities claimed, after "he had stumbled and fell down a staircase."

On one of her jailhouse visits, probably int he spring of 1969, Felicia Langer met Bashir. She would remember a pale man with large eyes who seemed "barely alive." "They beat me very badly," Langer recalls Bashir telling her, "until I was barely able to stand up."

(p. 246):

The next day, Prime Minister Sharon ordered Israeli troops back into Bethlehem, where they reoccupied the city, imposed a military lockdown, conducted house-to-house arrests, and blew up five homes, including the house where [suicide bomber] Nael Abu Hilail had lived with his parents and slblings. Sine Sharon had come to power less than two years earlier on a pledge to increase Israelis' security, bombers had struck Israel nearly sixty times; this was nearly twice the number of attacks of the previous seven years. Sharon's spokesman blamed Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for the attacks, saying that "all our efforts to hand over areas, and all the talk about a possible cease-fire, that was all window dressing because on the ground there was a continuous effort to carry out as many terrorist activities as possible."

(pp. 260-261):

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. [ . . . ]

Dalis has long believed in Einstein's words -- that "no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." For Dalia, the key to coexistence lay in what she called "the three A's": acknowledgment of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948, apology for it, and amends. Acknowledgment was, in part, to "see and own the pain that I or my people have inflicted on the Other." But she believed this must be mutual -- that Bashir must also see the Israeli Other -- lest "one perpetuate the righteous victim syndrome and not take responsibility for one's own part in the fray." Through this acknowledgment, she and Bashir could act "as mirrors through which our own redemption can eventually grow." As for amends: "It means that we do the best we can under the circumstances towards those we have wronged." But for Dalia this could not involve a mass return of refugees. Yes, she believed, the Palestinians have the right of return, but it is not a right that can be fully implemented, because the return of millions of Palestinians would effectively mean the end of Israel.

posted 2007-11-06