The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan
| The Lemon Tree an Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East |
Sandy Tolan |
2006 Bloomsbury Publishing
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I travelled to Israel/Palestine in the fall of 2004. Most of my time was spent in the West Bank where I experienced the brutalization of the Palestinian people by the Israeli Defense Forces. Since then I have been almost obsessed with trying to understand what I witnessed, and this book is perhaps the best single volume I’ve read that attempts to grasp the complex tragedy at the epicenter of east/west conflict. |
The title of this moving book refers to a tree in the backyard of a home in Ramla, Israel. The home is currently owned by Dalia, a Jewish woman whose family of Holocaust survivors emigrated from Bulgaria. But before Israel gained its independence in 1948, the house was owned by the Palestinian family of Bashir, who meets Dalia when he returns to see his family home after the Six-Day War of 1967. Journalist Tolan (Me & Hank) traces the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the parallel personal histories of Dalia and Bashir and their families—all refugees seeking a home.
The story is compelling enough on its own, but Tolan interjects history throughout that I found illuminating and helpful. It helped me understand better the perspective and anxiety of individual Israelis but in the end, I don’t think there can ever be a resolution until Israel as a nation comes to value Palestinian rights and aspirations as equal to their own - as a matter of policy.
