The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East

The narrative returns to July of 1967, when Bashir showed up at Dalia’s door. She immediately knew that the three visitors were Arabs and that they were returning to their former house. She paused for a little while and then she let them in, as Bashir soaked up every detail. As Bashir walked through the house, he “looked like a man in a trance” (146). Bashir and Dalia realized that they both lived (or currently live) in the same room. They sat in the garden, where Bashir saw the lemon tree, and Dalia served them drinks. Bashir invited Dalia to his house in Ramallah. When Bashir returned to Ramallah, he was so tired that he could not speak. The next morning, his family members grilled him about every aspect of the house, and Bashir’s father, Ahmad, began to cry, as his mother, Zakia, told Bashir: “You have opened our wounds again” (149).

During that summer, hundreds, or even thousands of Palestinians had made the trip across the Green Line to their old homes (or to their families’ old homes, which they had never seen), reopening old wounds. The Six Day War only increased their desire to return, and cadres—or groups led by Arafat, Abu Jihad, and other parts of Fatah—led incursions across the Jordan River into the West Bank.