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

In July of 1967, Bashir Khairi, a young Arab man, is in the bathroom of the West Jerusalem bus station in Israel. He has prepared for the trip he is taking with his cousins Yasser and Ghiath for twenty years, since he was 6. The men are from Ramallah, a Palestinian town 30 minutes to the north, where they were refugees. They had taken a taxi to East Jerusalem, where there had been fighting only weeks before that led to the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem. During the Six Day War, Israelis had taken over the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. After making their way to the bus station, they bought tickets to al-Ramla.

The action then switches to a woman named Dalia Eshkenazi, who is sitting in her house in al-Ramla. After days when the air raid had been sounded, it is finally quiet. Dalia is on a summer break from Tel Aviv University. She had felt the stress of the fighting acutely, but she was determined “to never again be led like sheep to the slaughter” (3), as Jews had during the Holocaust. Dalia’s parents had grown up in Bulgaria and had survived a pro-Nazi regime before moving to Israel when Dalia was 11 months old.