The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East Read Online Free PDF Page A

and its fruits are of the most luscious. The capital stands among fruitful fields, walled towns, and serviceable hospices. It possesses magnificent hostelries and pleasant baths, dainty food and various condiments, spacious houses, fine mosques and broad roads.
    In the next thousand years, al-Ramla would be conquered by the Crusaders, liberated by the Muslim hero Saladin, and ruled by the Ottoman sultans from Istanbul. By the 1930s, the town housed a military garrison used by British forces and a colonial office for a subcommissioner dispatched from London. British officers were fond of hunting fox through the olive groves, over cactus hedges and stone walls, with hounds from the town's kennels. A British subcommissioner filed periodic briefings to His Majesty's government in London. In a cursive scrawl with his blue fountain pen, he noted crops, tonnage, and, by 1936, as Ahmad Khairi's house rose, an increasing disintegration in the public order.
    In 1933, Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, and the situation for Jews was deteriorating across Europe. Within a few years, demands for Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. Underground Zionist organizations began smuggling boatloads of Jews in ever greater numbers from European ports to Haifa, along the northern Mediterranean coast of Palestine. The British authorities struggled to control the flow. Between 1922 and 1936, the Jewish population of Palestine quadrupled—from 84,000 to 352,000. During the same time, the Arab population had increased by about 36 percent, to 900,000. In those intervening fourteen years, as the Jewish community in Palestine had grown more powerful, a nationalistic fervor began to rise among the Arabs of Palestine. For decades, Arabs had been selling land to Jews arriving from Europe. Gradually, as land sales increased and Jewish leaders pressed their call for a state of their own, many Arabs began to fear Jewish domination. Already more than 30,000 Arab peasant families, or nearly a quarter of the rural population, had been dispossessed through the sale of land to Jews, many by absentee Arab landowners. The families arrived impoverished in the cities of Palestine and in many cases earned wages by building houses for the new Jewish arrivals. By the mid-1930s. Arab leaders had declared that selling land to the Jews was an act of treason. They were opposed to a separate Jewish state, and, increasingly, they wanted the British out of Palestine.
    Ahmad and his workers hung wooden shutters on the windows. For the exterior fence, they fastened lengths of iron bar to limestone pillars. They laid the tiles for a small garage—for a car that Ahmad didn't yet own but hoped someday he would.
    Before long, Ahmad would turn his attention to the garden. In the corner of the yard behind the house, he had chosen a spot for a lemon tree. Once the tree was in the soil, Ahmad knew it would be at least seven years, and probably more, before the strong Palestinian sun and sweet waters of the al-Ramla aquifer would nurture the tree to maturity. The act of planting was thus an act of faith and patience.
    The Khairis' stone house was finished by late 1936. To celebrate, the family butchered a lamb and prepared a huge feast: Chicken stuffed with rice and great piles of lamb were common for such occasions, along with handmade couscous, date-filled cookies made with soft buttery dough, and kanafe, a hot, pistachio-covered sweet that is shaped like a pizza and looks like shredded wheat. Cousins, sisters and brothers, and Sheikh Mustafa would all have come from the Khairi family compound to admire the new home, with its layers of white Jerusalem stone rising up from the earth. There stood Ahmad, in his coat and tie and fez; a pregnant Zakia; and their three girls—Hiam, six years old; Basima, four; and Fatima, three. Ahmad still waited for a son. He came from a good family with land and wanted to pass on the inheritance in the way of his ancestors. Zakia understood this