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

clearly
    Ahmad and Mr. Solli had designed the house to withstand the weight of three floors. Ahmad and Zakia hoped later to expand the home as the family grew and the income provided.
    But the sense of security the Khairis might have hoped for in their new home, on the land their families had inhabited for centuries, was tempered by the reality of daily life in Palestine in late 1936. By then, their homeland was in the midst of a full-scale rebellion.
    The Great Arab Rebellion had erupted the previous fall, when an Arab nationalist named Sheikh Izzadin al-Qassam took to the hills near Jenin in northern Palestine with a small band of rebels. Arab nationalists had long suspected the British of favoring the Jews over the Arabs in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration had helped put in motion the machinery for building a Jewish state, including a trade union, a bank, a university, and even a Jewish militia, known as the Haganah. As for the Arabs, Balfour said simply that the Jewish homeland would not adversely affect "the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." In the fall of 1935, when the British authorities uncovered a Zionist arms-smuggling operation but did not find and prosecute the organizers, Arab mistrust of the British deepened, and Sheikh al-Qassam launched his rebellion. He was convinced that only armed insurrection could bring about national liberation for the Arabs.
    The British suspected al-Qassam's band of causing two firebomb deaths at a kibbutz and other killings. They called the sheikh an "outlaw"; Zionist leaders said he was a "gangster"; both agreed he was a terrorist. In November 1935, al-Qassam, who liked to declare, "Obey God and the Prophet, but not the British high commissioner," was hunted down and shot dead near his cave in the hills. "The band was liquidated by police action," a British report stated. Arabs of Palestine spent the winter mourning the death of their first Palestinian martyr and organizing for the long fight ahead.
    On Wednesday evening, April 15, 1936, as Ahmad Khairi and his friend Benson Solli made plans to break ground in al-Ramla, the trouble began. On a road twenty-five miles north of town, two Jews crossing northern Palestine by car were held up by what the British authorities would later describe as "Arab highwaymen." The Arabs robbed the Jews, then shot and killed them. The next night, two Arabs near Tel Aviv were killed by Jewish assailants. In the coming days, Jews stoned Arab delivery trucks and looted Arab-run shops. Rumors, apparently false, spread quickly of the murder of two Arabs at Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv; Arabs responded with violence. The attacks, reprisals, and counterreprisals had begun.
    The British brought in military reinforcements to Jaffa and Tel Aviv and imposed a state of emergency. Colonial authorities imposed strict curfews, arrested Jews and Arabs, searched their houses without warrant, and censored letters, telegrams, and newspapers. Arab guerrillas, meanwhile, set up national committees in towns and villages across Palestine to serve as the bases for an insurgency. Leaders of Arab political parties in Palestine had formed the Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who called for a general strike and a boycott of Jewish goods. The mufti, who had been appointed by the British to represent the Muslim community in Palestine, had turned against his former colonial masters. His Arab Higher Committee demanded an end to Jewish immigration, an end of land sales to Jews, and an end to the British Mandate in favor of a single state.
    Arab fighters in checkered keffiyehs, or head scarves, struck from the hills, firing on British forces and Jewish kibbutzim. The rebels, known as fedayeen, cut phone and telegraph lines, sabotaged water pipelines, mined bridges, burned forests, derailed trains, and sniped at Jewish settlements and detachments of British forces. "There have been widespread acts