Dialogue and Solidarity

DIALOGUE AND SOLIDARITY
Mark Chmiel
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006. xiv + 264 pages. Bibliography to p. 282. Notes to p. 348. Index to p. 362. $24.95 cloth.

Witness in Palestine: Journal of a Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories, by Anna Baltzer. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006. xii + 212 pages. Appendices to p. 217. Glossary to p. 221. $62.00 cloth.

Forthcoming in the Journal of Palestine Studies

In July 1967 three young Palestinian men left the recently Israeli-occupied West Bank on a mission of visceral importance. Natives of al-Ramla, now in Israel, the men simply wished to see the home of their childhood. Bashir Khairi, one of the three, knocked on the front door of his family’s home and was met by a young Israeli woman, Dalia Eshkenazi, whose family came to occupy Bashir’s home after they fled Bulgaria after World War II. This encounter led to many more in the decades that followed, and it supplies [or these supply?] the narrative dynamic of Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree.

After the short first chapter sets up this dramatic face-to-face meeting, Tolan alternates succeeding chapters by devoting one to Bashir’s family and the next to Dalia’s, moving from the period before or during World War II up to 1967. One hundred and forty-three pages into the book, the meeting of Dalia and Bashir begins, leading them both on a journey of unexpected appreciation, grave disappointment, strong disagreement, and a willingness to keep talking and keep seeing the humanity of the other.

Like so many Israelis, Dalia saw Zionism and the State of Israel in glowing, heroic, and innocent terms. The encounter with Bashir begins to wear away at this uncritical understanding. As a child Dalia had been taught that in 1948 the previous owners of the Eshkenazi home simply ran away. Through Bashir’s stories and meeting his family, she begins to see how the Nakba affected one Palestinian family, with its members’ ardent longing to return to their home with the precious lemon tree in the back yard.

Nevertheless, in the ensuing decades, Dalia continues to challenge Bashir, who is adamant about the implementation of UN Resolution 194 and the Palestinian right to return: If the Palestinians were to exercise this right, what about the Israelis who are already there? His response to Dalia: “The Israelis created this problem, and they can’t place more burdens on us to solve it” (p. 261).

Tolan skillfully weaves significant historical and political events, from the first intifada to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, into the personal context of Dalia and Bashir’s families. This makes for compelling reading throughout.

As a personal gesture of acknowledgement of the intertwined histories of Jew and Arab, Dalia eventually turned her family’s home into Open House, a kindergarten for the Arab children in the town and a site of Arab-Jewish dialogue.

Eleven years ago, Edward Said made the following challenge:

The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be deflected by the common tactic of putting Israeli security on the same plane. On the other hand I do think it is a mistake simply to rule out the whole history of anti-Semitism (the Holocaust included) as irrelevant. As Palestinians and Arabs we have not even tried to study this enormous subject, nor in any serious way have we tried to see how it impinges on the Jewish, and indeed Western, conscience as something all too real. Thus we need a discourse that is intellectually honest and complex enough to deal both with the Palestinian as well as the Jewish experience, recognizing where the claims of one stop and where the other begin. (The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After [Pantheon Books, 2000], p. 123)

The Lemon Tree consciously attempts this kind of discourse and juxtaposition. Here is one exchange between the two protagonists/antagonists:

Dalia: “I know that my people were killed, slaughtered, put in gas ovens. Israel was the only safe place for us. It was the place where the Jews could finally feel that being a Jew is not a shame!”

Bashir: “But you are saying the whole world did this, Dalia. It is not true. The Nazis killed the Jews. And we hate them. But why should we pay for what they did? . . . Is it justice that we should be expelled from our cities, our villages, our streets. We have history here—Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa, al-Ramla. Many Jews who came here believed they were a people without a land going to a land without a people. That is ignoring the indigenous people of this land. Their civilization, their history, their heritage, their culture. And now we are strangers. Strangers in every place. Why did this happen, Dalia? The Zionism did this to you, not just to the Palestinians” (p. 160–61).

The Holocaust appears early in Witness in Palestine, the chronicle of a young Jewish American woman’s journey to the West Bank. The second sentence of Anna Baltzer’s introduction notes that her grandmother is a Holocaust survivor who deemed Israel crucial to Jewish safety. It was during Baltzer’s travels in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon that she began to hear a narrative, as the one so passionately articulated in Dalia’s exchanges with Bashir, that countered the Holocaust-Israel one.

Baltzer decided to see the Palestinian side for herself and committed to work on two different occasions for a period of five months with International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) in the West Bank. Like Rabbis for Human Rights and the International Solidarity Movement, Baltzer and her partners with IWPS were intent on practicing solidarity and nonviolent direct action with the Palestinians to protect their land, crops, property, as well as the people living under a brutal Israeli military occupation.

Scores of beautiful and heartbreaking color photographs accompany Baltzer’s lively and detailed journal entries, which take the reader through the hardship and horror of the occupation. She describes the mechanisms of that occupation, such as roadblocks and checkpoints, that belie their stated purpose of protecting Israeli citizens by simply making life hard on the Palestinians. She documents instances of intimidation, kidnappings, destruction of property, confiscation of land, among many other violations of Palestinian human rights.

Baltzer also writes with respect and admiration for the Palestinians who practice nonviolent direct action every day of their lives. Further, she candidly details several encounters she has with Israeli soldiers, at times remaining calm and at others becoming infuriated by their words and actions. Baltzer herself exhibits commendable courage in choosing to walk with Palestinians in difficult and even life-threatening situations, including nonviolent demonstrations against the separation wall. In addition to her reports on the day-to-day life of an activist in Palestine, Baltzer writes on broader issues such as nonviolence and Zionism.

Tolan’s book reveals how tense and fragile the path of dialogue can be. Baltzer’s account of her admittedly brief time in the West Bank also points to the limits of international attempts at sharing life with Palestinians and aiding them in their struggles for justice. Both books contain scenes of brilliant and courageous humanity and look unsparing at the power of violence, hatred, and vengeance. These books remind me of Albert Camus’s candid self-examination from World War II: “During these four dreadful years all Frenchmen were witnesses to a crime not foreseen by any law (and in saying this we are weighing our words carefully): the crime of not doing enough” (quoted in Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz [Random House, 2006], p. 261). Bashir Khairi, Dalia Eshkenazi, and Anna Baltzer may not be guilty of this crime; the reader of these books, of course, has to answer for himself.