The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, And The Heart Of The Middle East Quotes
"By its end, Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi are still arguing, talking—and mostly disagreeing. But their natures—intellectual, questing, passionate and committed—may represent the best hope of resolving one of the most intractable disputes in human history."
"The story of Dalia and Bashir's first face-to-face meeting in 1967, and the remarkable four-decade friendship that has followed, illuminate the personal narratives at the heart of the conflict."
"This wonderful human story vividly depicts the depths of attachment to contested ground."
"Instructive, heartbreaking and well-written, The Lemon Tree will inform readers of efforts by Palestinians and Israelis to make peace, despite the geopolitical and religious pressures to the contrary."
"Humane and literate—and rather daring in suggesting that the future of the Middle East need not be violent."
"This truly remarkable book presents a powerful account of Palestinians and Israelis who try to break the seemingly endless chain of hatred and violence."
"The key to this openness, I think, lies in the interweaving narratives: When someone sees his or her own history represented fairly, it opens up the mind and heart to the history of the Other."
"Jews are alternately pathetic or malicious, or perhaps worse; and they have little real claim to their land: 'If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it—much less run from it without real cause.'"
"For millions of Americans, Jew and Gentile, it was the same. They too were raised with the version of Middle Eastern history as told in Exodus, Leon Uris's hugely influential mega-bestseller."
"Like many Americans, I grew up with one part of the history, as told through the heroic birth of Israel out of the Holocaust."
"I did not realise how deep-seated was the Arab fear of Jewish overlordship and domination."
"Partition offers a prospect of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace."
"We have to uproot from the roots of our hearts the assumption that it is not possible. Indeed it is possible."
"Sympathetic cooperation between the two great Semitic peoples may have a great future in common."
"Terrorism has called for severe countermeasures."
"When Sheikh Mustafa came into a room, everyone would stand."
"Satan himself could not have created a more distressing and horrible nightmare."
"The deportation of these people outside Bulgaria, as suggested by some evil-intentioned rumor, was planned by the Bulgarian government."
"This measure is unacceptable not only because these people of Bulgarian citizenship cannot be expelled outside Bulgaria, but because it would be disastrous and bring ominous consequences upon the country."
"The whole Bulgarian Orthodox Church will stand up for the Jews."
"None of this would have happened without what the Bulgarian-French intellectual Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fragility of goodness': the intricate, delicate, unforeseeable weave of human action and historical events."
"A name should be prescribed for the child," the Prophet Mohammad had observed. "Its hair and all filth should be removed, and sacrifice should be performed on his behalf."
"The British used the territory as a massive staging area for the conflict in North Africa. Smooth asphalt roads began to replace the rutted dirt tracks of old Palestine."
"The boundaries of the state," Ben-Gurion wrote, "will not be determined by a U.N. resolution, but by the force of arms."
"Regrettably, our forces have committed criminal acts that may stain the Zionist movement's good name," Shitrit would say later. "The finest of us have given a bad example to the masses."
"They left their fields of wild peas and jasmine, passiflora and dried scarlet anemone, mountain lilies that grew between the barley and the wheat."
"This is what the people would later call 'the donkey road'—if the donkey can make it, perhaps people can, too."
"Wordlessly she took one from him and with her Girl Guide knife sliced into the red flesh."
"How far was Salbit? Were they still going in the right direction? They were always looking for shade and water."
"Some would say twelve; others would swear it was twenty."
"He knew that the refugees were crossing 'stony fallow covered with thorn bushes' and that, in the end, 'nobody will ever know how many children died.'"
"The Arab Legion has wired that there are 30,000 refugees moving along the road between Lydda and Ramla, who are infuriated with the Legion. They're demanding bread."
"It will take as long as it takes," he vowed, "but I will marry you."
"Herzl believed Europe did not want the Jews, and he argued for a Jewish state 'where we can have hooked noses, black or red beards, and bandy legs, without being despised for it.'"
"The train left Sofia in the afternoon, moving slowly, tentatively at first, then picking up speed as it puffed and clacked west."
"For many of the 1,800 Bulgarian Jews on the train from Sofia—or the tens of thousands of Hungarian, Romanian, or Polish Jews emigrating in the fall of 1948—the journey to Israel represented a return after two thousand years of exile."
"The right of innocent people, uprooted by the present terror and ravage of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return."
"The prospect of immediate return was fading, and Bashir began to hear his parents talk about moving out of Ramallah to some other place where they could live more comfortably until they were able to move back to al-Ramla."
"The poorest of the Gaza refugees survived on a UNRWA diet of 1,600 calories a day, including a standard monthly ration of twenty-two pounds of flour; about a pound each of sugar, rice, and lentils; and milk for children and pregnant women."
"For the refugees—the destitute in the camps or the more well-off like the Khairis—the central trauma was not in selling off gold or finding enough to eat. Rather, it lay in the longing for home and, conversely, in the indignity of dispossession."
"He died of a heart attack," Bashir said. "But really, it was from a broken heart."
"This sense of injustice, frustration and disappointment has made the refugee irritable and unstable."
"The desire to go back to their homes is general among all classes; it is proclaimed orally at all meetings and organized demonstrations, and, in writing, in all letters addressed to the Agency and all complaints handed in to the area officers."
"Decades later, immigrant children of the time would remember fathers and uncles with one hand on the handlebar and the other balancing a ladder, pedaling toward the orchards."
"We never felt Bashir was our brother," Khanom said. "Even though we were older, we always felt that he was like our father. He was the dominant figure, he was the one to take care of us."
"Dalia began to understand something fundamental. Decades later, she would remember this moment as the beginning of a life of discernment: of being able to see the whole and not judge someone or something based simply on a single observation or teaching."
"Of all people who should know better," she said. "Of all people who should know how not to treat someone badly just because they are different."
"If you are going to have a black group and a white group," Dalia announced, "then I am going with the black group."
"Their Hebrew often was bad, and the only work many of them could find was twelve days per month sweeping streets, maintaining roads, and 'building' forests for the Jewish National Fund."
"The forests, part of what the JNF called 'total redemption of the land of Israel for the entire Jewish people,' were part of a legacy of 'BOULDER-STREWN mountains, stagnant swamps, hard, arid soil, and sterile sand dunes thatthatthat must be redeemed from the neglect of twenty centuries.'"
"The Sabra was the New Israeli Man: handsome, tough, physically strong, an ardent Zionist, upbeat, without fear, and unencumbered by the weakness of his ancestors."
"Turning these people of dust into a cultured, independent nation with a vision will be no easy task."
"We must understand who we are working with...a community of rejects, of pathetic and helpless people."
"The municipality is proud that Ramla was transferred from a pure Arabic city to a place where now live twenty-five thousand citizens most of which are new immigrants."
"To the outside world, Israel had made it clear, once and for all, that it would never grant the Palestinian refugees the right of return."
"After nineteen years we really had the very strong feeling that we were going back to our lands, houses, streets, schools—to our lives. That we would get our freedom back, that we would be liberated, that we would get back to the homeland. Sorry to say, that was not the case. It was an illusion."
"David the king of Israel is alive. Alive and present. David is alive..."
"As long as there's an Israeli flag behind the judge in the courthouse, I won't be representing my people." - Bashir
"Palestinians could rely only on themselves to deliver their own justice." - Narration
"Strangely, in the midst of occupation and the utter failure of the Arab regimes, a sense of freedom was emerging: a notion that the Palestinians were suddenly free to think and act for themselves." - Narration
"What is a PhD when we have no country?" - A young man named Bassam Abu-Sharif
"I would rather be in prison in my own country than be a free man in exile." - Bashir
"The great paradox of the occupation was that suddenly historic Palestine was easier to reach than at any time since 1948." - Narration
"Feel at home." - Dalia Eshkenazi to Bashir and his cousins
"You are welcome. Come in, feel at home." - Dalia Eshkenazi
"I believe in one thing: Palestine. And I hate one thing: occupation." - Bashir during interrogation
"You stole our land from us." - Bashir to Dalia
"You'd think: They're killing the people who don't confess."
"Nobody... can deny that the cases of persecution, oppression and torture described in this book are not only true in themselves but are also characteristic of Israeli rule in the occupied territories."
"Torture is organized so methodically that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders. It is systematic. It appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy."
"They beat me very badly," Langer recalls Bashir telling her, "until I was barely able to stand up."
"I endured the beatings, the hoods, and the dogs. They did not break me."
"The only language which the enemy understands is that of revolutionary violence."
"Humans must change the world, they must do something, they must kill if needs be."
"How do you balance such realities? How do you confront them and respond to them?"
"For twenty years, resentment and resistance had built up, and by late 1987, it had reached a point of explosion."
"Across the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians declared a general strike, boycotting Israeli goods and calling on 'brother doctors and pharmacists' and 'brother businessmen and grocers' to shutter their shops—out of solidarity with the demonstrators and to make clear that life in the occupied territories would not go on as before."
"Now the image of the Palestinians that splashed across the world's television screens was not of hijackers blowing up airliners or masked men kidnapping and murdering Olympic athletes, but of young people throwing stones at occupiers who responded with bullets."
"The question—What kind of independence?—would come to divide the Palestinians in the years to come."
"Many families grew 'victory gardens' to replace Israeli supplies of produce, hatched chickens in the shells of old refrigerators, and poured milk into old animal skins, shaking the skins until the milk turned to butter."
"May it be Thy will to put an end to war and bloodshed on earth, and to spread a great and wonderful peace over the whole world, so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."
"Do not deport them! Do not deport them from the homeland!"
"But you cannot deport Palestine from my heart. You can deport us, kill us, destroy us. But this will never assure security for you."
"If there will be peace, there will be no problem any more with the prisoners."
"You can deport me," Jabril Rajoub would recall telling the judge. "But you cannot deport Palestine from my heart."
"Our childhood memories, yours and mine, are intertwined in a tragic way. If we can not find means to transform that tragedy into a shared blessing, our clinging to the past will destroy our future."
"Justice for you is receiving back what you lost in 1948. But that justice will be at the expense of other people."
"In a peace plan, everybody will have to do with less than they deserve."
"He who plants barley, Dalia, will never reap wheat. And he who plants hatred can never reap love."
"Your change, Dalia, and your new perspective was attained through research and investigation."
"We were exiled but we left our souls, our hopes and our childhood in Palestine."
"I was carrying my history and my love for my homeland."
"Why aren't we given our right to return? Why are we prevented from determining our future and establishing our state?"
"Does not the world owe me the right to reunite myself, to reunite my palm with my body?"
"All that I wish is for you and me to struggle together with all of the peace and freedom loving people for the establishment of a democratic popular state."
"This isn't the Security Council here. This isn't the UN General Assembly."
"I respect you very much, and I realize that you are affected by the Israeli position."
"We truly have deep doubts about the seriousness of his intentions."
"We want you. If you move, we will shoot you. You people make trouble for us."
"I won't take part in a siege enforced against hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children."