The Lemon Tree

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Through their friendship, Dalia learns how her family acquired their home and how Bashir unfairly lost his when Israel commandeered it and forced the community he lived in to flee. She is sympathetic, but realizes that there is nothing she can do about it. She cannot return the home to him, she cannot even sell it to him. It is a brutal mark on Israel’s history, but the Arabs wanted to drive them out, and the newly formed Israel saw no other way to guarantee its survival other than to kill or be killed. Israelis chose survival as cruel as its implementation required.

Lemon Tree (Tolan) - LitLovers Lemon Tree (Tolan) - LitLovers

The book dwells largely on the different paths each of them follow to find a solution. Dalia eventually creates a school for Arab children in their mutual former home, and Bashir becomes an Arab Freedom Fighter, involved with many violent groups and spending many years of his life in Israeli prisons for the cause of a one-state solution to the Middle East controversy.. But she does visit. Bashir is obviously pleased, and he shows her exceptional hospitality. Bashir answers Dalia's questions about the conflict between their peoples. She bemoans the poor decisions of the Israelites. They openly talk about their beliefs, and they show each other tolerance.This book is a marvellously thorough description of the formation of Israel, and the resulting Arab-Israeli conflict. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The Lemon Tree Café - Part One: A Cup of Ambition (Lemon Tree The Lemon Tree Café - Part One: A Cup of Ambition (Lemon Tree

Two young men emerged from the growing guerrilla movement: Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad. Arafat and Abu Jihad believed return would come only if it was led by an autonomous Palestinian political and military organization devoted to armed struggle. Neither Abu Jihad, who had been expelled from al-Ramla in 1948, nor Arafat trusted in deliverance from the Arab states, which they believed had sold out the Palestinians in 1948. Together the two men had founded the guerrilla group Fatah in the wake of the Suez conflict. The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan…True, tragic and calculated to make the most apathetic person realize a need to engage in more solidarity work and not to keep being fobbed off by those who say “ah but you see it’s too complex ” Here is a Facebook "note" I wrote after listening to The Modern Scholar - Odyssey Of The West III (3) The Medieval World:As co-founder of Homelands Productions, he has produced hundreds of documentaries and features for public radio. He has written for more than 40 newspapers and magazines. Sandy is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. From 2000-2007, he taught international reporting and radio at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2007, his students won the George Polk Award for a series for print and radio on the early signs of climate change around the world. It was the first time students have been honored in the 58-year history of the awards.

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

This is an exposition of the Israel-Palestine conflict via the stories of two people, Dalia, a Jewish woman whose family immigrated when she was a baby in 1948 and Bashir, a Palestinian Arab whose family was driven out and became refugees. Dalia's family live in what had been Bashir's family's home. The lemon tree grew in the yard. The book uses their stories to tell the story of the conflict. The book does a good job of showing the personal experiences and views of all concerned. With this kind of book (another example of which is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration) there is more emphasis on those personal experiences and rather less on explication. But there is enough to give the picture. At times Dalia thought she should listen to her Western friends who insisted that the taunting voice from Cairo represented bravado and "Oriental exaggeration." She knew that the Israeli army was strong. The king's fears of an Israeli occupation of the West Bank, however, were secondary to his worries at home. American officials in Amman had already warned Washington that "the monarchy itself is in jeopardy." This reminds me of that joke to the effect that before the coming of the missionaries, the natives had the land and the colonialists had the bible. Afterward, the natives had the bible and the colonialists the land.After reading Sandy Tolan’s well written book, The Lemon Tree, lemons will never taste the same to me. The story of the lemon tree helped me see history in a new light. I saw pain, tragedy and hope of two peoples, sharing same home, same land, and same destiny. Newspapers, politics, history books, told me one side of the story. I grew up as a Jew in Israel learning the story of our peoples from history books. The sixty years of history I believed in were shattered after reading the book. The other, the “enemy,” suffers as much as we, the Jews, did. In fact, there are no winners or losers, no victories or defeats. There are only individual human beings who suffer. The book is written both as a novel and a historical document. Two people, an Arab and a Jew, tell personal narratives that center on the lemon tree, creating an authentic historical portrayal of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In this book, sour lemons have the potential of bringing people together, when both sides can see the human part in the “other” and perhaps sweeten the flavor of the fruit. Nasser repeated his position that "our forces have not initiated any aggressive act," but added, "no doubt, we shall resist any aggression launched against us or against any Arab state." Dalia finds it hard to understand how someone she cares about, and supposedly someone who cares about her, can want the annihilation of her people. Yet Israel is also carrying out deeds of brutality, torture and murder, as they invade lands preemptively to protect their territory and their settlers. She finds it hard to justify or understand either behavior.