The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (34 page)

Rabin was coming under repeated attack from Benjamin Netanyahu, his rival from the Likud Party, who declared the prime minister had agreed "not to talk with the PLO, not to give up territory during this term of office, and not to establish a Palestinian state. He is breaking all these promises one by one." Netanyahu, who aspired to be prime minister himself, was a relentless critic of Oslo. He believed that the plan to arm thousands of Palestinian police, and to allow the PLO cadres to return to the edge of Israel, was absurd. The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, did little to blunt such criticism. If anything, the image of a longtime enemy of the state onstage with the two Israeli leaders only fueled the attacks. In 1995, Netanyahu accused Rabin of helping to establish "the Palestinian terrorist state." Religious settlers formed the sharpest edge of the opposition. Many believed God had given the Jews the land of Judea and Samaria, known to others as the West Bank. Some extremist rabbis called Rabin a
rodef,
or violent aggressor, who they believed was about to negotiate away their God-given home. A poster circulated showing Rabin in a doctored photo, wearing a Nazi uniform. For a growing number of Israelis on the religious Right, Yitzhak Rabin was an enemy of the state.

Dalia was stunned that anyone in Israel would use the memory of the Holocaust to manipulate people's minds. "It was ugly," she remembered thinking. "This was murderous. Where are the limits of freedom of speech? I understood that the battle for compromise in Israel was going to be very difficult." Still, she remained hopeful of the prospects for peace. Despite the carnage of the suicide bombers, she believed historical change was taking place among her people. Rabin, the old warrior, had shown the courage to accept a dialogue with the PLO and his former sworn enemy Arafat. Dalia, despite her own mistrust of Arafat, believed that each side had taken steps to create space for the other. "If we make space for that other, then it truly helps us make it possible to weave together a reality that is much more splendid than the reality we can envision alone." She was heartened by the news of more Israeli troop withdrawals from the West Bank and the early signs of sovereignty for her Palestinian neighbors. She saw these as the first steps toward equality for the Palestinians, a concept she had been considering for decades, since the day in 1967 when she opened the door to Bashir and his cousins.

At Open House, now in its fifth year in the house in Ramla, Dalia and Yehezkel had seen more willingness among Israelis to engage in Arab-Jewish dialogue. The summer peace camps with Arab and Jewish children were suddenly popular, and Yehezkel believed "the whole coexistence approach," which he and Dalia had advocated for years, "was legitimized in the eyes of Jews." Dalia, for her part, would remember how she had concluded her letter to Bashir seven years earlier: "I pray that with your cooperation and God's help, our children will delight in the beauty and bounties of this holy land."

On November 4, 1995, Dalia thought these dreams were still possible. It was a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbat), and she had spent all day and the previous evening in a convent run by the Sisters of Zion in the Old City, sharing a Shabbat meal and talking about the possibilities of Open House. The convent was part of the church known as Ecce Homo, "Behold the Man," the words Pilate used in denouncing Jesus Christ. The church's Lithostrotos, or smooth stone pavement, is said to be the place where Jesus stood when he was condemned.

From the higher levels of the convent, Dalia looked out at one of the most magnificent panoramas in Jerusalem: the glittering of the Temple Mount, or al-Haram al-Sharif, the holiest place in Jerusalem for both Muslims and Jews; the gray dome of the twelfth-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre, perhaps the most sacred site in all of Christianity; the rooftops of ancient stone homes with their clustered steel antennae reaching upward; Mt. Scopus to the north; and beyond that, the mountains of the West Bank, which Dalia knew as the Judean Hills, part of biblical Judea and Samaria. Dalia believed that Israel had to give up the settlements in those lands and that thousands of Jews would have to move. Even though this was part of what she, too, considered the biblical land of Israel, for centuries it had also been home to other people. Hard as it was, Dalia believed, each side in this conflict had to give up something precious.

That evening, November 4, as Dalia was preparing to leave the Old City to return home, Yehezkel and Raphael went for supper across the apartment hallway with Aunt Stella, who had moved from Ramla after Dalia's parents died. An hour west, in Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Rabin was at a rally at Kings of Israel Square, where one hundred thousand Israelis had gathered in support of peace with the Palestinians. The prime minister—who had fought against the Arabs in 1948, 1956, and 1967; who had authorized "might, force, and beatings" against Palestinian youths in the intifada; and who for years had opposed recognition of the PLO—addressed the crowd:

I was a soldier for twenty-seven years. I fought as long as there was no prospect of peace. I believe that there is now a chance for peace, a great chance, which must be seized. . . . I have always believed most of the nation wants peace and is prepared to take risks for peace. And you here, who have come to take a stand for peace, as well as many others who are not here, are proof that the nation truly wants peace and rejects violence. Violence is undermining the foundations of Israeli democracy. It must be rejected and condemned, and it must be contained. It is not the way of the state of Israel.

The crowd began to sing, and someone handed Rabin a page containing the lyrics of a song, "Shir l'Shalom," which conveyed the sorrows of the dead speaking from underground to instruct the living. It was written in 1969, two years after the Six Day War, and it had become the anthem of the Israeli peace movement. Rabin sang along:

Nobody will return us

from the dead dark pit.

Here, neither the joy of victory

nor songs of praise

will help.

So sing only for peace,

don't whisper a prayer,

it's better to sing a song for peace

with a great shout!

As the rally ended, the prime minister folded the page of lyrics, slipped them into his shirt pocket, and walked toward his motorcade.

At about the same moment, Dalia was getting into a taxi and riding down the Via Dolorosa, the path Christ traveled with his cross. She rode out of the Old City through the eastern entrance at Lion's Gate, facing the Mount of Olives. The Arab driver turned west, and at a stoplight they encountered another taxi driver, who shouted through his window: "Rabin has been shot!" Dalia was confused; she couldn't digest the words.
This isn't
possible,
she thought.
It can't be.
The driver sped toward West Jerusalem. "Oh, my goodness," he told Dalia in Hebrew. "I have no radio!" At each light they signaled to other cars and asked, "What happened, what happened?"

"Maybe it's not true," said the driver, trying to reassure Dalia. "How could this be true?"

Twenty minutes later, the taxi pulled up at Dalia's four-story apartment building. She dropped her heavy bag on the floor of the lobby and raced up the stairs, where Yehezkel, Raphael, and Stella were fixed on the television screen. The reporter for Israel Channel One was outside the hospital, surrounded by thousands of others, reporting on "rumors of Rabin's condition." Soon it was confirmed: Yitzhak Rabin was dead. He had been shot at point-blank range by a twenty-year-old religious law student, Yigal Amir. "I acted alone," Amir told police, "and on orders from God." Rabin's blood, Israel would soon learn, had seeped through his shirt pocket and soaked the page of the peace anthem.

Dalia watched the television screen as people started falling into one another's arms, their bodies shaking with sobs. She stayed up until the morning, completely bewildered. "There was an immense sense that something was lost. This was a man who had gone through tremendous change. I heard him myself, at a Memorial Day talk in Israel." Enough of the struggle for war, Dalia remembered Rabin saying. Enough bereavement. Now we have to struggle for peace. This is the most challenging of all wars—the war for peace. Over and over, Dalia asked herself, "Who could have thought that terror would hit home in such a way?"

Yehezkel recalled experiencing a familiar, sickening feeling he had felt three times as a teenager growing up in the States in the 1960s, with the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King Jr.

"That was really the turning point," Yehezkel said. "It destroyed any chances for accommodation, at least for a long time. I remember thinking in subsequent years,
If Rabin had lived, would he and Arafat have worked something out?

"I don't know."

Neither did Dalia. "Had he been alive, I don't know if he could have brought his entire people along with him. But I felt terribly hurt," she said, crying. "I felt that good people that could make a difference—they don't stand a chance."

Bashir remembered Rabin's words to him when the two met at Jneid prison, just before Bashir's deportation to Lebanon: "If there will be peace, there will be no problem anymore with the prisoners." Bashir, however, did not share Dalia's optimism that Rabin would have brought a just peace to the region; neither did he think Arafat was doing that. He continued to believe there could be no peace, no justice, without the Palestinian right of return, which, for Bashir, remained limited to modest, symbolic gestures.

It was a warm Friday morning in the summer of 1999, according to Lamis Salman, a young Arab woman who grew up in Israel. She was a teacher at Open House, the kindergarten for the Arab children of al-Ramla. Lamis was returning from a trip to the store to purchase drinks when she saw a middle-aged man gazing at the children at play in the yard of Open House. He appeared to be in his fifties—short, with a slight paunch and a tuft of gray hair that fell over his forehead. Standing beside him were two other adults about his age, and two young men. The man spoke to Lamis in Arabic, introducing himself, his sister and brother-in-law, and his two nephews.

"He came in secret. Nobody knows how he got there," Lamis recalled. "He asked about Dalia." Lamis and the other Arab teachers working at Open House were excited about the man's sudden appearance, but at least one of the Israelis there was alarmed. She considered him an intruder, a former criminal who had come illegally—no matter that he may have lived there decades earlier.

Lamis watched Bashir as he gazed at the kindergartners. They stood with the other Arab teachers in the garden, talking about politics, and life in Ramallah, and in al-Ramla. "He was missing the home," Lamis said. "The land and the house and al-Ramla. He didn't talk about it, but I could see it in his eyes."

In the summer of 2000, Arafat found himself across the table from a new Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, at Camp David, the White House retreat. Yitzhak Rabin, whom Arafat still liked to call "my partner" in the "peace of the brave," had been buried for nearly five years. His successor, Shimon Peres, had been defeated in a tight election race by Benjamin Netanyahu following a new wave of suicide bombings in the spring of 1996. Three years later, Barak, the Labor Party candidate and former chief of the Israel Defense Forces, had in turn defeated Netanyahu in what amounted to a referendum on Oslo: The Israelis believed an agreement with the Palestinians was their best chance for long-term security. In July 2000, two months after Israel ended its occupation of Lebanon, Barak, Arafat, President Bill Clinton, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and teams of negotiators spent two weeks at Camp David in search of a historic final agreement with the Palestinians.

Clinton was deeply involved in many of the discussions. On July 15, five days into the negotiations, the president attended a meeting of the border negotiating committee. Israelis revealed a map identifying what they said was 92 percent of the West Bank as land for a demilitarized Palestinian state, with settlements and Israeli military outposts remaining on 8 percent of the land. The Palestinians would be compensated with additional lands inside Israel, but less than the amount they were being asked to give up. The 92 percent figure did not include land that Israel had already annexed for Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and other lands in the Jordan Valley, over which Israel intended to maintain control for at least ten years.

For the Palestinians, the percentage on the table from the Israelis, whatever it amounted to, was carving into the little of Palestine that remained for them. They argued that in accepting Oslo and Israel's existence, they had already conceded the other 78 percent to the Jewish state, and they weren't prepared to give up any more of what was left. Clinton's influential Middle East negotiator, Dennis Ross, thought little of these "old arguments about the settlements being illegal and the Palestinians needing the 1967 lines," calling such positions "the same old bullshit." This point of view apparently influenced the president, who also considered these positions to be Palestinian intransigence. At one point, Clinton demanded that chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qurei (also known as Abu Ala) produce an alternative map as a counterproposal to the Israelis' idea. "My map," replied Abu Ala, one of the architects of the Oslo accords, "is the map of June 4, 1967"—the day before the Six Day War and Israeli occupation.

"Sir," Clinton said pointedly to Abu Ala, his voice rising to a shout, "I know you'd like the whole map to be yellow. But that's not possible. This isn't the Security Council here. This isn't the UN General Assembly. If you want to give me a lecture, go over there and don't make me waste my time. I'm the president of the United States. I'm ready to pack my bags and leave. I also risk losing a lot here. You're obstructing the negotiation. You're not acting in good faith." With that the president rose and, accompanied by Secretary of State Albright, stalked out of the room.