The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (4 page)

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 of murder and other outrages by gangs of armed terrorists," declared a report of His Majesty's government. British troops responded with baton charges, live ammunition, and a new tactic: demolitions of the stone homes of suspected rebels and their relatives. "This preliminary work of demolition," one British communique declared, "will be punctuated by frequent detonations and crashes of falling masonry . . . the neighbourhood should not be surprised, misled, or alarmed when they hear these noises."

In the summer of 1936, the entire Khairi clan, along with the rest of al-Ramla, prepared for the annual festival of Nabi Saleh. Despite the rebellion and the British crackdown, thousands of Arabs came from across Palestine to honor this early miracle-working prophet who foretold the coming of the Prophet Mohammad. Delegations from each city in Palestine would come to the ancient mosque at Nabi Saleh, planting their city flags. "Women went to his tomb in al-Ramla to pray for fertility and better health," Ahmad and Zakia's daughter Khanom remembered. "There would be singing and dancing and prayer and picnics. This event was the highlight of the year."

News of the conflict reached the family sporadically. The rebels were exacting a toll. Many Jewish farmers couldn't get their crops or livestock to market, and those who tried were often attacked and their animals killed. Water projects were suspended as survey crews were attacked. Rural guerrillas had mastered hit-and-run tactics, firing upon British patrols, in some cases retreating to nearby villages to disguise themselves as women. A British report underscored the frustration. Colonial troops "were continually finding themselves shot up on all sides," only to find "that the hostile area was apparently populated by unarmed peaceful shepherds and agriculturalists." On one occasion, "a small party of British troops were bathing near Beisan on the 12th August [and] were subject to a surprise attack by a large Arab armed band. Unfortunately their Lewis gun 'jammed' and those who were on guard were killed by the band, who succeeded in capturing the Lewis gun and some rifles." The rebellion was just as alarming to the Zionists. "On one side, forces of destruction, forces of the desert, have risen," declared Chaim Weizmann. "And on the other side stand firm the forces of civilization and building. It is the old war of the desert against civilization, but we will not be stopped."

At night, fedayeen fighters moved from house to house, sleeping in their muddy boots in the homes of peasants or city dwellers. Family oral history suggests some Khairis were also sheltering rebels. Organizers in the local committees set up networks for smuggling arms and for collecting "taxes," sometimes by intimidation, to finance the insurgency. Rebel leaders were pressuring urban Arabs to abandon their fezzes and put on the keffiyeh, so that the rural rebels would not stand out. It isn't clear if Ahmad's furniture workshop was a target of such "tax collection," but increasingly, his uncle, Mayor Mustafa Khairi, was facing threats from rebels who saw him as too close to the British. Despite the pressure from all sides, the family tried to continue living normally.

With the birth of baby Khanom, Zakia and Ahmad now had four daughters. Ahmad still waited for his son, and he had begun to wonder if his wife was capable of bearing one. "We also didn't have any uncles," Khanom said. "So it was even more important to have a male baby." Of her mother, she said, "Of course we thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world." At home Zakia always wore a dress: a housedress for family and fancier dresses with dark stockings for visitors. She smelled of Bombay perfume, which she applied from a special flask shaped like an Indian woman. Most people in al-Ramla in those days used the public baths, but the Khairis had their own; sometimes the girls' schoolteachers would come to use the bath, which shocked the children. "When we were young we thought teachers were like angels and did not need to bathe or eat or sleep," Khanom recalled.

Usually Zakia would send the servants to buy the food, but sometimes she would do her own shopping. When she left the house to go to Wednesday market, she put on a jacket and dark cape and wore a veil over her face. Occasionally she would take her daughters along.

At the market the girls would gaze up at the stalls of eggplants and peppers; tomatoes, cucumbers, and parsley; spices and herbs; and live chickens and squab. Village men rode to the oil presses perched atop sacks of olives in flatbed trucks. Horse-drawn carts creaked into market overburdened with produce. Village women would barter chicken and eggs—or, in hard times, silver bracelets and old Ottoman coins—for Syrian silk, Egyptian linen, and cotton from Gaza. The women chose dyes for their embroidery: indigo from the Jordan Valley, red from the sumac growing wild in the fields of Palestine, yellow
muchra
from the soil found near the Egyptian border.

The Khairi girls could see how each villager's dress told a story. Some were embroidered with patterns of sesame branches; others with sunflowers or field tulips. In al-Ramla, a citrus-growing region near the sea, patterns of orange branches were woven into the embroidered bodices. These were surrounded by green triangles to represent the cypress trees used as windbreaks beside the orange groves. Below that, undulating lines of indigo stood for the waves of the nearby Mediterranean.

At home, Zakia and her servants often cooked the girls' favorite,
makloubeh,
or "upside down," a lamb-and-eggplant casserole they would turn over and sprinkle with pine nuts just after it came out of the oven. The girls would gather around their mother in the kitchen as she sprinkled sugar and pistachios atop the
kanafe.
The main meals were served at midday in the dining room. Zakia would call the girls to the table; Ahmad would come home from his carpentry workshop to join them; and the family would dine around a short-legged table called a
tablieh.
When guests came the parents would retire to the salon, where they would sit on couches of engraved wood covered in dark blue velvet, on which the girls were never allowed to sit.

After dinner Ahmad would return to work, where he had built a reputation as an accomplished furniture craftsman. His vision was bad, and reading therefore difficult, so instead of the university, Ahmad had attended the Schneller's School in Jerusalem, which turned out young men expert in the trades. Now, a decade later, Ahmad had enough work to hire assistants, and his business was prospering despite the Arab Rebellion. His trade, along with the income from the Khairi land, was enough to provide the family a comfortable life.

Ahmad rarely socialized at home; instead, he would join the other Khairis to play cards, drink Arabic coffee, and smoke from the
arguileh
(water pipe) at the
diwan,
or social gathering place, in the family compound. There the talk of politics was unending.

By the end of 1936, a relative calm had settled on Palestine. The Arab Higher Committee had suspended its general strike and rebellion in response to a British promise to investigate the underlying causes of the conflict. Lord Peel, the former secretary of state for colonial India, arrived from London dressed in a top hat and tails. The British lord was to direct the parliamentary commission of inquiry, but at times he seemed baffled. "I did not realise how deep-seated was the Arab fear of Jewish overlordship and domination," he wrote to a colleague in London. "As to reconciliation between the two races, nobody makes any attempt to bring it about." With increasing numbers of European Jews "pour[ing] into Palestine . . . by means legal and illegal," Lord Peel decried the "unpleasant atmosphere of suspicion" and fretted over the futility of making even "constructive suggestions."

In July 1937, the Palestine Royal Commission presented its 418-page report to the British Parliament. Declaring "half a loaf is better than no bread," Peel and his fellow commissioners recommended Palestine be partitioned into two states—one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. "Partition offers a prospect," the Peel Commission concluded, "of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace." Hundreds of Arab villages, and at least 225,000 Palestinian Arabs, were inside the proposed boundaries of the new Jewish state; some 1,250 Jews resided on the Arab side of the partition line. An "arrangement" would have to be made "for the transfer, voluntary or otherwise, of land and population . . . if then the settlement is to be clean and final, this question of the minorities must be boldly faced and firmly dealt with," the Peel Commission declared.

The Zionist leadership accepted Lord Peel's recommendations despite internal dissension. Many Jewish leaders did not want to give up the idea of a Jewish homeland across the whole of Palestine, and some leaders even considered Transjordan, the desert kingdom across the Jordan River, as part of an eventual Jewish state. For them, acceptance of the Peel Commission's report was a major compromise, and their disagreement reflected ideological divisions that would manifest for decades. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Mapai Party and the most influential of the Zionists in Palestine, had argued in favor of the plan. At the core of the Peel Commission plan was the idea of transferring the Arabs, a concept that had been advanced for decades by fellow Zionists. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, had written that in purchasing land from the indigenous Arabs for a Jewish homeland, "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Forty years later, during Lord Peel's investigation, Ben-Gurion had instructed Jews who met with the commission to recommend the transfer plan. After the release of the commission's report, the Zionist leader wrote: "We have to uproot from the roots of our hearts the assumption that it is not possible. Indeed it is possible. . . . We might be losing a historical chance that won't return. The transfer cause, in my view, is more important than all our demands for additional territory . . . with the evacuation of the Arab population from the valleys, we get for the first time in our history a real Jewish state." A year later, Ben-Gurion would declare, "I support compulsory transfer." Others sympathetic to the Zionist cause had warned against such measures. Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, for example, had long advocated what Einstein called "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic peoples," who "may have a great future in common."

The Arabs were as stunned by the Peel Commission's proposal as Ben-Gurion was excited. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, promptly rejected it, not only because of the transfer plan, but because of the partition itself. The Arabs would fight for a single, independent, Arab-majority state.

In September 1937, the Arab Rebellion erupted again when Arab assassins gunned down a British commissioner on a winding, narrow road in Nazareth. The British response was swift. The military took control from the civil authorities. Military courts stepped up execution of suspected rebels. Thousands were jailed as British forces occupied cities across Palestine, including al-Ramla. British gunners hunted bands of insurgents from the air, at one point employing 16 airplanes west of al-Ramla to kill more than 150 rebels. "Terrorism has called for severe counter measures," wrote the district commissioner for al-Ramla in October, "and these, inevitably, have exacerbated feelings still further. Moderate opinion has now lost the last shred of influence it possessed, and al-Ramla, where the moderates grouped under Sheikh Mustafa Kheiri [Khairi], the Mayor, exercised some restraining power, has capitulated to the gunmen."

Ahmad's uncle Sheikh Mustafa was in trouble, caught between the British occupying forces and the fedayeen of the Arab Rebellion. For fifteen years, he had commanded great respect as al-Ramla's mayor and leader of one of its most influential families. Sheikh Mustafa's popularity, according to later generations, was based on his defense of the rural poor and their rights to pay lower taxes. "When Sheikh Mustafa came into a room, everyone would stand," remembered Khanom Khairi,, "When he walked by people on horseback, they would get down from the horse. People who were working would stop working. No one asked them to do so; they did it out of respect." The sheikh was tall and good-looking, with hazel eyes and a mustache, and he was never without his
abaya,
or dark cape, and the white turban of the religious scholar. He would wrap the turban himself before placing the dark red
tarbush
(fez) over it.

The charismatic mayor walked a fine line between the imperial power and the rebels. He had opposed the Peel Commission plan and battled with Arab "notables" who he felt were too close to the British and the Zionists. The mayor, according to later Khairi generations, even secretly used his sons to ferry information on British troop movements to the rebels and to transport weapons in the trunk of a car. If this is true, they did so at the risk of execution.