The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan

Author:Sandy Tolan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-05-21T07:00:00+00:00

Blessed are You, the eternal One,

our God, Ruler of the universe,

Who brings forth bread from the earth.

Eleven

DEPORTATION

BASHIR LAY BLINDFOLDED and face down in an Israeli military van rolling south from the West Bank town of Nablus. His hands were cuffed behind him, his legs shackled and attached by chains to three other prisoners.

His freedom hadn't lasted. Three years after his release from prison, Bashir Khairi was in custody again.

That morning—January 13, 1988—Bashir and three other men had been taken from their cells at Jneid prison in Nablus and led along the concrete floor toward the prison exit. The action would come as no surprise to the international diplomatic community, the press, human rights lawyers, the Arab world, and the eight hundred Palestinians behind bars at Jneid. The arrest of the four men was part of a broader Israeli crackdown on the suspected organizers of the ongoing disturbances in Gaza and the West Bank, known to Israelis as riots and to the Arab world as the uprising—in Arabic, the intifada.

Five weeks earlier, Gaza and then the West Bank had exploded in demonstrations against Israel's rule. For twenty years, Palestinians living in the Israeli-controlled territories had seen nearly every aspect of public life dictated by an occupying force. Israelis determined school curriculum, ran the civil and military courts, oversaw health care and social services, established occupation taxes, and decided which proposed businesses would receive operating permits. Though the Israelis had allowed the formation of some civil institutions, including trade unions and charities, by the mid1980s the 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza seethed under occupation. Israelis controlled the land the Palestinians lived on and guarded access to the streams and aquifers running through and beneath it. They could arrest and imprison Gazans or West Bankers under shifting laws and military regulations not subject to public review. For twenty years, resentment and resistance had built up, and by late 1987, it had reached a point of explosion.

On December 8, 1987, an Israeli vehicle—some accounts claim it was an agricultural truck, others insist it was a tank—veered into a long line of cars carrying Palestinian men returning to Gaza from low-paying day labor in Israel. Four Arabs were killed. The same day, rumors spread that the corpses of the four men had been seized from the Jabalya refugee camp by Israeli troops attempting to cover up evidence that the men had been murdered.

Later, in the Jabalya camp, several thousand people gathered for the funeral, and clashes broke out. The next day, boys and young men began hurling stones at the Israeli soldiers. Hundreds of stones were falling on the troops, and they responded with live fire. A twenty-year-old man, Hatem al-Sisi, was killed; he would be known as the first martyr of the intifada. Quickly the demonstrations spread, first to the rest of Gaza and then to the West Bank, as young men, teenagers, and even boys as young as eight years old hurled stones at the Israeli tanks and troops.

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