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

In juxtaposing the experiences of Dalia, Bashir, and their families, The Lemon Tree draws attention to the similarities in their pasts and in the pasts of the Jewish and Palestinian people broadly. For Dalia in particular, the fact that both people have experienced exile serves as a baseline for empathy, dialogue, and perhaps eventually reconciliation. However, the book also complicates this idea by showing how the arrival of European Jews in Israel—an event many experienced as a homecoming—was causally intertwined with the dispossession of Palestinians.

The exile Dalia’s family and others like them experienced was in some sense twofold. As part of the Jewish diaspora, they had been separated from their ancestral homeland for centuries, during which time they were often subject to persecution. This culminated in the Holocaust when the Eshkenazis experienced a more immediate displacement from their homes and found their very survival in jeopardy. Likewise, Bashir’s family was uprooted from their house in al-Ramla and entered an extended period of exile in the West Bank and Gaza. Bashir himself was later exiled from the West Bank to Lebanon and then Tunis.

Israelis and Palestinians, then, have both had the experience of being adrift and subject to persecution. In Europe, Dalia’s family did not know whether they would be sent to concentration camps; years later, Bashir was subjected to imprisonment several times, resulting in a similar sense of uncertainty regarding the future.