BOOK REVIEW: THE LEMON TREE

The Lemon Tree has been on my little bookworm agenda for months. After finally getting the chance to sit down and read it a couple of months ago (and finally getting round to writing up my review!) it went above and beyond all of my expectations.  

The story begins in the summer of 1967, not long after the Six Day War broke out, when Israelis and Palestinians were slowly coming to terms with the enormity of the events which had just taken place. Three young Arab men are journeying to their childhood town of Ramla, which had been absorbed by Israel in the war, and where their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly twenty years earlier. There, Bashir Khairi, a Palestinian, meets a young Bulgarian-Jewish woman, Dalla Eshkenazi Landau, whose family emigrated to Israel in the 1940s, who occupies the home Bashir's family were forced to flee from several decades before. 

Tolan weaves in and out of the Israeli-Palestinian narrative with stunning velocity, providing the upsetting details which never quite made it to front page news. In what makes for an utterly compelling read, Tolan sheds light on the human side of the story and the areas of common ground between two families linked by their respective histories. In an interview which followed the release of this book, Tolan explained that he strongly felt that he had only ever been told one part of the history as an American; the heroic birth of Israel from the horrors of the Holocaust and the Orientalist tropes of Palestinian identity. But the relationship between the two are far more complex and richer than the conventional narrative has ever allowed. The Lemon Tree is a powerful awakening for a narrative which runs far deeper than the headlines have allowed and begins to explain how we ever got to this difficult place; an endless cycle of repeated history. A deadlock. 

This book does not make for comfortable reading. But perhaps we are just uncomfortable with hearing the story of the other? Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli are set up as a mutually exclusive binary; pick a side and stick with it, it seems to suggest. But this book tries to deconstruct that binary and questions whether, in the story of Israel-Palestine, can we ever simply be just pro-peace? Of course, the very nature of the conflict means that the road to said peace has always been a bumpy one; as we recognise that both sides stand to lose too much, the conventional narrative had kind of dictated that we should probably just rally behind the side we feel most sympathetic towards. 

But as the story of Bashir and Dalla illustrates, the lines between historical enemy and friend can be blurred. A recognition of the other as the same, in many respects and opening up the heart and the mind to the history of the other is key to this openness. One of my favourite lines in the whole book is when Dalla says ''our enemy is the only partner we have''. In the case of the Israel-Palestine story, I definitely think she's onto something. 

Antonia x