The Lemon Tree

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At 11 a.m., Jordanian forces began firing long-range artillery toward Israeli suburbs near Tel Aviv and at an airfield at Ramat David. Fifteen minutes later, Jordanian howitzers began firing thousands of shells on neighborhoods and military targets in Jewish parts of Jerusalem. Within an hour, Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi fighter jets were slicing into Israeli airspace as Jordanian infantry churned forward toward Israeli positions. f. Dalia was born three days after the United Nations voted, on November 29, 1947, to partition Palestine into two states – one for the Arabs, and one for the Jews. Eleven months later, she and her parents boarded the Pan York, bound for Israel. In this sense Dalia is truly a child of Israel. Describe through Dalia’s eyes a young and growing Israel – both in terms of the excitement her family felt to be literally building a new state and of the trauma so many immigrants brought with them, and Dalia’s efforts to empathize with them. How might this empathy have prepared her to meet Bashir years later?

The Lemon Tree Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary

Your Honor!" Bashir bellowed. He was surprised how loud his voice sounded. The other lawyer stopped in midsentence; everyone in the courtroom stared at Bashir. "I have just received word that the war has begun on the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts." it’s easy to lose hope… Then along comes Sandy Tolan’s new book, The Lemon Tree, and offers just a glimmer of possibility.” i. (RG5) Dalia describes herself as growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust (pp. 112-115). Even though her family, along with their fellow 47,000 Bulgarians, escaped these atrocities, she nevertheless experienced a young Israel as deeply traumatized. At the same time she grew up among a new community of Jews who were trying to re-form their identity. On pp. 118-120 a discussion of the Sabra, or “New Israeli Man,” describes a desire among many Israelis to “wash off that old Jew” and “stand tall for the first time.” How much of a role do you think the Holocaust, and reaction to it through the crafting of a Sabra identity, played in the formation of Israel’s national psyche? How great a role have these factors played in determining the attitudes of Israel’s citizens, its soldiers, and its leaders?

o. A few months later, Dalia repaid the visit of Bashir by visiting him in Ramallah. Describe the journey, both physically and emotionally, that Dalia took as she rode into the West Bank and then walked up the steps into Bashir’s home. What must it have taken to get her into that place? In Amman, the Samu raid had already provoked waves of violent protests against the king's regime. Palestinians accused the army of being weak and unprepared and demanded arms to fight Israel. A PLO broadcast from Cairo called upon the Jordanian army to overthrow the king. Riots broke out in Jordan and the West Bank, Jordanian troops fired at Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem, hundreds were arrested, and the king dissolved the parliament, imposed martial law, and secured additional military aid from the United States. w. In 2000 Israeli and Palestinian leaders met with President Clinton and others at Camp David (pp. 234-39). There are widely varying interpretations of why the summit collapsed. Describe it from Ehud Barak and Israel’s point of view, and then from Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians’. How would you explain the collapse? x. (RG9) Bashir and Dalia finally meet again, in the midst of rising violence and political tensions, in Ramallah in 2004 (256-262). They find that their political differences are as great as ever, but that their personal relations are as warm as ever. How does one explain that? your book vivified and humanized the Palestinian – Israeli situation as none has. It informed and fascinated me. Many, many thanks. Please write another.

THE LEMON TREE | Kirkus Reviews

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. In The Lemon Tree, which provides an impartial, journalistic account of the shared Israeli-Palestinian history, I found myself reading a story that was only half familiar to me. Throughout my life, I have celebrated and appreciated Israel. I have felt connected with the Jewish state at the heart. But I realized in reading this book how little I know her. It's a bit like learning that your mother was naughty in her youth, and maybe still isn't the goddess you thought she was when you were five. You don't love her any less- maybe even a little more - but it is a more mature love. fabulous insight on the Arab-Israeli issue…a fair and balanced touch on that sensitive matter…and unbiased reading to the facts. At stake, Nasser assured the president, was something more important than the Straits of Tiran or the withdrawal of U.N. forces...It was about defending "the rights of the people of Palestine."The story is compelling enough on its own, but Tolan interjects history throughout that I found illuminating and helpful.