The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East Read Online Free Page A

foundation. Hundreds of other chiseled slabs, known as white Jerusalem stone, were stacked high beside him. With the first stone in place, Ahmad looked to the cousins, friends, and hired laborers beside him. They began to place stone upon mortar upon stone.
    It was 1936, and Ahmad Khairi was building a home for his family. The house was to stand at the eastern edge of al-Ramla, an Arab town of eleven thousand on the coastal plain between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean. To the north lay the Galilee and southern Lebanon; in the Bedouin lands to the south, the sands of Palestine and Sinai.
    Al-Ramla was named for sand, some believed, from the Arabic word raml Mostly the soil here was good, bearing citrus, olives, bananas, lentils, and sesame. The year Ahmad Khairi built his house, Arab farmers in Palestine would produce hundreds of thousands of tons of barley, wheat, cabbage, cucumber, tomato, figs, grapes, and melons. The Khairis tended oranges, olives, and almonds in a communal waqf, land owned collectively by the extended family and administered under Islamic law.
    The Khairis traced their history and landed wealth to the sixteenth century and the religious scholar Khair al-Din al-Ramlawi. Khair al-Din came from Morocco to preside as a judge for the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans, based in Istanbul, would rule Palestine for four hundred years. At its height, the empire stretched from the outskirts of Vienna through the Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. From Istanbul, the Ottoman sultan bequeathed to Khair al-Din the productive waqflands that would sustain the family for centuries.
    By 1936, Palestine was under the rule of a new overseer, the British, who had arrived at the end of World War I as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. By this time, the Khairis of al-Ramla had their own family quarter, an expanse of open grounds and houses connected by stone gates and archways that made it possible to travel from home to home without ever leaving the compound. The women rarely ventured out, leaving the shopping to maids and servants.
    The Khairis owned the town's cinema, and on Tuesdays it was made available for the exclusive use of the clan. Dozens of family members would come to watch the latest films from Egypt. In the privacy of their own theater, the Khairi women would not be exposed to the looks of strangers, especially men. Khairis rarely married outside the clan, but at his wedding seven years earlier, twenty-two-year-old Ahmad was an exception: His bride, Zakia, nineteen, was from the Riad family of al-Ramla. Quiet, discreet, and loyal, she was considered a good housewife and was much loved by the Khairis.
    Ahmad's uncle Sheikh Mustafa Khairi was both the family patriarch and the longtime mayor of al-Ramla. Mustafa was like a father to Ahmad; when Ahmad was seven, his parents died, and Mustafa's family had raised the boy as their own. Mustafa was popular both with the town's citizens and with the British colonial overseers, despite growing tensions.
    The British had arrived in 1917, the same year of the historic Balfour Declaration, in which England pledged to help establish a "national homeland for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This was a triumph for Zionism, a political movement of European Jews founded by Theodor Herzl. The British had authorized "an appropriate Jewish agency" to help develop public works, utilities, and natural resources—in essence, the beginnings of a Jewish government in Palestine. In recent years, Jewish immigration to Palestine had driven the Arabs and the British further apart, and Sheikh Mustafa, as mayor and town patriarch, had to mediate between the colonial overseers and his restive fellow Arabs.
    Ahmad watched his walls go up from the loamy soil on the eastern outskirts of al-Ramla: from foundation to roofline, fourteen layers of Jerusalem stone. His decision to move out of the family compound, and its world unto itself, was unusual. Ahmad wanted to feel independent,