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

The land that now comprises Israel and Palestine has changed hands many times in history, and both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs claim longstanding ties to the region. Jewish claims to the territory ultimately stem from the immigration of the biblical Abraham’s descendants to the region in the second millennium BCE and to the kingdom they would ultimately establish there, while Palestinian claims trace their lineage to the peoples living in the region at the time (Gelvin, James L. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History. 4th ed., Cambridge University Press, 2021). However, the more proximate source of the conflict comes from 19th-century history. At the time, the area was under Ottoman control but inhabited largely by Palestinian Arabs (predominantly Muslim but with a sizeable Christian minority); as in other regions of the Ottoman Empire, there were also communities of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, many of whom spoke Arabic and whose culture overlapped significantly with that of their Arab neighbors.

Though similarly assimilated to the surrounding society, the Jewish diaspora community in Europe faced considerably more antisemitism than was generally present in the Middle East. Pogroms in Russia and the Dreyfus affair in France were particularly galvanizing events in Ashkenazi history.