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

“It was the breath, the currency, the bread of his family, of nearly every family he knew. It was what everyone talked about, all the time: return. In exile, there was little else worth dreaming of.”

Bashir and his friends and family dream only of returning to their house in Ramla. Living in exile, they have a kind of half-life, as evidenced by Tolan’s word choice; “breath,” “currency” and “bread” are all necessities of human existence, but for Bashir, these things reside in old Palestine. In opening the book with Bashir’s journey to his family’s former home, Tolan establishes the motif of exile, which is a facet of not only the Palestinian but also the Jewish experience.

“Dalia believed God had a hand in Israel’s survival and compared her own feeling of awe and wonder with the feeling she imagined her ancestors had when witnessing the parting of the Red Sea.”

In the aftermath of the Six Day War, Dalia believes that divine intervention protected Israel. The allusion to the story of Moses and the story of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt contextualizes this feeling in terms of Jewish religious and cultural tradition: She believes that God has played a role in their return and that Israel is their destiny.

“Why, she thought, would You allow Israel to be saved during the Six Day War, yet not prevent genocide during the Holocaust?”

Dalia finds it difficult to reconcile her faith in God with the occurrences during the Holocaust. Her comparison of this event to the Six Day War, when Israel quickly emerged victorious, suggests how the power dynamics have shifted in the post-WWII world. Her reflections demonstrate her questioning nature, which eventually facilitates her friendship with Bashir.