Highly regarded journalist Sandy Tolan spoked at Cambell Hall this week and elaborated the history of his book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. explores the relationship between In the book, two people come together over a house which belongs to the family of Bashir, a Palestinian which expelled from during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. The family of Dalia, a Bulgarian Jew, now lives in the small stone house in the town of Rimla.The book was nominated for a National Book
The lecture entitled “One Land, Two Peoples: Sixty Years of the Israel-Palestine Tragedy” . As usual when speaking to general audiences in the US and Israel, he glossed over the specifics, such as the fact that the Israeli takeover of the town of Rimla occurred in a context of the massacre at Dier Yassin, where Israeli troops murdered 250 Palestinians in cold blood. They then threatened to repeat the atrocity, forcing unarmed farmers to exit Palestinian land. Thereafter, Israeli government units distributed the houses to Israeli immigrants.
Tolan deserves great credit neverthelss for making an effort to present a balanced picture. But he is caught in his historical situation as a Westerner and he fails to extricate himself from the false consciousness of the West, which demonizes the relatively defenseless Palestinians while covering the Zionist settler's land grab with false glory.
Sadly, the Lemon Tree risks posing the landless, houseless, homeless Palestinians as what are called "tourist Indians" in American vernacular: an oddity, a conversation piece, a pitiable specimen of a culture steamrollered by higher technology of the Western imperialist hegemones. But the game is not over until the fat lady sings...
Tolan had enough guts to mention the ominous fact that the Zionist hawks are even today preparing a possible new invasion of Gaza. The groundwork is being done by the numerous comfortable apologists of the Zionist military apparatus, for instance in a recent Independent article where the potential of hundred of Gazan fatalities is mentioned as casually as a comment on the weather.
