Reopening the 1948 File: Considering Emotion and Literature to Inform Legal Approach
It is no secret that among the roadblocks at which peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians have stumbled has been one very crucial central theme, the Palestinian refugees. Talks which for decades have echoed the mantra of the two-state solution, built on the premise of creating two distinct ethno-centric states side-by-side, have for the most part failed on what to do regarding the deep and often painful interconnected history of the territories that would form both states. For most Palestinians, both in the occupied territories, and within Israel-proper, the legacy of the some 700,000–800,000 refugees that were forced to leave their homes in 1948 remains an open wound. Though little progress has been made on the matter, their rights remain clear. Atif Kubursi (2013)[1], in noting the acknowledgement of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that “almost every major peace agreement concluded around the world since the late 1980s has included provisions related to the return of displaced persons”, further elaborates on aforementioned rights. Resolution 194 (III)[2], Kubursi notes, related “directly and unequivocally” to the rights of Palestinians regarding repatriation and compensation. Focusing on the latter, Kubursi imparts six main types of compensation for consideration; “Compensation for refugees choosing not return to their homeland; Compensation for loss of movable or immovable property or material damage to property; Compensation for incomes derived from the use of refugees’ property; Compensation for lost income streams, pensions, insurance and deposits; Compensation for the loss of collective goods such as infrastructure and natural resources; Compensation for non-material damages such as psychological injuries, and so on.” Despite the lack of physical progress on negotiating this issue between the two sides, one thing remains clear, that this issue cannot be resolved without large-scale input from the field of legal practise.
Orit Gal[3], writing on the Israeli perspective regarding compensation for Palestinians that lost property in 1948 notes that amongst the issues dealt with by attempts to reach a negotiated settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, the “refugee issue is the only one that is mainly past-oriented, relating to the essence of the conflict”. Gal therefore seeks to address why this issue in particular has so often been left inadequately addressed in the forum of negotiations. He explains that much of this is related to the internal politics of Israeli society. Originally, the biggest theoretical challenge that the Israeli political spectrum experienced was that posed by the concept of Palestinian statehood and all it entailed with establishing a reality of shared sovereignty in the totality of Historic Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. As he notes, in the early 1990s right up to the beginning of the process that was to lead to the signing of the Oslo Accords, it was only the Israeli left that meaningfully accepted the idea of a Palestinian state. While the mainstream ‘remained sceptical’, the Israeli political right sought to bolster support for an ‘Eretz Israel Hashlema’, meaning full Israeli sovereignty from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. The result was, as Gal notes, that “as long as questions of sovereignty dominated the Israeli discourse, the refugee issue was held to be non-issue at best, or at worst one that would solve itself within the last stages of the negotiations.” Though the Beilin-Abu Mazen ‘Understandings’ in 1995 would address the issue of refugees, laying out an informal agreement for how to proceed with discussing the possibility of compensation, such issues were still generally perceived by most Israelis to “fall within the international and material spheres, rather than within the bilateral and political domains.” As such, during the preliminary talks referred to as the ‘Stockholm Channel’ in the run up the Camp David summit in 2000 Israel would focus on ideas of international compensation mechanisms. However, the talks would eventually implode around the issue of refugees. As Gal notes, a combination of two factors would contribute to this break down. Firstly, the clash of historical narratives of the opposing sides and Palestinian focus on the ‘right of return’. Secondly, the introduction on the part of the Israeli side of the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, used somewhat as a counter claim to Palestinian demands. Something which Gal argues “should not be seen merely as a practical demand but as part of the struggle over the historical debate”. As Gal further notes, by the time of the Taba negotiations in 2001, the issue of refugees began to be referred to as ‘the last hurdle to peace’, as the Israeli public expressed greater suspicion about the intention of the Palestinians. Indeed for much of the Israeli public the issue of Palestinian attachment to land and former homes is clouded by fear towards perceived lack of acceptance of the right of self-determination for the Jewish people.
It could be argued that for progress to be made on this issue, new approaches are necessary. Only so much can be built on an official state-level to prepare a society for actualising coexistence. As Nussbaum notes in her work ‘Poetic Justice’ (1997),[4] “[o]ur society is full of refusals to imagine one another with empathy and compassion, refusals from which none of us is free.” Nussbaum further notes that she believes that an ‘ethical stance’ regarding law and society “will have a large place for rules and formal decision procedures”. Yet, regarding the ability of the individual to be coaxed into stepping into the shoes of the ‘other’, she promotes the ‘literary imagination’ “precisely because it seems (…) an essential ingredient of an ethical stance that asks us to concern ourselves with the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own.” As Nussbaum thus further notes, “an ethics of impartial respect for human dignity will fail to engage real human beings unless they are made capable of entering imaginatively into the lives of distant others and to have emotions relate to that participation.” (preface) Therefore she continues to describe the ‘literary imagination’ as a power capable of being able to sway legislators and policy-makers, focusing particularly on stories which centre the lives of a single or small number of protagonists, rather than more rounded general histories. This approach is intended to build in the reader actual empathy for that individual and their narrative. This compelling argument provokes us to explore the possibility of the use of literature in understanding the Palestinian narrative in the context of 1948. Indeed, we must ask whether or not the understanding of Palestinian connection to former properties fled from inside Israel can be transformed by understanding of what Palestinians write about this subject.
Conway and Stannard (2016) [5]note that the question of whether or not property should be considered ‘more than a commodity’ is hotly debated subject in property law. Though they acknowledge that relatively little has been written regarding the connections between property and emotions from the perspective of the law, they further note Radin’s analysis making the case for distinguishing the differences between types of property. Radin, Conway and Stannard explain, argues for a ‘qualitative approach’ which takes into account the connection between the owner and the property. Conway and Stannard thus further argue that such an approach is supported by extensive psychological study into the way property can help form and become part of one’s identity. They further break down two differing forms of attachment and connection which inform the emotions of the individual in different ways.
The first of these is ‘material possession attachment’, which very simply refers to the connection one builds to what we could term ‘movable’ possessions such as family trinkets or souvenirs. Conway and Stannard assess that in this situation, the owner goes through a process in which the object they have placed emotional investment in goes through a process of decommodification. Meaning that the object in question ceases to become viewed only in terms of its economic value as the owner psychologically appropriates it and adds sentimental value to it. This is much the same as the process that takes place in the second form of attachment noted by Conway and Stannard, ‘place attachment’. As they explain, this form of attachment also “involves a similar psychological process of appropriation by which the place becomes part of the person’s identity.” Yet, ‘place attachment’ can be differentiated from the former type in two main ways: “the subject matter’s comparative permanence, and its immobility.”
In discussing how emotions are reflected in the law, particularly in the field of property law, Conway and Stannard explain that ‘most’ modern systems of law distinguish between ‘offences against the person’, that might include things such as homicide, assault and rape, and ‘offences against property’. In regards to what we consider degrading towards the physical integrity of the individual, we tend to associate this with the latter. Indeed, courts are often “wary of penalising what is often term ‘mere’ emotional distress, at least where it is not accompanied by a recognisable psychiatric diagnosis.” Part of such general dismissal of the effects of emotional harm is at least partly connected to the failure to associate it to the former category of harm towards the person. Yet, is being more widely recognised, emotional harm can in fact disturb the integrity of the individual. Conway and Stannard thus argue that there is an inherent emotional overtones at the centre of basic property offences, in so far as the law protects the possession as a representation of their personal economic interest. As such, a number of legal systems subscribe to the ‘Castle Doctrine’ which reflects the home’s inherent importance to the individual as a ‘pre eminent place of safety’, meaning that an individual can be justified in using force to defend it.
Conway and Stannard go on to consider the dearth of recent literature focusing on the special status of the home. For example, they quote Thompson (2007) who explains that the home is the “most intimate space we inhabit… the place where our most significant relationships are nurtured [and] where we can impart a sense of self in both physical and psychological ways.” In regards to the latter, they note Low’s (2008) analysis that emotions associated with the home are often not just ‘proactive’ ones, meaning “love, warmth, trust and security” but also ‘reactive.’ Reactive feelings being associated with defensiveness and being under threat from “real or imagined dangers”. Conway and Stannard further acknowledge that in circumstances where the home is at the centre of private legal disputes, the value of emotional significance can vary from case to case. As such “the types of attachment highlighted earlier have fluid boundaries, and material attachment often shades into place attachment when analysing the home.” They assess that in situations of family units breaking down, perhaps due to a failed marriage, or appropriation of a home by lenders or creditors, the home itself forms an ‘important third-party’. In such circumstances, emotional attachments can fade into the background as the home is rendered a mere capital asset. As Thompson notes, the meaning of the home is “disrupted, changes and lost when families… fall apart”. As Conway and Stannard explain, the home can thus become a source of pain, “that symbolises loss of the intact family as well as lost hopes and dreams.” In case involving divorce, the custodial parent is usually rewarded the family home, something designed to prioritise the needs and emotions of the children. From this theory we can draw interesting parallels to incidences of inter-ethnic conflict and loss of homes during wartime. In many ways, such incidences can function like a break down of a family (nation) unit during a divorce, albeit considerably more painful and destructive. Yet like family breakdowns, ethnic and social strife is rarely perfectly solved.
The Palestinian writer and refugee from the coastal town of Jaffa, Raja Shehadeh, writes at great length of his experiences returning to his family’s ancestral town. Amongst his recollections in his work “Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine”[6], Shehadeh writes of his first experience returning to the town. Following the Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that followed it, many Palestinians residing in the occupied territories were able to visit former homes that they had been forced to flee in 1948. Shehadeh notes the differing reactions of his parents upon visiting the former home of his mother’s family and encountering the “Romanian” family that now lived within it:
“ The encounter was more surreal than sad. The portly woman wearing a long dark dress who opened the door had no idea who we were. She looked confused and scared at the sight of us. Perhaps she had never been told that she had been given the house of a Palestinian family […] She was baffled when we made our way inside and my mother began to explain the function of every room in the house. My father seemed embarrassed by the whole experience. He could not wait to leave. My mother, on the other hand, moved through the house as though she owned it, pointing out the beautiful floor tiles, which she emphasised to us were Portland stone of the best quality. ‘Look how after all these years they still shine. My Father always wanted to have the best material.’
Perhaps most interestingly regarding the way in which Shehadeh perceives the confused Romanian Jewish woman they encounter at the front door is the way in which Shehadeh immediately seeks to humanise her. There stood before him a strange woman who, as he describes could not communicate with them in any shared language. Anger and disgust may be a natural reaction when one is confronted with a situation such as this. After all, the dispossession of his mother’s family home took place following a bloody and painful period of history following which legal means were used to dampen any hope of Palestinian refugees ever returning to their old homes. Yet, despite this, Shehadeh does not seek to paint the woman as a thief, or an interloper. He instead ponders whether or not she was aware of who had lived there before. This could be seen as an expression of his confusion and disbelief toward the fate of the town. Writing about his feelings towards being invited by a Jewish lawyer colleague to spend the night at the old ‘Arab-Style’ he shared with his wife in Jaffa in 1978, he states, “[s]trangely I felt neither anger nor reproach. I just wanted to understand how it had all been possible: the Nakba, the expulsion of the city’s inhabitants, the new inhabitants in the homes of the conquered.” This is a seemingly common theme throughout Shehadeh’s work. Writing of the stories of Jaffa that had been told as a child growing up in Ramallah, he notes his dismay upon encountering the bleak reality of the contemporary Jaffa. Though the homes along al-Ajami, as he writes, were still palatial, and the narrow streets still possessed a ‘faded beauty’, he states that this was “marred by the scurrying rats and the broken doors and windows.” For him, the city personified had been ‘insulted by sheer neglect’. Yet, though he clearly finds their actions and circumstances uncomfortable, Shehadeh appears to stop just short of apportioning direct blame towards either the Romanian Jewish woman living in his mother’s family home or his colleague David and his wife Sarah. When confronted with such a large event of mass-trauma, it is difficult to imagine how simple-seeming individuals that you may encounter could have contributed to such a catastrophe. Though Shehadeh does note importantly that he arrived at the Jaffa house of his colleague David ‘unburdened by memories of Jaffa before the Nakba’, unlike Shehadeh’s parents.
In 1950, Tawfik Toubi, Palestinian Citizen of the new Israeli state and member of the first Knesset as part of the communist party ‘Maki’, took the opportunity to raise the issue of Al-Birwa. The residents of the town, which has been a fairly large prominent location in the Galilee east of Acre had been displaced during the war in 1948, like many other Palestinians. Yet, unlike Palestinians who had fled to other countries following the war, many of the refugees of Al-Birwa became ‘internally displaced’, and as such still present in the territory that formed the new state. Toubi therefore demanded that the village’s residents should be allowed to exercise their right to return to their homes. However, Israel prime minister at the time, David Ben-Gurion would only dismiss such claims, stating that “the questioner presented the fact inaccurately. Birwa is an abandoned village which was destroyed in the fighting. Its inhabitants cooperated with Kaukji’s gangs.” Ben-Gurion was of course referring to the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) field commander Fawzi al-Qawuqji who had led international Arab forces in 1948, and previously collaborated with the Nazis. Up until the war, the town had been somewhat representative of the Palestinian ideal. It was a mixed Muslim-Christian town home to traditional olive oil presses and a classic agrarian style of living which remained mostly intact up until the 1940s when residents started to work in neighbouring urban localities such as Haifa. This mostly traditional lifestyle lent itself well to good health, with Haganah intelligence reporting that the majority of residents lived to be over 100 years old. This was the setting for the early childhood of Mahmoud Darwish who would later come to be known as Palestine’s national poet. [7]
Darwish’s story was emblematic of the Kafka-esque experience that many Palestinians found themselves in following 1948. His family had attempted to return to Al-Birwa only to be denied, instead discovering that the town had been razed. Additionally, due to the fact that the family had not been present during the first Israeli census of its Arab population the family were deemed ‘infiltrators’ and termed under the Orwellian phrase of ‘present-absent aliens’. The main result of which being not allowed to claim an Israeli passport, instead receiving simple identity cards. Darwish would later recall that upon attempting to travel to Paris in 1968, he was denied entry by confused border staff who could not understand his undetermined nationality and laissez passer travel documents. As Darwish described it, his family was reduced to simple agricultural labour. Speaking of his grandfather, he explained that he “chose to live on a hill overlooking his land. Until he died he would watch [Jewish] immigrants from Yemen living in his place, which he was unable even to visit.” Such precarious feelings of displacement would later inform Darwish’s work. Arguably amongst his strongest poems is ‘I am Yousuf, O father’[8]:
“I am Yousuf, O father.
O father, my brothers do not love me nor want me among them.
They assault me and throw stones and words at me.
They want me to die so they can eulogise me.
They closed the door of your home and left me outside.
They expelled me from the field.
They poisoned my vineyards.
They destroyed my toys, O father.
When the gentle breeze passed by and played with my hair they became jealous
And flamed up with rage against me and flared up in rage against you, what did I ever do to them O father?
Butterflies perched on my shoulders, stalks of wheat swayed toward me and birds rested in my palms.
What did I do O father? And why me?
You named me Yusuf, and they threw me into the well, and accused the wolf, the wolf is more merciful than my brothers.
Father! Did I ever wrong anyone when I said: ‘I saw eleven stars, and the sun and moon, I saw them prostrating before me?”
The importance of the story of Joseph in this context would not be lost on either religious Muslims or Jews. Joseph, viewed as the favoured son of Jacob and Ruth, represented by his gifted coat of many colours, draws the ire of his jealous brothers who thus plot against him. Of course, the strong descriptions of Yousuf’s brothers actions in the poem refer directly to Darwish’s experience of dispossession from his ancestral home in Al-Birwa. Yet, more subtle but perhaps more fascinating in terms of narrative is Darwish’s choice to resist more often used colloquial descriptions of Jews and Arabs as ‘cousins’, something often deployed in a derogatory manner in everyday-talk. Instead, the use of the word ‘brother’ more deeply reflects Darwish’s politics. Though often depicted in a nationalist light, Darwish before his exile post-1971 subscribed to the ideology of the joint Arab-Jewish communist party that we was a member of. As such, Balraj Dhillon [9] highlights how his work “resists separatist nationalists’ discourses by frequently humanising both Israelis and Palestinians — humanising the enemy of each.” Yet at the same time, he expresses the power-disbalance between the two peoples, depicting Palestinians as weak children whose possessions, or ‘toys’, have been broken by malicious older brothers.
Darwish’s humanisation of Israeli Jews that he otherwise portrays as complicit in the dispossession of Palestinians in his work is further represented by his admiration for Jewish poets such Yehuda Amichai, considered among the national poets of Israel. Referring to his complicated feelings towards his Israeli Jewish counterpart, Darwish imparted that “his poetry put a challenge to me, because we write about the same place. He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?” Indeed, Yehuda Amichai’s work as well as personal story is infused with themes and ideology that Darwish found challenging. Born with the German name Ludwig Pfeuffer, he later changed his surname to ‘Amichai’, a name infused with theological undertones, meaning ‘my people lives’. Among the first to write such poetry in modern colloquial Hebrew, Amichai, though not religious himself, wrote from the perspective of someone who had grown up imbibed with Jewish theological and Zionist teachings. Yet when we delve deeper in Amichai’s work, we can find interesting reflections that mirror the ideals and themes found in Darwish’s poetry. For example, in the poem ‘The Place Where We Are Right’ [10]we find what could be read as a the ‘flipside’ of 1948 story; the victor lamenting:
‘From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
Many have interpreted this poem in a broad sense, talking about the stubbornness of the human condition. The insatiable need to not only be right, but to be recognised as such. Though we cannot be entirely certain of Amichai’s intentions behind the poem, the last lines of the final stanza stand out. The image of the ruined house is one that a reader approaching from the perspective of either the Jewish experience in Europe, or the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’) can relate to. After experiencing traumatic loss in Germany, Amichai had fought with the Haganah in 1948. Both experiences naturally influencing the themes of his work. In light of this context this poems seems to, as he does in other poems, null the triumphalism of the young Israeli nation, as if to pose the question ‘at what cost is our righteousness?’ The words of this poem thus adorn the museum in Tel Aviv dedicated to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995 while in the midst of peace-talks with the Palestinians. This is a theme that seems to run through Amichai’s work. As Kirsch (2015) notes, while others were celebrating the capture of East Jerusalem following the Six Day War in 1967 with messianic fervour, Amichai for one developed a more sombre tone. While the whole country seemed to be singing ‘Yerushalayim shel Zahav’ (Jerusalem of Gold), Amichai wrote the powerful opening line to his poem ‘Jerusalem, 1967’, “Jerusalem stone is the only stone that can feel pain”. Yet, despite Amichai and Darwish’s similarities channelled through a shared humanist outlook, we can understand why Darwish perhaps found Amichai’s poetry so challenging. A poet functioning as a mere propagandist for the Zionist cause would perhaps be easier to dismiss. A writer who recognises certain pains and describes the land and its peoples in such emotives tones despite coming ultimately from a juxtaposing narrative is thus infinitely more disturbing.
In Amichai’s poem, ‘My Parents Migration’, we find an interesting parallel, or perhaps a complimentary image to the themes of home we have previously looked at in the works of Raja Shehadeh and Mahmoud Darwish:
“And my parents’ migration has not yet calmed in me,
And from bitter peoples I learned better languages
For my silence among the house
Which are always
Like ships.”
In Sandy Tolan’s book, ‘The Lemon Tree’[11], we are presented with a fascinating account based on the lives of Dalia Eshkenazi Landau and Bashir Khairi. Set in the town of Ramle, now located in central Israel, the account focuses on the relations between a former resident of what was once a predominantly Palestinian Arab town and one of the town’s current Israeli Jewish residents.
“Dalia sat in a plain wooden chair on the back veranda of the only home she had ever known. She had no special plan for today. She could catch up on her summer reading for the university, where she studied English literature. Or she could peer contentedly into the depths of the jacaranda tree, as she had done countless times before.
Bashir stood at the metal gate, looking for the bell. How many times, he wondered, did his mother, Zakia, walk through this same gate? How many times did his father, Ahmad, pass by, coming home tired from work, rapping his knuckles on the front door in his special knock of arrival?
Bashir reached for the bell and pressed it.”
Tolan’s writing, like Shehadeh’s recollections of his first childhood encounter with his ancestral Jaffa, focuses on the period following the Six Day War in 1967 when all of a sudden many Palestinians who had been barred from returning following 1948 were able to visit their old properties. This sets the scene for the journey made by three Palestinian cousins from Ramallah to their old family home in Ramle. Making their way to the central bus station in West Jerusalem, crossing the Green Line into what had become for them an alien world, they feel a mixture of confused emotions towards the landscape and people they encounter. Firstly, their fear at being discovered during their journey is expressed in the way they place themselves separately on the bus taking them to Ramle. This also gives them the opportunity to better view the landscape as they descend the hills west of Jerusalem. Bashir thinks to himself unsure whether or not he wants the trip to go quickly or slowly. Passing Abu Ghosh, he feels mixed feelings towards a town that had collaborated with the Haganah and had largely been spared the fate that had befallen many other Palestinians. He then meditates on his ancestors of eight hundred years previous who had fought of the crusaders in this area. As the bus moves into Latrun, he recalls the panicked journey his family had made years before in 1948. Bashir then acknowledges the Israeli man sitting next to him, utterly fixed on his book, seemingly uncaring about the scenery outside. This Bashir puts down to the man’s familiarity with this landscape, and he can not help but feel envy towards this man’s inattention.
In the following chapters, Tolan sets about narrating the stories of the two main protagonists, Bashir and Dalia. As such, Bashir’s story begins with his father, Ahmad, laying the foundation stones for the family home on the edge of al-Ramla. This takes place in 1936, to the backdrop of the beginning of the Arab revolt in the British Mandate of Palestine. The Khairi family, many of whom make a living from tending to oranges, olives and Almonds in the communal ‘waaf’ (a piece of collectively owned land belonging to the extended family) is a fairly prominent family, tracing much of its lineage back a religious scholar by the name of Khair al-Din al-Ramlawi who came from Morocco in order to serve as a judge in the Ottoman Sanjak of Jerusalem. Not only was Bashir’s great uncle, Sheikh Mustafa Khairi a long serving mayor of the town, the clan owned al-Ramla’s only cinema. Following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Sheikh Mustafa subsequently played a role in mediating between the British and the native population. Bashir’s father, Ahmad, wanting greater independence from the family at large had designed the family home with a British Jew by the name of Benson Solli. Noted by Tolan to be one of the few Jews living in the town at the time. Further to this, Tolan paints a picture of the relative coexistence of the era in which the Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine) rubbed shoulders with Palestinian Arabs. As such she describes Kibbutznikim shopping at the town’s Wednesday market, bartering for products and bringing horses to be shod. As well as the “bearded, Arabic-speaking Jews riding by donkey to purchase bags of cement at the local factory.” Additionally, she describes the wealthy of al-Ramla venturing to Tel Aviv for tailors, drycleaners and portrait photographers. The house designed by Ahmad and Arabic-speaking ‘Mr. Solli’ was to have all the modern comforts of the time; large living and sleeping quarters separated by double wooden doors, an inside kitchen with a modern stove. “Instead of baking her Arabic bread in the taboun, the open-air, wood-fired oven found at most traditional homes, she now had the luxury of sending her dough to the communal ovens”. Al-Ramla itself, founded in 715 A.D. by the caliph Suleiman Ibn Abdel-Malek, had at one time even been the political capital of Palestine, outshining even Jerusalem. Yet, by the 1930s, with the influx of Jewish immigrants, rural peasant families were being displaced by land-sales. Sheikh Izzadin al-Qassam and his men in the north launched what would become known as the ‘Great Arab Rebellion’, while the British authorities would contend with illegal arms-smuggling conducted by underground Zionist militias. The tit-for-tat killings would only gather pace following the assassination of al-Qassam. All the while, the women of the Khairi family were embroidering dresses decorated with orange branches, a symbol of the citrus-cultivating region. In 1937, news of the partition plan, presented by the British Peel Commission sparked yet more violence, causing Bashir’s great uncle Sheikh Mustafa to flee for Cairo for a time out of fear of assassination. In a lull in the fighting in 1942, Bashir was born.
Tolan describes the way in which the family is alarmed at the influx of refugees from other parts of Palestine in al-Ramla, particularly following the fall of the city of Jaffa, earlier in 1948. With the Haganah closing in and news of the atrocities committed at Deir Yassin, the family begins to panic and flees with the retreating Arab Legion troops in the direction of Ramallah. Subsequently, Bashir does not see his father’s house again until roughly 19 years later, when Dalia takes the decision to welcome him into the house, ‘opening his father’s gate’ to him. Dalia’s family, the Eshkenazis, also have their story narrated. Dalia’s parents, Moshe and Solia had met in Sofia, Bulgaria, descendants of a prominent Sephardic Jewish community. After the war time government had collaborated with the Nazis and introduced anti-semitic laws removing Jews from much of public life, the family existed precariously, Moshe and other members of Dalia’s family being sent to work camps. Following the deportation of the Jewish populations of Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Greek Macedonia, the Jews of Bulgaria proper, with pressure from the church, communists, the king and ordinary citizens are saved from deportation to certain death in Poland. Following the war, the communist government, during the brief period in which Israel was given support by the Soviet Union, finally opens up the possibility of emigration to the fledgling Israeli state. The Eshkenazis, under pressure to escape the ruined post-war economy, take the opportunity, being forced to sign documents rescinding their citizenship of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria upon exiting the country. Upon arriving in Israel, the family spend time in the Ma’abrot (transit camps) searching for a permanent home, before they’re taken by bus to Ramla. When they arrived it was practically a ghost town. Encouraged to find a home in the town, the come across a suitable-looking home; “Clearly someone had lived there before. It was a stone house with an open layout and plenty of space. There was a carport the family might use someday, and in the yard in the back there was a Lemon tree.”
At first, Dalia is startled by the ring of the doorbell, and uneasy about letting three strange Arab men into the house while she is home alone. However, she suppresses any ill feelings and welcomes them inside, greeting them with the sentence “feel at home”. Something that provokes odd feelings in Bashir while he is deep in contemplation; “Bashir could see the white Jerusalem stone his father had laid with his own hands thirty-one years earlier. If he were standing a bit close, Bashir could run his fingertips along its cratered surface, its miniature hills and valleys like the landscape of Palestine itself.” Dalia is full of questions, and quickly becomes sensitised towards things like how Bashir might feel about the poster of the Israeli soldier standing triumphantly over her bed in what she then learns was once Bashir’s own room. She later marks the moment of their first encounter as ‘the beginning of her quest toward understanding’. Bashir finally comes face-to-face with the lemon tree his father planted, while his cousin Yasser remarks, “I don’t think they changed anything in the house.” Indeed, little has changed, save for perhaps a few things, such as the Jacaranda tree, a species native to South America that Dalia’s father had planted, the shade of which she had been enjoying until the arrival of the Khairi cousins. Dalia does not understand the importance of the visit to its fullest extent perhaps until, when visiting Bashir in Ramallah some months later out of sheer curiosity, she notices a lemon from the tree that they had picked during their visit sitting on a cabinet in the family’s home. Explaining to a perplexed Dalia, Bashir remarks, “to us this lemon is more than fruit, Dalia. It is land and history. It is the window that we open to look at our history”. He then proceeds to relate to Dalia the story of how, soon after the first encounter, he had come across his father, Ahmad, sobbing while holding the lemon in the middle of the night.
Countering Nussbaum’s work, and attacking the wider ‘Law and Literature’ movement more broadly, Posner (2009)[12] posits that exposure to literature does not in fact make for a better citizen. In stating this he puts to the use the words Oscar Wilde; “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” He further notes the words of Helen Vendler; “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realises the complex psychological motives of a work of art.” Indeed, stories and narratives can be manipulated to convince the reader of all kinds of misplaced causes. As such, literature has played a role throughout history as a tool of hate and oppression. One only need to open such anti-semitic canards as ‘Mein Kampf’ or ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ to find this to be true. Without being grounded in the context in which such books were written, a reader can easily be convinced that European civilisation is truly under threat from a shadowy Judaic cabal that not only controls most aspects of public life, but also creates its own false flag oppositions. Whatsmore, even where stories and poems may present compelling accounts grounded firmly in a sense of justice, the ideological stubbornness of the reader can be simply too set-in-stone to shift. As such, one will find on the website of the right-wing ‘pro-Israel’ campaign group ‘Stand With Us’ [13] essays dedicated to attacking Tolan’s work in ‘The Lemon Tree’. In a similar vein, one will find Israeli ministers expressing disgust toward attempts to teach the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to Israeli high-school students, not to mention attempts to ban his work from said curricula. Yet, the seeming power these acts confer to the literary works in question therefore may lead us to conclude that perhaps the reality is not so black-and-white. Whereas one of the authors that Posner gives as example, Orwell, was correct to be wary of the use of literature as some kind of edification, we can concede to Nussbaum the point that his work can indeed inform the reader. For example, in his book ‘Homage to Catalonia’, we are given a very rare insight into the workings of revolutionary forces in Republican Spain preparing to face General Franco’s fascists. From these recollections, it could be argued that one is able to get closer to the motives and reality of such volunteers who went to fight in Spain, of which Orwell was one, albeit the human limitations of recording such events. Perhaps, such pieces of work only gain in value the further in time we find ourselves from the event recorded. This is particularly pertinent in the case of Israel-Palestine as we draw ever nearer to living in a world in which most of those of fighting-age in 1948 have since passed on.
It goes without saying that what lies at the core of the debate surrounding law and literature is fundamentally a question of human nature and more specifically the ability of the individual to be impacted meaningfully by the narrative of the ‘other’, whoever that other may be. Indeed, this is an imperfect art, something we can see clearly from the aforementioned literary works. In ‘The Lemon Tree’, the relationship between Bashir and Dalia ultimately strains under the weight of the former’s participation in the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the ultimately clash over ideological vision. While Bashir tows the party line of a single, secular democratic state in all of mandate Palestine, including of course full implementation of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees, Dalia supports a two-state solution and a less defined, more symbolic solution regarding said refugees. Similarly, in ‘Where the Line is Drawn’, Raja Shehadeh speaks of how his relationship with his leftist, Jewish-American friend Henry is tested to the limits as the latter finds religion and makes ‘aliyah’, claiming Israeli citizenship. Yet, just as Henry and Raja make amends and rekindle their friendship, the interaction between Dalia and Bashir leads to the conclusion of Dalia turning her, and Bashir’s former home in Ramla into a binational education centre for Arab and Jewish children, known today as the ‘Open House’. What this seems to reflect is the ability of humans to rationalise the direct, present and living right in front of them and within their own lives, often despite sometimes contradicting opinions regarding wider situations. As such, upon visiting the depopulated Palestinian-Christian village of Iqrit last July, reduced now to a single church near Israel’s border with Lebanon, I was surprised to come across two right-wing Likud-voting Israeli Jews from a nearby Moshav. After arguing with one of the residents of Iqrit who stays to maintain the town’s church and show around visitors about politics I pressed them about what they think about the right of return for the residents of Iqrit. Without hesitating they both agreed that it would be a good idea. In a similar vein, Menachem Klein[14] notes the story of a certain Reuven Mas, who in the immediate pre-state era was the Jewish Mukhtar (Arabic for ‘community elder’) in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talbiyyeh, which then was a mostly Palestinian Christian neighbourhood. As Klein notes, “at the height of the War of Independence, Reuven Mas (…) tried to protect the rights of his Arab neighbours who had fled. He issued special neighbourhood-residence certificates to the Jews who started to move into the empty houses. The newcomers pledged to Mas that they would store the belongings of the departed homeowners in one room, which they would seal with wax. They also promised to evacuate the house within one month its lawful owner so requested.” As he further notes, he undertook this task only three months after his own son, an officer in the Palmach had died in fighting at Kfar Etzion. Such stories, anecdotal as they are, coupled with the universe of literature and poetry written on the subject, undoubtedly show us a perhaps more humane route to be taken by those working towards a legal solution on the questions posed by the legacy of 1948.
[1] Kubursi in Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai (2013), Compensation to Palestinian Refugees and the Search for Palestinian-Israeli Peace
[2] Palestine-Progress Raport of the United Nations Mediator
[3] Orit Gal in in Rex Brynen and Roula El-Rifai (2013), Compensation to Palestinian Refugees and the Search for Palestinian-Israeli Peace
[4] Martha Nussbaum (1997) Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life
[5] Conway, H., & Stannard, J. (2016). Property and Emotions. Emotion Review, 8(1), 38–4
[6] Raja Shehadeh (2017) Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine
[7] Mahmoud Darwish (2011), In the Presence of Absence
[8] http://www.naseeb.com/villages/journals/1-palestinian-poetry-oh-my-father-i-am-yusuf-68387
[9][9] Balraj Dhillon (2010), Subaltern Voices and Perspectives: The Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish
[10] Yehuda Amichai and Robert Alter (2015) The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
[11] Sandy Tolan (2008) The Lemon Tree
[12] Posner (2009) Law and Literature
