The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
Sandy Tolan
The true story of a house in Ramla, the Palestinian family expelled from it, the Jewish family who moved in — and the friendship that grew around the lemon tree in its yard.
In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a young Palestinian whose family had been expelled from the town of al-Ramla in 1948, traveled back to see his childhood home. Dalia Eshkenazi, a young Israeli whose family had fled Bulgaria after the Holocaust and been settled in that same house, opened the door and invited him in. Out of that meeting grew a friendship — difficult, tested, enduring — between two people whose claims to one stone house could not be reconciled.
Sandy Tolan, an NPR journalist who first told their story in a 1998 radio documentary, uses the house and the lemon tree Bashir’s father planted in its yard as the still point around which the entire history of the conflict turns, from 1936 to the second intifada. It is one of the most humane and widely taught narrative accounts of 1948 and its aftermath.
About the author
Sandy Tolan is an American journalist, author, and professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. A longtime producer of radio documentaries, he is also the author of Children of the Stone.
Details
- Published by Bloomsbury, 2006
- Grew out of Tolan’s 1998 NPR documentary of the same name
Connected in the archive
19 connected records19 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
named in this record — 1 record
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- Ramleالرملة
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a young Palestinian whose family had been expelled from the town of al-Ramla in 1948, traveled back to see his childhood home.
on a related subject — 18 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- +972 Magazine
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "journalism".
- A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- Acreعكا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- Bisan Owda
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "journalism".
- Gate of the Sun
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- and 12 more
Cite this page
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- Chicago
“The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/library/the-lemon-tree/.- MLA
“The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/library/the-lemon-tree/. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-the-lemon-tree, title = {The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/library/the-lemon-tree/}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }