The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan Read Free Book Online

Jewish refugees, the British government released its White Paper, accepting many of the demands of the Arab Rebellion. The British agreed to strictly limit Jewish immigration and to tighten restrictions on land sales in Palestine. Most important, the White Paper called for a single independent state. Many Arabs in Palestine saw in the White Paper a practical solution to their problem. But Hajj Amin al-Husseini, speaking for the Arab Higher Committee, rejected the White Paper. His word carried the day in Arab Palestine, even though it was made from exile: the ex-mufti had fled Palestine nearly two years earlier, wanted by the British at the height of the Arab rebellion. The ex-mufti's decision was unpopular with many Palestinian Arabs, who believed they had missed an opportunity.
    The new British policy marked a sharp change from the Peel Commission plan of only two years earlier. The Wliite Paper was a major concession to the Arabs. For the Jews of Palestine, it was an abandonment of British support for a Jewish national homeland promised in the Balfour Declaration, at a time when the situation for Jews in Europe was growing more perilous. Within weeks, Jewish paramilitary squads were attacking British forces, planting explosives in Jerusalem's central post office, and carrying out attacks on civilians in Arab souks. The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine. "Satan himself could not have created a more distressing and horrible nightmare," David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary.
    By the turn of 1940, the British authorities had finally defeated the Arab Rebellion through what they called "severe countermeasures": tens of thousands jailed, thousands killed, hundreds executed, countless houses demolished, and key leaders, including the mufti, in exile. In the cities, Arab men had taken off their keffiyehs and replaced them once again with the fez. The Palestinian national movement was deeply divided and utterly unprepared for any future conflict.
    Two years later, on February 16, 1942, newspaper headlines announced British defeats in Burma and Singapore at the hands of the Japanese. In the sands of Libya and Egypt, British forces had retreated three hundred miles in the face of a fresh assault from Nazi brigadier general Erwin Rommel. Stories of Nazi atrocities had begun to trickle out of Poland and Germany; Jews in Palestine were terrified that Rommel, should he reach his prize of the Suez Canal, would keep marching east toward Tel Aviv.
    Compared with a few years earlier, the Holy Land was quiet. The British high commissioner's monthly telegram to the secretary of state for the colonies reported "no genuine political developments" among the Jews and "on the surface no political activity on the Arab side." The commissioner expressed concern over possible Arab recruiting efforts for a postwar conflict. He mused over the exile of Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The now ex-mufti had resumed his nationalist struggle against the British and the Zionists by taking up with the archenemy of the British Empire: Nazi Germany. The ex-mufti was now in Berlin.
    In his February report on the state of Palestine, the high commissioner worried about a Jewish "pseudo-political terrorist gang known as the Stern group," which had begun carrying out assassinations. But mostly the commissioner advised London, "Public interest, both Arab and Jewish, has tended once again to concentrate more on the cost of living and the supply situation": food rationing, the price of yarn, the supply of shoes, and the number of meatless days per week.
    In al-Ramla, Mayor Khairi was once again attending to his municipal duties, confronting black marketeers illegally hoarding foods to get around wartime rationing, and dealing with a failed well and subsequent shortage of water in the town. "The enemies of the Mayor," wrote the district commissioner, "are profiting by the shortage of water as well as of food to conduct a campaign against