The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East Read Online Free Page B

however, and he conferred with Sheikh Mustafa. They agreed that from the young man's inheritance, his own share of the Khairi wacff income, and the income from his al-Ramla furniture workshop, his family's home would rise. It was time. Zakia, now twenty-six, was pregnant with her fourth child, which Ahmad hoped would finally be a boy.
    The young couple had envisioned a house with an open design. Ahmad had gone over the master plan with a British friend and builder, Benson Solli, one of only a few Jews who lived in al-Ramla. For the Khairis, as for many Arabs, Jews like Mr. Solli, as Ahmad's children remembered him, were simply part of the landscape of Palestine. Jews from the kibbutzim bartered for wheat, barley, and melons at al-Ramla's Wednesday market. Arab laborers worked in nearby Jewish fields, pushing hand plows made in the kibbutzim, and Jewish farmers brought their horses into al-Ramla to be shod. Arabs would recall Jewish engineers and conductors working for the Palestine railroad that passed through town; some remembered bearded, Arabic-speaking Jews riding by donkey to purchase bags of cement at the local factory. For the most part the two communities lived and worked in separate worlds, but their degree of interaction was undeniable. The well-to-do of al-Ramla traveled to Tel Aviv to have suits cut by Jewish tailors, fezzes cleaned by Jewish drycleaners, or portraits taken by Jewish photographers. Khairi women recalled traveling to Tel Aviv to have their dresses made by a Jewish seamstress. One of the Khairi family physicians, Dr. Litvak, was Jewish; and at the Schmidt Girls College in Jerusalem, where Ahmad and Zakia's daughters studied, many of the girls' classmates were Jews. "They all spoke Arabic and were Palestinians like us," one Khairi daughter would remember decades later. "They were there—like us, part of Palestine." Mr. Solli, an architect and builder, was a quiet man, unassuming, with daughters named Rosalie and Eively. He spoke Arabic and, according to later generations of Khairis, coexisted comfortably among the town's Muslim and Christian Arabs.
    Ahmad and Mr. Solli designed large living and sleeping quarters separated by double wooden doors in the center. Workers walled off a small bedroom in a corner. They laid tile, hung wire for electric lights, and ran pipe for indoor plumbing. Zakia would have 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 in al-Ramla, to be brought back as warm bread ready for the table.
    These were new luxuries for the town founded twelve centuries earlier, in 715 A.D., by the Muslim caliph Suleiman Ibn Abdel-Malek. Suleiman, it was said, did not name the place for its raml, or sand, but rather for a woman named Ramla who had been generous to him as he had traveled through the area. Suleiman made al-Ramla the political capital of Palestine, and for a time it became more important than Jerusalem. The town lay halfway between Damascus and Cairo, and soon it was a stopover for camel caravans hauling leather, swords, buckets, walnuts, barley, and cloth. Suleiman's workers built the White Mosque, considered one of the most beautiful in the Arab world. They built a six-mile-long aqueduct to carry fresh water to the town's residents and to irrigate its fields. The gently sloping lands surrounding al-Ramla would be considered among the most fertile in Palestine. By the tenth century, a Muslim traveler would write of al-Ramla:
    It is a fine city, and well built. Its water is good and plentiful; its fruits are abundant. It combines manifold advantages, situated as it is in the midst of beautiful villages and lordly towns, near to holy places and pleasant hamlets. Commerce here is prosperous, and means of livelihood easy . . . Its bread is of the best and the whitest; its lands are well favoured above all others,