In 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramle, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir Al-Khairi, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited them in.

This act of faith in the face of many years of animosity is the starting point for a true story of a remarkable relationship between two families, one Arab, one Jewish, amid the fraught modern history of the regio. In his childhood home, in the lemon tree his father planted in the backyard, Bashir sees dispossession and occupation; Dalia, who arrived as an infant in 1948 with her family from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust. As both are swept up in the fates of their people, and Bashir is jailed for his alleged part in a supermarket bombing, the friends do not speak for years. They finally reconcile and convert the house in Ramle into a day-care centre for Arab children of Israel, and a center for dialogue between Arabs and Jews. Now the dialogue they started seems more threatened than ever; the lemon tree died in 1998, and Bashir was jailed again, without charge.

The Lemon Tree grew out of a forty-three minute radio documentary that Sandy Tolan produced for Fresh Air. With this book, he pursues the story into the homes andhistories of the two families at its center, and up to the present day. Their stories form a personal microcosm of the last seventy years of Israeli-Palestinian history. In a region that seems ever more divided, The Lemon Tree is a reminder of all that is at stake, and of all that is still possible.

“The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East is the story of two people trying to get beyond denial, and closer to a truth they can both live with. By its end, Bashir Khairi and Dalia Eshkenazi are still arguing, talking — and mostly disagreeing. But their naturesintellectual, questing, passionate and committedmay represent the best hope of resolving one of the most intractable disputes in human history…It is very tempting to write off the Israeli-Palestinian standoff as insoluble. But one lesson of The Lemon Tree is the relatively short span of its history. The conflict between the two peoples is little more than a century old.”Seattle Times

 “No novel could be more compelling...This book… will haunt you long after you put it down. And it will certainly be one of the best works of nonfiction that you will read this year.”Christian Science Monitor

“A graceful, compassionate and unmuddied presentation of Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lives of an Arab and a Jew, strangers who forge a connection and a reconciliation while never veering from their passionate desires for a homeland.”Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Quite simply the most important book I've read for ages...a handbook to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a narrative that captures its essence through tracing the connected lives of two extraordinary individuals. Literally the single work Id recommend to anyone seeking to understand why the conflict remains unresolved, and why it continues to dominate the region.”Time

 “Beautifully told…a very poignant but impressively unsentimental story…It reads like a work of fiction.”Nation

“Sandy Tolan has found a remarkable story, and has told it in all its beauty and sadness.”Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and King Leopolds Ghost

 “Truly remarkable.”Tom Segev, author of One Palestine, Complete and 1949:  The First Israelis