Book #55: The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan

If there's anything that is a grown-up topic of discussion, it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And since I still do not consider myself a real true grown-up, I've never known anything about it (sad as that is to admit). There's always stuff happening with it, but I've never had the chance to be introduced to the conflict from the beginning and therefore always been overwhelmed to try and learn anything about it. But this book was an AWESOME introduction to the entire situation. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to find out what's going on over in that part of the world.

Tolan tells the story of the conflict through the narrative of two people, two families: an Arab family from al-Ramla, and a Jewish family who moved into their home after the Arabs had been expelled from that part of Palestine. He uses these two people as the example of what happened to hundreds and thousands of people on both sides of the conflict: the Arabs kicked out of their homes, the Jews brought in in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Arabs longing for the right to return from exile, the Jews terrified of the Arabs' increasing desperation. You can't read this story without feeling terribly sorry for both sides of the conflict, and without feeling angry at the overriding "powers that be" that made the decisions that affected both groups of people so seriously. For someone like me, on the outside of the conflict, it's easy to see the truth to both sides of the conflict and the rights that both groups have. There is no easy solution--the only obvious fix is to go back to the past, before all of these problems started (which would really be thousands of years), and obviously that's no solution at all.

I really liked how Tolan seemed (to my inexperienced view) to be really impartial to the conflict and to be trying to represent both parties fairly and equally. I think that's part of the problem with the conflict--it's nearly impossible to hear from both sides.