Sandy Tolan is a journalist, educator, and author. Since beginning his career in the 1980s, he has published pieces in such prestigious outlets as Salon, The New York Times Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 1989, he cofounded Homelands Productions, which is an independent journalism outlet that produces documentaries and radio features as well as print-based media. In 2008, Tolan began teaching at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Tolan describes his work as centering on “the intersection of land conflicts, racial and ethnic identity, natural resources, and the global economy” (“About.” Sandy Tolan). With its interest in how Palestinians and Israelis understand their historical and cultural relationship to the territory in dispute, The Lemon Tree falls squarely under this umbrella. In 2015, Tolan published another book centering on the Israel-Palestine conflict called Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land.

Bashir Khairi is a Palestinian man and one of the two figures whose stories The Lemon Tree centers. He was born in 1942 to Ahmad and Zakia Khairi, who at the time lived in al-Ramla in Palestine. His family lived in Palestine for centuries.