(RNS) — Sari Bashi was working at a Tel Aviv nonprofit providing legal assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip when she fell in love with one of her clients.
The man she calls “Osama” in her memoir, “Upside-Down Love,” was born in Gaza but had been living in Ramallah, in the West Bank, unable to leave for fear he would be arrested and taken by force back to Gaza. In 2006, he was accepted to a doctoral program in London and sought legal help to allow him to leave Ramallah and return there — not to Gaza — when he completed his studies.
Bashi, who is Jewish, grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Yale Law School with a passion for human rights. She co-founded a law clinic to help Palestinians work through Israel’s draconian regulations that control the movement of Palestinians who live there.
Bashi secured Osama’s passage to London and back. Years later, after he completed his Ph.D. and returned to Ramallah, Osama and Bashi began a tenuous, on-and-off-again relationship. It was in every way a forbidden love between an American-born Jewish Israeli and a Gazan-born Palestinian Muslim.
The memoir about their relationship alternates between chapters conveying her perspective and his. (For security reasons, she does not reveal his name.) First published in Hebrew in 2021, it has been translated into English, and that version was released earlier this year.
Unlike Romeo and Juliet, theirs has a happy ending. The couple now lives in a Palestinian community in the West Bank with their two children. Bashi works as executive director of the human rights organization Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. Her husband teaches at a Palestinian university.
RNS caught up with Bashi on Zoom this week to talk about her book and how she navigates her extraordinary marriage. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
First off, how are you doing with the rocket barrages from Iran and Lebanon?
Our apartment happens to be built into the slope of the hill, so it’s partially underground. It gives a little more protection. But the kids are home. There’s no online learning.
How did your memoir come about?
When he and I met, it was overwhelming. It felt so strong, but also so impossible. And we couldn’t really tell anybody. And so, independently, we both started to write a little bit. The book incorporates some of that correspondence.
I wrote the book using the construct of alternating chapters to try to tell the story from both sides. I also hoped that the alternating chapters would be a bit of a bridge for Israeli readers to be able to access because they could start with something familiar and maybe safer, and then move to something less familiar and less safe.
Were your views on Israel already formed by the time you moved there?
Not at all. I grew up in a Jewish community in the United States. I went to a religious day school as a child. Our home wasn’t political, but Zionist. And so when I was a kid, I learned in school and at home about the persecution of the Jewish people. I learned that the Portuguese persecuted Jews during the Inquisition, and the Nazis persecuted Jews during the Holocaust, and Arabs are persecuting Jews in Israel. I didn’t really question it because I wasn’t a political person. But when I came to Jerusalem as a young woman, I saw that the situation was not what I had been told. Jews were not a persecuted minority. They were controlling a system of government that’s oppressing others. For me, that began a journey into a human rights career and a very long evolution of my worldviews. When I fell in love with Osama, those worldviews continued to evolve and deepen.
Sari Bashi. (Photo by Samar Hazboun)
The book describes the incredibly difficult attempts at freedom of movement that Osama endures, and the byzantine set of checkpoints and gated communities across the West Bank. Has that gotten worse over time?
During the time period of the book, which is about 2010 to 2014, there were significant travel restrictions between Gaza and the West Bank, within the West Bank. But the situation has gotten much, much worse — to the point where every Palestinian city or town is surrounded by iron gates and they’re usually closed, blocking entrances to a main road. So to get to a main road for intercity travel, you might need to travel 30 miles north out of your way and then double back 30 miles south just to get to the road that you wanted to get to in the first place, which are concentrated into choke points. So even if a road is open, it could take a very, very long time to travel. The other factor limiting travel has been increasing settler violence. The settlers have encroached on Palestinian villages in ways that have deterred me from venturing too close to a settlement for fear of violence.
How is your husband’s family doing in Gaza?
One of the things that’s very painful is that we are isolated from family. His family lives 50 miles away, but we can’t see them. His mother is the only one who was able to leave Gaza for Egypt in March 2024. She’s trying to get back but the Rafah (crossing) is barely open. My brothers-in-law were lucky; their home was damaged but not destroyed, and they were able to move back, and they’re trying to fix it to make it a little more habitable. But it’s hard. In the last few days, the Israeli government, again, closed the crossings, blocking food supplies. For the young people in Gaza, it’s really hard for them to see a horizon.
Explain why a relationship between an Israeli and a Palestinian living in the occupied territories is so difficult.
Palestinians, for the most part, are not allowed into Israel, and Israelis are not allowed into Palestinian cities. So he couldn’t come to me in Tel Aviv, and it was illegal for me to come to him in Ramallah. Then there are the societal taboos. In Israeli society, Palestinians are the enemy, and in Palestinian society, Israelis are the enemy. Just as we were feeling a spark of attraction and passion and trying to get to know each other in that very fragile state, we were constantly being pulled apart. He had to get used to hearing Hebrew, a language that he associated with soldiers who tortured him in detention, in the mouth of the woman he loved.
We both had to deal with an overwhelming power imbalance, where I could come see him and he could never come see me. I was free and he was not, and it broke us up repeatedly. There’s a funny part of the book where he broke up with me and wanted me back, and I didn’t want to talk to him. He couldn’t come to Tel Aviv so he compiled a fake medical permit to enter Israel on medical grounds to come see me and say he’s sorry. So it was sweet, and I think romantic, but it says something about the overwhelming power dynamics. And you know, when you’re just getting to know somebody, it’s easy for that to tear you apart. And it was only after our relationship got stronger and our love got more resilient that we could respond to those pressures as a couple against the world, as opposed to it tearing us apart.
In one chapter you describe a Shabbat dinner in Tel Aviv where your relative keeps saying racist things about Arabs. As you point out in the book, your relative is herself an Arab Jew. Explain that.
Seeing my family through Osama’s eyes helped me see the Arabness that was hiding in plain sight. My family are Iraqi Jews, but the authorities here construct identities in ways that divide people. And so, when Arab Jews came to Israel, mostly in the ’50s, like my father, they were told that they are not Arab, that being Arab is bad, that Arabic is the language of the enemy. They were rebranded as Eastern or Sephardic, and those terms have validity for different reasons, but they were also ways of denying and negating the Arabness of Arab Jews in order to create two categories, Jews and Palestinians — one being superior. I also saw the wonderful similarities between Arabic and Hebrew, between Judaism and Islam.
Neither of you are very religious. How do you navigate the religious holidays?
The Muslim traditions are kind of baked into living in the West Bank. It’s Ramadan now. School starts later and ends earlier. People are rushing for an iftar meal at around 5:30. But I also bring in Jewish tradition. Last night was a good example. I made hamantaschen, which is traditional for the Jewish holiday of Purim. And then we had friends over for an iftar meal where we had an Iraqi Jewish dish of chicken and rice called t’bit. In our house, it blends nicely. It’s natural. This land knew how to contain many different cultures and languages and religions, and so, we’re practicing.
Why do you stay? You could probably have an easier life elsewhere.
Over the last couple of years, we have had a backpack with passports and documents in case we need to run. And I think that the decision about whether to stay or go is really in some ways more Osama’s than mine because I have privilege that I can take with me, including in the West Bank. It’s harder for him. He’s living under occupation in a way that I’m not, even though we live in the same house. If it becomes too hard for him or for the kids, then I think we would try to leave. But for me personally, I want to fight. There are terrible injustices taking place here, and I want to fight for a better future here. This land is so beautiful, and the pluralism and tolerance that it’s had historically is worth fighting for.
I think we’re both just looking at our kids and asking, “Are they OK?” By marrying a Palestinian Muslim I found a creative way to protect my kids from going to the army. So my kids will never be drafted. But my Arabic is still not great. It’s been harder to go into Israel because of the travel restrictions. I’ll think twice and three times before taking my kids to a family dinner or to the sea. But I’ve also gained a lot. And you know, finding somebody that you love and want to talk to and can agree on how to spend money with is actually really hard. So if you find that kind of love, you’re lucky, and it’s worth making some sacrifices.
