Even by the most extreme “Romeo and Juliet” standards, Sari Bashi’s romance and marriage to her partner, Osama, has overcome impossible odds.

When the two met in 2006, she related on the Haaretz Podcast, “It was very confusing for both of us, both because of the overwhelming social taboos, and the fact that it was also literally illegal for us to meet up together.”

The two met after he had been “trapped” for six years in the city of Ramallah, where he was pursuing a career in academia. Registered as a resident of Gaza, where he was born, travelling elsewhere in the West Bank – or abroad – meant that the authorities would send him back to Gaza. Bashi had recently founded the human rights organization Gisha, and was assisting him gain permission from the Israeli authorities to study for his doctorate abroad.

Bashi’s new book “Upside-Down Love” – written diary-style from both Bashi’s and Osama’s perspective – chronicles the story of the logistics of their courtship, like a date in which they took a hike in a West Bank countryside and “as we encountered more and more settlers with guns, it became apparent that I had an identity and a language that was common with the people who terrified him.”

But despite the ongoing identity and security challenges, their love persevered. Bashi, who is also the newly appointed executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, talks about their life as a family in the West Bank – and the evolving complicated identities of their two Palestinian Jewish children, as she watches them “engage more in a process of trying to assert who they are. I think it'll change probably a million times before they become adults.”

Browse the Umm Forat column (2019-2022) in Haaretz

Israeli Human Rights Groups Tell UN That Israel Increased Use of Torture During Gaza War

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