(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 ch …