What happens when you find love where you’re not supposed to? And how do you keep it alive in one of the most repressive territories in the world? In this fascinating and eye-opening ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ interview, Mehdi speaks to Israeli human rights lawyer and executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Sari Bashi, who co-authored a memoir that tries to answer what seem like impossible questions about love under occupation.
‘Upside Down Love’ is a joint memoir from Bashi and her Palestinian husband, Osama Fahed. The Israeli human rights lawyer and the Palestinian academic detail what their life has looked like over the past decade, living in the occupied West Bank, under an apartheid system, where one of them has rights that the other does not.
“As an Israeli Jew, falling in love with a Palestinian man, it was overwhelming. And I wanted to write down what I saw,” Bashi tells Mehdi. She details during their conversation how her young daughter understood the nature of “apartheid” in the occupied West Bank simply by watching her parents. “It took 120 pages for Human Rights Watch to describe something that our daughter, as a five-year-old, thought immediately… Jews can and Palestinians can’t.”
During the course of this rare discussion, Bashi describes the hurdles she and Fahed have to go through to make their relationship work, telling Mehdi, “most of the time, we can’t drive together, because he [Fahed] can’t go through the checkpoints that I can go through.”
Mehdi asks Bashi about several aspects of her relationship in the occupied territories, including:
The book’s reception among both their Palestinian and Israeli circles.
Life as a non-settler Israeli in the occupied West Bank.
The possibility of coexistence after Israel’s brutal genocide in Gaza.
Why most of her fellow Israelis don’t see Palestinians the way she does.
The involvement of one of Israel’s most famous former prime ministers in the Epstein scandal.
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Click here to buy a copy of Bashi and Fahed’s book, ‘Upside Down Love.’ Share your review of the book in the comments below!
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