A Shadow

In a region racked by violence and animosity, a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman have dared to fall in love. But their life together has had to wait as Israeli laws keep them apart. Osama Zatar, an Arab, and Jasmin Avissar, a Jew, met and fell in love at the animal shelter near Jerusalem where they both worked. But after the two 25-year-olds married in 2004, they found themselves entangled in a web of laws that prevent them from living together as husband and wife. Israelis are legally forbidden to enter Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank known as "Areas A", for security reasons. Conversely, the Nationality and Entry into Israel law, introduced in 2003, forbids residency or citizenship to any Palestinian from the occupied territories married to an Israeli. So Avissar could not live in her husband's home in Ramallah and he did not have a permit to visit her in Jerusalem...

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What makes South Africa's apartheid era different to segregation and racial hatred that have occurred in other countries is the systematic way in which the National Party, which came into power in 1948, formalised it through the law. The main laws are described below.

Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Act No 55 of 1949
Prohibited marriages between white people and people of other races. Between 1946 and the enactment of this law, only 75 mixed marriages had been recorded, compared with some 28,000 white marriages.

I lived in the shadow of that law. I knew people who were forced to leave South Africa for committing the crime of loving each other. It doesn't matter how it comes about, when you legislate to separate it is only because the legislators are afraid that any mixing of people, any exchange that doesn't involve shooting or explosives or beatings and supplication, increases the risk of seeing the enemy as a human being. It's because of things like this, things that I've seen and lived as a child that I will never support or temper my criticism of Israel and any other country that legislates racism. Things like this belong in a dark, forgotten age, not the 21st century.