Authentic voices from the scene of the turbulent conflict between Israel and Palestine which exposes its deep existential difficulties
Maqluba is a love story, told in two voices, between Osama, a Palestinian professor who is trapped in the West Bank city of Ramallah and Sari, an Israeli-American lawyer and ultra-marathon runner, who represents him before the Israeli authorities, as he seeks to travel between Ramallah and the outside world.
Osama was born in Gaza and moved to the city of Ramallah 25 years ago. He is trapped in Ramallah, because the Israeli authorities deny his right to live in Ramallah and therefore will not allow him to return home, should he leave the city. He longs to travel to conferences and to visit his mother, the sea, and the remnants of his childhood in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip.
Sari is an American-born human rights lawyer whose passion for freedom of movement leads her to cross the scarred and beautiful landscape of the West Bank (the Palestinian teritory) and to take on the Israeli military authorities in court battles on behalf of Osama and others subject to travel restrictions.
The book reflects their attempt to find their place in Israeli society and Palestinian society and to find their way back to each other. Through Osama, Sari begins to learn Arabic, the mother tongue that her father cast aside after fleeing Iraq as a child. Through Sari, Osama gets a different view of the Israel he once knew, as a laborer on Israeli construction sites and a prisoner in Israeli military jails. The characters’ attempt to maintain their relationship in nearly impossible circumstances exposes readers to the intimacy, alienation and domination that the half-century long military occupation of Palestine has created between Palestinians and Israelis.
2021 | 317 pp. | English translation available | Rights Sold: Italian, Dutch, Hebrew

“Maqluba” means “upside down” in Arabic, after the traditional Palestinian chicken-and-rice dish whose pot, once the cooking is completed, is turned upside down onto a serving platter. The characters discover that important aspects of their own and each other’s societies are upside-down and leave no space for them to love each other. They decide to create a non-space space in which their relationship can exist.

Sari Bashi is a lawyer, consultant, writer and researcher, with expertise in international humanitarian law and human rights law, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinian economy and human rights movements around the world. She lectures in Israel and abroad, writes opinion articles, frequently interviewed in the international and national media and writes a blog in Hebrew and English under a pen name in Haaretz daily newspaper, with an average of about 20,000 people reading each bi-weekly post. Sari is a long-distance runner and holds the Israeli record for women of 216 km ultra-marathon in 2012.