THEY have been called the Romeo and Juliet of the Middle East. But Pyramus and Thisbe is the better parallel for this divided couple.

Like the doomed Babylonian lovers of Ovid’s tale, Osama Zatar and Jasmin Avissar are separated by a wall — in this case, the vast concrete slab that Israel has built between their home towns.

Ms Avissar, an Israeli Jew, and Mr Zatar, a Palestinian Muslim, met while working together at an animal shelter near the border between Jerusalem and Ramallah, the West Bank capital now sealed off by a 5m (18ft) concrete wall, watchtowers and razor wire.

She is a ballet dancer and he a sculptor. But although they married two years ago, he cannot travel to Israel to be with his wife. After a Supreme Court ruling upheld a ban on Palestinians remaining in the Jewish State with their Israeli spouses Ms Avissar, 25, is forbidden to bring her husband to Israel to live together as a couple.

“We pray to God that it will work out but I have given up hoping. I am leaving it to fate,” Mr Zatar said.

The court’s ruling, criticised as racist by human rights groups and Israeli Arab MPs, upheld an amendment to a citizenship law introduced in 2002 at the height of the intifada. Enacted in an attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen entering the country, it allowed only Palestinian women over 25 and men over 35 to apply to join their spouses. Mr Zatar is 26.

Sabin Hadad, an Israeli Interior Ministry spokeswoman, said: “In this case, Osama is under 35, so there’s nothing we can do. When there’s a law, we must obey it.”

Although the couple’s families support their rare cross-community marriage and she can travel into Ramallah on a temporary permit, their future is uncertain because her pass expires in a month.

“We’re in a Kafka-esque situation. All we want is the right to live together as a married couple,” said Ms Avissar, who crosses an Israeli checkpoint almost daily to work as a waitress in a Jerusalem café, before returning to Ramallah in the evening. “After the Supreme Court’s decision a lot of couples will have to move out of Israel altogether, or live apart. I am luckier than other couples because I have a job in Jerusalem, when many in Ramallah do not have work.”

Michael Sfard, their lawyer, has appealed to the Supreme Court seeking permission for them to be together, either in Jerusalem or Ramallah. Arguing that under the United Nations declaration on human rights they “have the basic right to live a family life and free choice of spouse” his petition even cites Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, saying of Mr Zatar: “Being held a foe, he may not have access to breathe such vows as lovers use to swear; And she as much in love, her means much less to meet her new-beloved anywhere.”

Israeli law and the construction of its controversial 800km (500-mile) barrier reflects the Jewish State’s concern that Palestinians will soon outnumber Jews between the Mediterranean sea and Jordan river.

Israeli statistics indicate that of the Jewish State’s 7,026,000 citizens 5.33 million are Jewish and 1.39 million — 20 per cent — Arab Palestinians. A further 3.5 million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, cites demographic trends as a driving force behind his plan to abandon outlying Jewish settlements in the Palestinian-majority West Bank.

Although they had an Islamic ceremony as well as a civil wedding in Cyprus, Mr Zatar remains worried about his wife in the West Bank amid growing hardship and fears of civil war between Hamas and Fatah gunmen. “We haven’t received any threats from any factions but I am concerned for her safety because, in all the chaos here, you never know — someone might do anything for $100,” he said.

Ms Avissar’s father, Menachem, 63, said: “We love them both and we try to support them in all ways. I feel betrayed by my country. It is cancelling a basic right of a citizen to build a home and to create a family.”

Pyramus and Thisbe

“Now, it so happened, a partition built
between their houses, many years ago,
was made defective with a little chink;
a small defect observed by none, although
for ages there; but what is hid from love?

Our lovers found the secret opening,
and used its passage to convey the sounds
of gentle, murmured words, whose tuneful note
passed oft in safety through that hidden way.

There, many a time, they stood on either side,

Thisbe on one and Pyramus the other, and when their warm breath touched from lip to lip,
their sighs were such as this: “Thou
envious wall
why art thou standing in the way of those
who die for love? What harm could
happen thee
shouldst thou permit us to enjoy our love?

But if we ask too much, let us
persuade
that thou wilt open while we kiss but
once: for, we are not ungrateful; unto thee
we own our debt; here thou hast left a way
that breathed words may enter loving ears,”
so vainly whispered they, and when the night
began to darken they exchanged farewells;
made pretence that they kissed a fond farewell
vain kisses that to love might none avail.”

Ovid, Metamorphoses 4

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