Despite All the Barriers, Love Blooms for Israeli Woman and Palestinian Cab Driver : Mideast: Such relations may no longer be as rare because of rapprochement between the two entities.

What was going on between the handsome young taxi driver and the attractive manager of the canning factory? It could not be romance, people said, for she was Jewish, he was Muslim; she was Israeli, he was Palestinian; she was a boss, he was a driver.

But Esther Mordechai and Nadi Mohammed Zeineddin were spending a lot of time together, talking quietly in corners of the Jaffa cannery, and questions grew about their relationship.

“Well, we were in love,” Zeineddin recalled. “Against all expectations, against all odds, we had fallen deeply in love. It was difficult for the people around us--our families, first of all--to accept. They asked, ‘How can this be? Are you mad? It’s crazy, it’s impossible.’

“True, there were religious barriers, social barriers, political barriers and many more,” Zeineddin said. “And we were not so naive as to believe that love conquers all. In asking her to be my wife, I was also asking her to come to Gaza, to live in a refugee camp. She would become Palestinian.”

Yet, won by a poetic, six-page letter of proposal from Zeineddin pleading his love, Mordechai agreed. So impassioned and compelling was the letter, written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew, that it brought her back early from a training trip to the United States.

“Esther, just two words--only peace,” Zeineddin wrote in the letter. “Every man has hopes in his life--why shouldn’t our hopes be fulfilled?”

Mordechai’s family did not come to the wedding, however, and only as they were heading for Gaza did Zeineddin tell her that he had just finished building a house for her and they would not have to live in the pestilential refugee camp where he was born and had grown up.

“I remember telling Nadi the day of our wedding, ‘To be with you, I will live in a shack. For us to be happy is better than living in a castle,’ ” she said. “I still feel the same, and 14 years have passed.”

Marriages between Jews and Muslims, though difficult because of religious, social and legal problems, occur occasionally in Israel, and over the years, a few Israelis and Palestinians have also married, but they generally have chosen to live in Israel.

“The commitment we made to one another was total, and the only place to realize it at that time was here in Gaza,” said Mordechai, who converted to Islam and took the name Shahira when she married Zeineddin in 1979. “What we did was not easy, but for us both it was the most natural thing.”

With the nascent reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, however, such inter-marriages may not remain so rare, and Mordechai sees the families’ gradual acceptance of their marriage as emblematic of the new rapprochement between the two entities.

“It took time and effort, but people on both sides came to accept our love,” she said. “My brothers--I have five, all tough guys--did not try to deter me once they recognized the fact of our love and commitment to one another. My mother loves Nadi very much, and she adores our children. My father, well, is still comme ci, comme ca about this.”

Hemi Mordechai, who had brought his family to Israel from Morocco in 1956 when his daughter was 3, had tried hard to argue Zeineddin out of marrying Esther. “I’ll give you whatever you want,” Hemi Mordechai had told the young Palestinian, “just leave my daughter alone.”

“I explained that Gaza is full of young women, beautiful women,” Zeineddin replied, “but I was only interested in one--his daughter.”

In an attempt to break up the romance, police were called in to harass Zeineddin, the canning factory forced Mordechai to leave, then refused to pay the pension money she was due because she had moved to Gaza, and friends warned both of the troubles that lay ahead.

“Among (Israelis), there are a lot of Arab-haters who cannot distinguish between people and politics,” Mordechai said. “Many angry, bitter things were said against me and against Nadi in those days. But I think the situation is changing, especially with the peace agreement. . . .

“Nadi’s friends even told him that a Jewish woman could never make him happy, never take care of him like an Arab man expects, never give him the children he wants,” she added. “Well, we have five wonderful children, and, as for my cooking, look at him now and remember he was skinny, skinny, skinny when we married.”

Neither Mordechai nor Zeineddin sees Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation based on intermarriage or even a greater degree of social integration, but on the cooperation between neighbors.

“Jews longed for their own nation, and they have built a very strong country,” said Zeineddin, who is now 37. “We Palestinians, too, long for our own independent state. Our relations must start with respect, our respect for the Israelis and theirs for us.”

Mordechai, 40, has won that respect in Beit Lehiya, a town built by refugees moving out of the congested Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. She speaks Arabic fluently and is greeted warmly on the street by other women.

The couple’s five, well-mannered children--three sons, two daughters, ages 8 to 13--attend local Gaza schools and visit their Israeli grandparents in a farming community near Kiryat Malachi to the north in Israel, aware of the uniqueness of their family but apparently unburdened by it.

“I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up, and have a Mercedes,” said daughter Hiba, 10. “By then we will have peace, and our land will be really beautiful.”

During tense days of the intifada, the Palestinian rebellion against the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the family had no trouble from the young street fighters, although Mordechai remains an Israeli citizen.

The family’s most serious problem came during the summer when Zeineddin was summoned by a new agent of the Israeli General Security Service, known as Shin Bet or Shabak, and told that his much-valued permits to drive his taxi to the Allenby Bridge on the West Bank, to travel throughout Israel and to leave the Gaza Strip even when it was closed or under curfew were being canceled.

“The guy said I was a security risk,” Zeineddin said. “He accused me of helping people from the Fatah Hawks (guerrillas supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization) escape from Gaza. He accused me of doing things too absurd to recount . . . but the bottom line was no permits.”

Without the permits, Zeineddin has been unable to work for more than three months and is uncertain when he will be able to do so. His new Mercedes taxi sits unused in the garage that adjoins the house.

“What the Shabak guy really wanted, however, was for me to work with him, to collaborate and inform on others,” Zeineddin recounted. “He used a lot of arguments, but in the end he told me, ‘You’re really one of us. You married into the family, and you have to do your share. You help us, and we’ll help you.’ For 15 years, I had those permits and never had a complaint from the police or the army or Shabak. Now, we get this very raw pressure.

“I told him that I was the wrong man for him, that I had married an Israeli woman, yes, but not the State of Israel. I am a Palestinian, my family was forced from our village near Ashkelon, I was born in Jabaliya refugee camp and this has been my life. My love for Shahira does not change that reality.”