This article was originally published by Haaretz and is republished with permission.

A Palestinian girl holds a bouquet of flowers at a wedding ceremony in the Gaza Strip. (Wesam Saleh, Maan Images)

Toward the end of the long conversation held in her living room, surrounded by her husband and her two children, Tatiana Yunis goes into the other room and brings back the latest issue of the Russian newspaper Vesty. She wants to show me a story about the subject of our conversation, to back up what she had said with a written text. On the first page was a photo of a swastika, which accompanied a story about a group of Russian-speaking neo-Nazis. Tatiana says that she condemns the phenomenon, but also understands how it has emerged in light of Israeli society's attitude toward new immigrants.

On the face of it, there is nothing exceptional about our little encounter, except for the fact that it takes place in Ramallah, where Dr. Yunis buys her Russian-Israeli newspaper every week. This publication, along with Internet sites in Russian, is one of the young doctor's sources of information, serving also as a sort of substitute for the limited physical mobility to which she has been condemned. Like other women from abroad who have married Palestinians from the territories, Tatiana Yunis is an illegal resident in her own home, who lacks status in her new homeland, is persecuted and deprived of her rights. Next week the High Court of Justice will discuss a petition filed by several such women against the State of Israel in the wake of the official freeze on the process of family reunification among residents of the territories, which has been explained as stemming from "diplomatic considerations."

She was born Tatiana Targov 33 years ago, in the city of Zaporozhye in western Ukraine, to parents who were both educators and encouraged their daughter to study. In 1992 she began to study medicine at the local university and on the first day of classes she met another medical student in the library, a young Muslim from Nablus. One look into her large green eyes was enough for Hatam Yunis to tell her, "You will be my wife." Tatiana replied: "You're crazy," but he didn't give up. Fifteen years and two children later, Tatiana giggles and says that "for Palestinian men, anything with white skin and green eyes goes."

Back then she didn't know what a Palestinian was, or where the West Bank and Ramallah were situated. She only sensed the reservations of her classmates about "the dark man from 'that country.'"

"It wasn't racism," she says now, in their defense. "They simply thought that every foreigner had money, while they were forced to count every kopeck in Ukraine."

Love and exoticism triumphed: Tatiana the Pravoslav and Hatam the Muslim got married while they were studying. He

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specialized in pediatrics and she in gynecology. During that period Yasmin, now 11, was born. Karim-Kyrill, 4, was born in Ramallah, after they returned to the territories in 1998; Hatam had decided to come home and Tatiana did not hesitate to join him.

The security situation in this region was quite calm in those days, whereas there was great poverty in Ukraine. The salaries of young doctors there were pathetic, and anyone who could leave did so. That was an interesting period, recalls Tatiana. Several of her Jewish friends immigrated to Israel, and today she has girlfriends in Netanya, Rehovot, Hadera and Rishon Letzion; some Christian girlfriends married Palestinians and one of them even went to Gaza.

From the start Tatiana had no hesitations as to whether to join her husband. She paraphrases a Russian saying to the effect that "Your homeland is my homeland" - an approach that her parents also welcomed. Since she had no idea what to expect in this part of the world, she wasn't afraid, either. She thought she would feel like a stranger to some extent, which seemed fair enough to her, since Hatam had been a stranger in her country for seven years. There was only one thing Tatiana didn't take into account when she decided to move to Ramallah: that she wouldn't see her parents for over eight years.

In Ramallah, which Tatiana dubs "half a village," the Yunis family lives in an attractive modern house in a bourgeois neighborhood. The house lacks any identifying signs of religion or culture, as though designed to provide a neutral space for the couple. They celebrate both the Muslim and Christian holidays. At the club for Russian-speaking women in Ramallah, which has about 250 members, Tatiana meets women like herself. It is actually the children who embody the complexity of the women's situation: They study in the German Lutheran school, which is considered particularly good, and they speak Russian, Arabic, German and Ukrainian - perhaps in advance of the day when they will have to decide exactly who they are.

Diplomatic considerations

In the days prior to the second intifada, life was entirely different. The young couple traveled a lot: Tatiana's visitor's permit was then valid, and they were allowed to travel to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and went to the beach.

With the outbreak of that intifada in September 2000, however, everything was disrupted. Tatiana's permit expired and at the same time, the Israeli government totally froze family reunification. Since then Tatiana has been trapped. She is considered an illegal resident in the territories; if she leaves, she will be unable to return. In conversations with officials in Israel, the demographic rationale comes up as an unofficial explanation - as though preventing family reunification is designed to reduce the number of residents of the territories. But apparently even this explanation is weak, since the children of mixed families have been registered as residents of the territories. In the absence of an explanation, such a policy seems simply malicious, and is usually explained with the vague statement that "it's a diplomatic matter."

The dramatic change brought about by the freeze has hurt thousands of families in the territories in which one of the partners is a foreign citizen. These are not Palestinians who want to receive Israeli citizenship or residency; they are foreign citizens who want to be registered in the Palestinian population registry as residents of the territories. But since the signing of the Oslo Accords, Israel has had control of the Palestinians' registry, too, and has the power to decide people's fates. During the past seven years, it has been making mainly negative decisions. Couples that were unable to withstand the pressure are living apart, and those who did not separate live in fear.

In recent years Israel's Civil Administration has rejected repeated requests by Tatiana to be granted permanent status in the territories. The regular intervention of Israeli human rights organizations - such as Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, and B'Tselem, which have even appealed recently to Defense Minister Ehud Barak on this matter - has not helped either. Representatives of these organizations, who have already seen and heard it all, have difficulty understanding the rationale behind the policy, since Israel has never explained its refusal to allow family reunification as being due to security considerations, per se.

Hatam, for example, recently received a stipend from the Peres Center for Peace to participate in a course in a Nazareth hospital; apparently the authorities did not find that he poses any security threat. He moves around freely, but usually alone, because every crossing at a checkpoint exposes Tatiana to the danger of detention or expulsion.

The High Court of Justice is due to address all these questions next Monday, when it discusses the petitions filed by Moked in the name of four West Bank families in which the wives are from the Commonwealth of Independent States. The State Prosecutor's Office will say in its response that the petition should be rejected because the decision to freeze the process of reunification falls under the jurisdiction of the Israeli government.

Tatiana says that the checkpoints don't prevent her from moving about, and that she often sneaks out to Pravoslav churches in Jerusalem and Jericho. "My crossing permit is from God," declares the devout young woman. But the Creator does not issue permits to attend medical conferences that are important for her professional development, such as an international conference of gynecologists that will soon be held in Nazareth. Nor does He enable her to visit her patients.

This week she said that the most difficult day in her life was in July, when her mother in Ukraine underwent surgery to remove a tumor from her lungs. Until then Tatiana had learned to live with the fact that her connection with her parents is limited to phone calls, and the money and videotapes she sends them. But that day she knew that all these were insufficient. Because she couldn't be at her mother's side, Tatiana did what she knows best to do: She prayed. Taking a risk and traversing eight checkpoints, she embarked on a journey among churches. "God is great, He can even cross checkpoints," she says. Whether or not her prayers actually had an effect, the tumor turned out to be benign.

"My life is exotic," she says, with a laugh, but a bitterness creeps into her voice. "It's only a shame that it is dependent on someone else. Just as there are Palestinians who are dependent on Israel for the supply of electricity and fuel, I'm dependent on them in order to move around." At the end of the conversation she adds that if in the future her daughter wants to marry a man of a different religion, she will tell her that it's very difficult.

'Home and work'

The petitions to be discussed by the High Court will also include one filed by the neighbors of the Yunises, who seem to illustrate Tolstoy's remark that every family is unhappy in its own way. In a well-kept home, in a quiet and developing neighborhood that contrasts with the bustle and the tension of central Ramallah, Muhammad and Olga Hamadan are living not quite happily ever after.

The story of the Hamadans is similar to that of the Yunises. He is a surgeon in the Al-Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem; she is a general practitioner. They met at medical school in Kalinin, Russia, when Olga helped the foreign student in her study group to learn Russian. "The rest is history," sums up Olga, 32. But the rest is also geography and politics; she had no idea about the bureaucracy that would envelop her life after her marriage.

"In 1998 it seemed very natural to me to return here," explains Muhammad. "I felt responsible for Olga's fate, but it was a relatively quiet period. Besides, we share a common destiny."

In their case, this common destiny also includes Olga's conversion to Islam. "It was not a difficult decision, because I came from a communist family for whom religion was of no significance," she says, adding jokingly that she is a bad Muslim; she fasts during Ramadan but she doesn't pray. Furthermore, she has no legal status, so that as an illegal resident she feels she lives in a kind of large prison.

A pleasant woman, Olga does not conceal the fact that her confined life is difficult. "Home and work," she says, describing the cycle of her life, which is so different from the open spaces and the freedom in which she grew up. As opposed to Tatiana, who tempts fate, Olga says that the checkpoints frighten her. They are also the only place where she meets Israelis, many of whom are Russian-speaking soldiers. She says that they take an interest in what she is doing in Ramallah and inquire with concern as to whether she is happy there.

But all these problems, as well as the yearning to go to a museum, a theater or a library, are dwarfed in comparison to Olga's longing for her parents, whom she hasn't seen for almost 10 years and who do not know their three grandchildren. Olga explains that her parents have submitted eight requests for a visa so that they can come and visit her, and all their requests have been rejected.

"I'm like a prisoner in jail," she says with a sad smile. "But a prisoner knows how long his punishment will last. I have no idea."