Hilmi tells her three things about himself, all of which end up mattering: He can’t drive. He never shot a gun. He can’t swim, partly because the West Bank, unlike Israel, does not have the sea Liat loves so much. (The book is dedicated to Ms. Rabinyan’s former lover, the artist Hassan Hourani, who drowned in 2003. She wrote a poignant farewell to him a year later in The Guardian.)

The romance intensifies quickly, though Liat is concerned from beginning to end, less about him, but that her relationship goes against all she was taught.

“Cut this off quickly,” Liat tells herself after their first night together. “Decide with a heavy but determined heart that it’s better this way, better for both of us. And never see him again.”

Needless to say, she does.

“In New York they became more like each other, same land, same experiences,” Ms. Rabinyan said of her characters. “They went into this bubble.”

Image Ms. Rabinyan’s novel was published last week in the United States by Random House. Credit... Random House

The couple find that their similarities and differences are very complicated. Liat, a high-minded, educated woman of the left, sees the only solution as two states, fair but in the end separate. Hilmi thinks there is no dividing the two people on the same land. (This argument, of course, has only intensified.)

The book is too finely drawn for easy symbolism, but at one point Liat sums up what nearly all Israelis have thought, knowingly or not, of their Palestinian neighbors — sometimes not so much antagonism as the wish it simply was not an endlessly prodding problem.