One day, Fadi Masarweh had a hankering for a bagel. He entered a shop in Berkeley, and ordered. The man behind the counter had an accent.

“You’re Israeli,” Masarweh said.

“You’re Jordanian,” Yossi Moshonov replied.

That could have been a conversation-ender right there. But it wasn’t. Instead, Masarweh asked Moshonov to have lunch sometime.

That chance meeting occurred more than 15 years ago, and sparked a friendship and business partnership that has lasted just as long.

Though Moshonov is no longer in the restaurant business, his wife, Vivi, is now Masarweh’s partner. The two of them run Palomares Café in Castro Valley, which they opened in 2002.

The pair does not call their Jewish-Arab partnership a gimmick, but agree it seems to work in their favor.

“We were sincere about it from the beginning,” said Masarweh, “but it does help the business a lot. There are a lot of Jews and Arabs in Castro Valley and they hear about us and come and lend their support.”

Either that, or they just like the hummus.

Masarweh came to the United States to go to college. The first Jew he ever met was his first landlord in San Francisco. He graduated from San Francisco State University but needed to work to support himself and went into the restaurant business.

When asked how he perceived Jews growing up, Masarweh, who is a non-practicing Christian, said, “They were our enemies. Not the Jewish people, but Israel was the enemy.

“I was brought up to believe that Judaism is the mother of all religions.”

But at the same time, he was not immune to the Mideast conflict, and more specifically, the one between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Half our population is Palestinian, and you can’t help but sympathize with them,” he said.

Vivi Moshonov grew up Jewish in Brazil, and came to the United States in 1977. She met her husband Israeli folk dancing in San Francisco in 1985. They moved to Israel for several years and married there. Moshanov said her husband was the type to always have Palestinian friends, and that remained the case when she moved there with him.

“Yossi used to go to the West Bank all the time,” she said, “but then when things got bad, his friends there began telling him not to come.”

When they moved back to California, he went to work in the bagel shop.

It was right around the time Masarweh was looking to open a business of his own when he met Moshanov behind the counter.

In 1991, the two opened the Cornerstone Café in San Leandro with their wives.

Word got out about their origins, and the local press came calling. They did a newspaper interview here and there, but when a local television network wanted to do a story on them, they declined.

“It was during the Persian Gulf War, and we felt it could be almost fueling the fire,” said Masarweh, whose wife, Carol, is American. “So we decided to be safe and decline all the publicity. There are some nuts out there who might do something to prove a point, so we decided against it.”

Some customers who heard about them would come in, only to guess wrongly who was the Jew and who was the Arab.

After 10 years of running the Cornerstone Café, they got an offer to sell it, which they took.

That precipitated some regrouping.

Yossi and Vivi Moshonov opened the Palomares Café. Carol Masarweh went into real estate, and Fadi Masarweh opened a burger joint in Hayward. He would occasionally help out at the Palomares, though, and one thing led to another: Yossi left to try something new in construction, and Vivi Moshanov and Fadi Masarweh began running the restaurant.

The two families remain extremely close, noting how difficult it can be to find truly trustworthy business partners.

“We’ve kept politics out of it,” said Fadi Masarweh. “Opinions differ from one person to the next, and we don’t even discuss them with customers.”

Vivi Moshanov said she felt their opinions were more similar than different. And even though their partnership seems to be the source of ongoing interest, she said she liked to think it isn’t all that unusual — that most people are like them, and the extremists on both sides are ruining it for everyone.

“Both sides are wasting time killing each other when they could be developing things together,” she said.