The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide

The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide

by Susan Nathan

Harper Perennial, HK$135

Israel's 1948 constitution promises to 'uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex'. Susan Nathan's The Other Side of Israel says that's a lie. Nathan, whose emigrant parents ended up in South Africa before settling in Britain, takes up her right as a Jew to become an Israeli citizen. Breastfed on Zionism, she soon questions what the state is doing to one-fifth of its population - the so-called Israeli Arabs who didn't flee to refugee camps some 60 years ago. She moves from Tel Aviv to Tamra, a town of 25,000 of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens in Galilee, to teach English. She's the only Jew in the town. Her friends warn her that the Arabs will be friendly at first, but will turn on her, rape her and kill her. Instead, she sees at first-hand a systematic form of apartheid by the state against non-Jews. Nathan has been called 'a self-hating Jew'. She counters that it's 'precisely because I like myself that I've taken this political position'.