Nathan, Susan

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Nathan, Susan

PERSONAL:

Born in England; immigrated to Israel, 1999; divorced.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Tamra, Israel.

CAREER:

Writer. Worked as AIDS counselor.

WRITINGS:

The Other Side of Israel: My Journey across the Jewish-Arab Divide, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Susan Nathan, born and raised in London where she worked as an AIDS counselor, decided after a mid-life divorce to immigrate to Israel. ‘I arrived full of Zionist enthusiasm,’ she told Al Ahram Web site interviewer Jonathan Cook, but she was shocked and disappointed to learn that the democratic ideals of the Israeli state did not apply to its Palestinian citizens, who lived under conditions that reminded her of apartheid-era South Africa, where she had often traveled as a child to visit family. Determined to prove wrong those, particularly on the Israeli left, who claimed that Jews and Muslims could not live peacefully together in Israel, Nathan moved to Tamra, a town of 25,000 Israeli Arabs in Galilee. She became the town's only Jewish resident. Though her friends warned that this move placed her in danger, Nathan found that Tamra's Arab residents accepted her relatively easily. The problems she encountered stemmed not from her Arab neighbors, but from Israeli policies and the fears and prejudices of the country's Jewish population. Her memoir, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey across the Jewish-Arab Divide, exposes the injustices under which Israeli Arabs live and argues for policies that would make Israel a true multiethnic state. She describes how difficult it is to arrange simple things, like getting furniture delivered or ordering an airline ticket, when she has a Tamra address; she also notes the larger obstacles that Israeli Arabs face regarding territory. Explaining that her town's extreme overcrowding is caused because the surrounding collective farms are reserved exclusively for Jews, she commented to Cook: ‘By making life unbearable here is the state not really trying to bring about a quiet form of transfer, of ethnic cleansing? People who have the money or connections to move abroad do so."

Critics welcomed the book as a devastating portrait of life in Tamra and an uncompromising critique of Israeli policy. As Laura Levitt observed on the California Literary Review Web site, the memoir reveals ‘not only discrimination but systemic and systematic state and extra-state institutions, policies and procedures that perpetuate and extend the marginalization and oppression of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens.’ Most notable for Levitt were Nathan's accounts of ‘ongoing efforts to confiscate ancestral land and property from Arab Israeli citizens,’ which are implemented to ensure that Israel remains a Jewish state. Though this information is not new, Levitt pointed out, Nathan's ‘compelling’ approach ‘brings readers with her to look at the ‘facts on the ground’ and she demands that we not turn away."

Calling The Other Side of Israel a ‘heartfelt story of love,’ Middle East reviewer Pamela Ann Smith noted that the beauty of the book is that ‘it does not stop at being simply a personal record of an extraordinary emotional, intellectual and physical journey. It also looks at possible solutions, including the debates about one state or two.’ Despite her disappointment that the memoir omits any discussion of feminist issues, Women's Review of Books contributor Sherna Berger Gluck expressed her deep appreciation of the book and concluded that it is ‘required reading for anyone willing to take the intellectual journey across the Jewish/Arab divide.’ In the Times Literary Supplement, Ahdaf Soueif wrote that the memoir ‘deserves wide attention as a profoundly human story, thoughtful and funny and unafraid, the journey of a Jewish woman, deeply conscious of the history and suffering of her people, to the realization that today, the divide between the Palestinians and the Jewish Israelis ‘is really an illusion … an artifact we (the Jews) have created in our imaginations … to protect us from the truth.’"