The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish-Arab Divide
by Susan Nathan
(Harper Collins)
Sometimes it takes one person to institute a revolution, even a small revolution. Although she would probably not see herself as such, Israeli Jew Susan Nathan’s decision to move into an Israeli Arab village in 2002 – and to write about it – might be considered a revolutionary act.
It was certainly a radical step. Born in Britain, the author moved to Israel and, under the right of return, became an Israeli citizen in 1999. Having something, it seems, of a rebel streak – drawn perhaps from ongoing encounters with apartheid during frequent visits to South Africa, where her father had grown up – she soon developed an interest in the question of Palestinian and Israeli Arab rights in her country. Her ‘outsider’ observations – that even Arabs who were voting Israeli citizens experienced discrimination – led her to decide to settle in Tamra, a village where she was the only Jew.
Tamra, between Haifa and Nazareth, is an Arab. Overcrowded and poor, although part of Israel it has less resources than equivalent Jewish towns and its citizens – though Israelis – do not receive the same social benefits as their Jewish counterparts. This, Nathan points out, is standard practice. Israeli Arab children receive generally poorer education and Arab culture is closely monitored by a state deeply concerned that these fellow-citizens might find common cause with their Palestinian Arab cousins in the West Bank and Gaza. Political activity is closely monitored, there as in other parts of Arab Israel. Arab education is vetted so as to prevent any expression of Arab identity and nationalism from being fostered. There, as in the rest of Israel, professional opportunities for Israeli Arabs are severely limited: certain jobs are barred to Arabs because they require, for example, approval of the military – or at least a record of completion of military service. And Arabs, for obvious reasons, are barred from the Israeli Army.
Nathan’s life in Tamra involved working closely as a social worker and teacher of English in the town. More than that, she consciously chose to engage socially with her neighbours. Her book shows how she got to know Arabs – men and women, their social lives, their aspirations and frustrations. She came to see how so often non-Arabs and non-Muslims made glaring exaggerations and stereotyped Arabs, often applying Western assumptions to Arab culture that were simply mistaken. Most of all she sees how Israeli Arabs occupy the uneasy position of ‘semi-citizens’ in their own country and find themselves caught between Israel and Palestine in the ongoing nationalist conflict.
As a Jew, Nathan is also able to try to understand her fellow Jews, who – even among the left – find themselves in a permanent state of tension. Some see the discrimination and are morally disturbed by it – but feel they can do nothing for fear of ostracism. Others desperately cling to the idea that Israel is a moral state and that the Israeli army is the most ethical military force in the world – despite experiences of military service that undermine this belief.
Although not a work of political science, Nathan’s book raises the question of peace regularly. She is not convinced by the two-state solution proposed by most progressive Israelis and many Palestinians. The approach she seems to approve is a kind of two-state federal republic model (a kind of canton-system, to use political science terms) advocated by a friend, Saed Zidani, an Israeli Arab academic. Yet both she and Zidani know that few Israelis, even within the Left, take it seriously.
There is a mood of ‘learned hopelessness’ among both Jews and Arabs, she concludes, a mentality of ‘nothing can be done’. While this way of thinking persists, she concludes, no lasting peace will be found.
In some ways this is deeply disturbing book, one that will win the author few friends within the Jewish community, for it is savagely critical of the state of Israel as it currently exists and of the Zionist project. One senses that she herself is aware that she will be called anti-Semitic for her stance, one that places her far to the left of most of Israeli Jews critical of the current situation. Yet her sense of justice, which though she is secular, seems rooted in the great Jewish tradition of the prophets.
On another level, though, this is a hopeful book, perhaps as I suggested earlier even revolutionary, in that it is the account of one person who resolutely crossed the barricades, rejected a sense of fatalism and has committed herself to seriously address a seemingly irresolvable problem.