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Another apartheid
A Review by Ahdaf Soueif

On October 10, 1999, Susan Nathan stepped off an El Al flight into Tel Aviv airport. The badge pinned to her chest declared "I've come home". The Jewish Agency in London had processed her application for Israeli citizenship in one week, paid her air-fare and was providing accommodation in Israel until she found her feet. Nathan was fifty, leaving behind grown-up children and a recently failed marriage.

The desire to perform aliyah -- the "divinely ordained mission of every Jew to return to Israel" -- had not come upon her suddenly. The daughter of a committed Zionist father (who had moved from South Africa to England), she had visited Israel eight times and had sent her children to work on kibbutzim. For her, Israel was "a land without a people for a people without a land", and she movingly describes the emotions stirred by her aliyah; opening the door, say, to a plumber wearing a kippa, or being hailed by an elderly neighbour who tells her how she, a Polish child, had escaped the Holocaust.

Four months into her new life, Nathan finds herself in a ward in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital. There she is confused to find not only Jewish but Muslim, Christian and Druze Israelis: Israeli Arabs, in fact. She is troubled by the pistol and rifle sported by a young settler coming into the ward to visit his wife and baby, and troubled that nobody seems to think it strange that an armed man should be wandering among unwell women and children. In a strong American accent the settler tells Nathan -- who seems able to strike up a conversation with almost anyone -- that he had just "requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem" and never went out without his weapon. When she suggests that he might be happier in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City he replies that "all of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews".

Up until that moment, Nathan does not seem to have sensed any conflict between her Zionism and her humanism. Now an unease sets in, which eventually nudges her out of Tel Aviv and into Tamra, an Arab town of some 25,000 people. The Other Side of Israel begins as Nathan discovers the Arabs of Israel: the Palestinians who managed to remain in the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 -- and their descendants, and the conditions under which they live.

At the end of the book Nathan finds herself once more with a group of Jewish settlers who have taken over the top floor of a Palestinian house in the Old City in East Jerusalem. They use a common corridor between themselves and their Palestinian neighbours as an open latrine. This is part of the attempt to force out the Palestinians. "Although the methods vary in Tamra, Jerusalem and Hebron", Nathan writes, "the goal is always the same: the accumulation of land by whatever means possible for the exclusive use of Jews."

The Other Side of Israel is Nathan's narrative of her shock and increasing sadness on the road to this moment of illumination. From the moment, on her first visit to Tamra, when she finds that it reminds her of apartheid South Africa -- "I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships" -- to her articulated belief that Israel "is a state that promotes a profoundly racist view of Arabs and enforces a system of land apartheid between the two populations", Nathan at every turn uncovers institutionalized discrimination in all areas of life: land ownership, housing, education, access to work, access to basic services, state benefits. She discovers that land held by Palestinians for generations is constantly under threat of confiscation and homes lived in for years are under threat of demolition; and that to be an Israeli citizen who is an ethnic Arab means that you are locked in a permanent, debilitating and costly battle with a state that essentially wants you to get out. Israeli Arabs are the object of academic and media discussion as a demographic threat, and there is in place a giant construct of complex and disguised mechanisms, designed to make their lives unliveable, which is almost impossible to call to account. One of the achievements of this book is that Nathan unmasks these mechanisms -- with the help of Jewish and non-Jewish friends she lists in a roll of honour in her acknowledgements -- and describes them accessibly.

Nathan's encounters with the common-or-garden Israeli face the reader time and again with what the Palestinian writer Mourid Barghouti has called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Palestinians: the bleeding heart Israelis who meet with Palestinians to offer them "love and friendship" but get angry if any mention is made of politics; and the ones who are so troubled by Palestinian "ingratitude" and angered by how they, the Israelis, have been forced to appear harsh in dealing with it. Nathan is very soon disillusioned with them and they with her. But perhaps one of the saddest portraits in the book is of a Palestinian man, an enterprising, hard-working, successful middle-aged head of a family who has twice been ruined and made a refugee by Israel, and now clings with fervour to his patronizing Israeli "friends".

The discoveries that Nathan makes along her journey are not new to anyone who has made it their business to look with clear eyes at the Palestinian-Israeli problem. They have been available in Arabic witness accounts for a long time and in English at least since 1980. What is new is seeing them revealed through the personal narrative of a woman who has had to make a choice between ideology and common humanity. And it is a tribute to her and to the Israeli friends she cites that -- having made the choice -- she and they are no longer content to be bystanders.

The Other Side of Israel could not be more timely. It should leave no one in any doubt about the coherence of current Israeli policies both in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and within Israel. Susan Nathan no doubt knows that her book will make her many enemies. But the friends it wins will take her work to their hearts. Perhaps The Other Side of Israel will do more than preach to the converted. It 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 Jewish Israelis "is really an illusion . . . an artefact we (the Jews) have created in our imaginations . . . to protect us from the truth".

Ahdaf Soueif's collection of essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the common ground, was published last year.