The Other Side of Israel

"The Other Side of Israel is the human story of a British Jew and once-passionate Zionist who moves to Israel and makes an extraordinary decision: to live her new life beyond the ethnic divide, as a lone Jewish woman in an all-Arab town." "Leaving London in the late 1990s to take up the 'Law of Return' promised by Israel to Jews throughout the world, Susan Nathan is amazed to discover that one in five Israelis is not Jewish but Palestinian, the remnants of the country's Arab population expelled in the 1948 war. She is even more shocked to find that none of her Jewish acquaintances have friends among their Arab fellow citizens. So she chooses to make a further journey across the country's deep ethnic divide to live in Tamra, a town of 25,000 Muslims between Haifa and Nazareth in the Galilee." Here she starts to see life in Israel through Arab eyes and experiences at first hand the daily discrimination exercised by the Jewish state against its Arab citizens - in education, employment, land ownership and local politics. Having been a regular visitor to apartheid-era South Africa, where her father was born, she is quickly aware of certain comparisons, but now begins, with the help of Arab and Jewish friends, to explore practical ways to establish a more just society.