The Other Side of Israel

Published in New York by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey across the Jewish-Arab Divide combines autobiography with a critique of relations between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel.[1] The Internet Archive catalogs the Nan A. Talese edition with a publication date of September 6, 2005.[2] The memoir uses Nathan's experiences in Tamra to discuss discrimination, land policy, competing one-state and two-state proposals, and her argument for policies that would make Israel a multiethnic state.[1]

Susan Nathan was born and raised in London, where she worked as an AIDS counselor. Following a mid-life divorce, she immigrated to Israel in 1999, later recalling, "I arrived full of Zionist enthusiasm."[1] As a child, she had often traveled to apartheid-era South Africa to visit family. Conditions she later encountered in Israel reminded her of aspects of that experience and supplied a central comparative framework for the memoir.[1]

Nathan subsequently moved to Tamra, described by the source as a Galilee town of 25,000 Israeli Arabs. She intended to challenge claims, particularly those she associated with the Israeli left, that Jews and Muslims could not live peacefully together in Israel, and she became the town's only Jewish resident.[1] Although friends warned that the move was dangerous, Nathan reported that Tamra's Arab residents accepted her relatively easily. She attributed the difficulties she encountered instead to Israeli policies and to fears and prejudices among the country's Jewish population.[1]

The memoir develops its argument through Nathan's observations of everyday life in Tamra. She describes difficulties arranging ordinary services after providing a Tamra address, including furniture delivery and the purchase of an airline ticket, and treats these episodes as examples of the broader marginalization she believed Israel's Arab citizens experienced.[1]

Nathan attributes Tamra's overcrowding to surrounding collective farms that she says were reserved exclusively for Jews. The biographical entry also summarizes the memoir and its reviewers as alleging continuing efforts to confiscate ancestral Arab land and property and linking those policies to an effort to ensure that Israel remains a Jewish state.[1] These arguments support the book's call for policies intended to make Israel a multiethnic state.[1]

The memoir also considers possible political resolutions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including one-state and two-state proposals. Its comparison between Palestinian citizens of Israel and apartheid-era South Africa functions as Nathan's interpretive framework throughout the account.[1]

The memoir received strongly favorable assessments from several reviewers recorded in the biographical entry. Laura Levitt described it as exposing "systemic and systematic state and extra-state institutions, policies and procedures" that marginalize Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens. Sherna Berger Gluck recommended it to readers willing to undertake an intellectual journey across the Jewish-Arab divide, while Ahdaf Soueif characterized it as a "profoundly human story, thoughtful and funny and unafraid."[1]

The book was translated into several languages.[5] A Malayalam translation became controversial in India in 2011, when Indian authorities alleged that Nathan had contact with religious extremist groups operating in southern India. The report presents that suspicion as the authorities' position, not as an independently established finding.[5]

Nathan's memoir should not be confused with a separate Arabic-language work by Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas received a history Ph.D. in 1982 from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. His dissertation was titled "The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement 1933–1945."[3]

FDD reports that the dissertation was published in Amman in 1984 as The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.[3] A JCPA publication instead gives 1983 and translates the title as The Other: The Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement.[4] MEMRI reports a 1984 edition published by Dar Ibn Rushd in Amman and renders the title as The Other Side: The Secret Connection Between the Nazis and the Zionist Movement's Leadership.[6]

The work argued that Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis in the persecution and mass murder of European Jews in order to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine.[3] MEMRI reports that it said the victim total "might be 6 million and might be much smaller – even less than 1 million." It also reports that the Arabic text attributed a figure of 896,000 victims to Raul Hilberg, although that figure was not found in the cited Hilberg work.[6] FDD records that Abbas's book cited French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in connection with claims about gas chambers, while JCPA states that the book denied that gas chambers were used to murder Jews.[3][4]

JCPA categorizes these arguments as Holocaust denial, citing the rejection of gas-chamber murder and minimization of Jewish victims.[4] A separate JCPA analysis summarizes the dissertation-based work as claiming that fewer than one million Jews were killed and that the Zionist movement was a partner in their destruction.[7]

The memoir's descriptions of systemic discrimination, land confiscation, oppression, and parallels with apartheid-era South Africa are presented through Nathan's account and favorable reviewers. The cited biographical entry summarizes those positions but does not independently test them; they should therefore be understood as the memoir's political and historical interpretations rather than stated as neutral findings.[1]

Bibliographic sources also differ on the publication date. The Internet Archive catalogs the Nan A. Talese edition as published on September 6, 2005, while a later Times of Israel report dates the book to 2004; the approved sources do not resolve whether the discrepancy reflects different editions or publication markets.[2][5] The Indian authorities' 2011 suspicion concerning Nathan's alleged extremist contacts likewise remains a reported allegation rather than a confirmed finding.[5]