Every night at 1:05 a.m. the last train departs London's Waterloo station on a 42-minute trek through the privileged communities of southwest London. In nine minutes it reaches Clapham, where in 1807 Evangelical Anglicans convinced Parliament to abolish the slave trade on moral grounds. Six minutes later the train arrives in Wimbledon, which has been a favourite retreat of the wealthy and powerful since Queen Elizabeth I made it fashionable. Today, Wimbledon is an enclave of expensive homes and tidy gardens where well-to-do professionals enjoy a short commute to the halls of Westminster and their offices in Knightsbridge.

When Susan Nathan, a middle-aged Jewish woman of Lithuanian and South African descent, left Wimbledon in 1999 to exercise her right of return to Israel, she took her liberal, south London sensibilities with her. Her book, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide, examines the moral, social and political injustices suffered by the Arab citizens of Israel--the one million invisible Palestinians, who, because they live inside the state of Israel, are deprived of the international attention that their compatriots in the Occupied Territories have achieved during the two Intifadas. Susan Nathan exposes the abuses committed against Israeli Arabs in education, employment, land rights, public services, the military and the political system. Writing for a popular international audience, and Diaspora Jews in particular, she chronicles the transformation of her own attitudes from the idealized version of Zionism she grew up with to a more informed perspective which she gained by living in the Arab town of Tamra, in the western Galilee.

The author argues that whereas concrete walls separate Israel from the Occupied Territories, the Jews and Arabs in Israel are divided by a psychological barrier. She marshals a mountain of evidence to support her contention that Israel is an apartheid state, drawing on her South African heritage as a template. She shows--convincingly--how racism is knitted into the legal and political fabric of the country through Jewish control of the ideology taught in Arab schools, a constant grab for Arab-owned land through a legal framework that favours Jews, denial of basic infrastructure services to Arab areas and a refusal to employ Arabs in important state enterprises. By avoiding the visible elements of the racism that made South Africa infamous, such as separate washrooms for different races, Israel's domestic policies have eluded international scrutiny.

Nathan examines in detail the psychological effects of inequality to support her argument that the divide traumatizes both Arabs and Jews and perpetuates a cycle of fear and learned helplessness that paralyzes a search for solutions. For Israeli Arabs the result is hopelessness about the future, an eroded identity and a fading awareness of their own human rights. Arabs feel they have no reason to participate in their own state, and fragmented leadership makes it impossible for them to take any collective action. For Jews, fear and a herd instinct reinforce an exaggerated sense of victimhood which causes them to deny any responsibility for injustices toward Arabs. Nathan laments that Israeli Jews, now in a position of power, have forgotten what it is like to be the minority.

Susan Nathan's background as an HIV/AIDS counsellor sheds light on these issues and her attention to the human aspects of the difficult issues she describes lends freshness to the book, as do her vivid descriptions and accessible style. She is fearless in addressing controversial topics, such as the parallel between the Holocaust and the treatment of Arabs. But in most cases she does so with a level of sensitivity that most popular writing about Israel lacks, such as in discussing the role that the hijab plays in the self-esteem of young women and examining the psychological trauma that young Israeli soldiers must cope with in trying to enforce an illegal military occupation.

But The Other Side of Israel is as much a story of the disillusionment of a Diaspora Jew when faced with the realities of her promised land as it is a chronicle of injustices suffered by Palestinians. It is an intensely personal account that is heavily influenced by the perspectives Nathan brought with her to Israel.

Having one's romantic illusions about life shattered is a common experience for the generation of boys and girls who grew up in England in the 1950s. The children of post-war Britain awoke from their cradles to a conflicted childhood--an upbringing full of heroic stories of Churchill and empire on one hand, and shell-shocked parents and ration books on the other. As a child, Nathan filled this existential gap by inventing fantasies of the exotic places she discovered in the pages of National Geographic and developing a nostalgic, rose-coloured vision of Zionism in response to the muted anti-Semitism she encountered in English boarding schools. When she moved to Israel, Nathan chose to relive the epic journey of previous Jewish immigrants by spending six months in an immigrant absorption centre, instead of taking a more direct route to her new life in Tel Aviv. But her simplistic view of her Jewish homeland collapsed as soon as she came into contact with the reality of power relations between the Jews and Arabs in Israel.

She responded to this trauma by exchanging one set of illusions for another. The Other Side of Israel begins like a James Bond novel: Israel is a land populated by heroes and villains where it is impossible not to choose a side. She constructs a highly romantic view of Arab life and motivations around a novel archetype--Hajji, an Arab grandmother. Hajji's life transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary: her household skills are "miraculous" and her understanding of nature, reflected in her gardening, is "profound." And Hajji doesn't simply make a pot of coffee--she conducts a ritual of coffee-making that is practiced with reverence by all Palestinians. Nathan's romantic outlook causes her to expunge the seething anger felt by Palestinians and to refuse to concede any wrongdoing on the Arab side. This is refreshing for readers who are used to a Western media environment where the most common image of a Palestinian Arab is the keffiyeh-wrapped head of a terrorist or a teenager throwing stones. But when it comes to most of the Jews she meets, she is quick to lay blame.

Nathan reserves her most passionate criticism--and her weakest argument--for the Jewish left which claims to support peace with the Palestinians. For her, these Jewish parties and peace groups maintain the status quo by failing to address the real issue in the conflict--an inequality of rights between Jews and Arabs. They support the Arabs only as long as the identity of Israel as a Jewish state is not challenged. But in contrast to the impressive evidence provided elsewhere, she bases her attack on anecdotal observations of Jewish/Arab co-existence groups and the spoken words from a few Jews whom she has provoked.

She also jumps to unfounded conclusions about the motives of Israeli Jews. A female soldier who is particularly rough at a checkpoint brings to mind stories of female guards in Dachau. Left-wing groups exist only to make themselves feel better about the injustices their country inflicts and to maintain a democratic international image. When an Arab suggests that his people must consider their own faults before blaming Jews, she surmises that he has been "bought" by his employment on the nearby kibbutz. Susan Nathan's emotions are never very far from the surface, and in her critique of the Israeli left they finally get away from her.

Accusations of anti-Semitism resurfaced recently against some writers and academics with the angry criticism that greeted last year's paper--and the just-published book--by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on the power of the "Israel Lobby" in American politics. As a Jew, Susan Nathan is immune to these charges, but given her extreme moral stance against Israeli policies it is no wonder that her book has received little response in America. In Britain both the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement reviewed the book, but no major American publication will touch it. Sales have also been weak on this side of the Atlantic: the original printing of 10,000 copies remains on North American bookstore shelves, while in Britain a paperback edition is selling at least reasonably well and the book is finding its greatest success in Scandinavia which may be due to more balanced opinions about the Middle East that I have heard prevail there. International editions have been published in German, Dutch, French, Italian, Swedish and Finnish--and one is forthcoming in Arabic.

The American author John Updike wrote that a reviewer should never criticize an author for not achieving what she never attempted to do. Susan Nathan's book provides only one side of the Israeli Arab issue to be sure, but it is titled, after all, The Other Side of Israel. Susan Nathan attempted to give Israeli Arabs a voice, and she provided a forum for some of them to speak to the world through her personal interviews with them. It is a compassionate, intelligent voice, one that we are not used to hearing in the West. And although The Other Side of Israel may not earn her many friends in the mainstream American media, it is a fresh and candid addition to the literature on the domestic aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.