Susan Nathan
Susan Nathan is a British-born Israeli writer.
Susan Nathan was born in England to a Jewish family. Whilst young Nathan visited friends and family in the apartheid-era South Africa where her father was born. There she had several encounters with the social and political situation in that country.
When she returned to London she became an AIDS counselor.
She divorced and, in 1999, once her children had grown-up she immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return, and settled in Tel Aviv, finding work as an English teacher, working with various centre-left organizations.
Nathan formed the view that much of Israel's Arab population were neglected and oppressed. As a result, in 2003 she moved from her home in Tel Aviv to the Arab city of Tamra in northern Israel. There she wrote The Other Side of Israel. In that work Nathan examined the historical, political and cultural currents of the Middle Eastern conflict. She wrote of her Arab neighbors, their challenges and their hopes and the segregation and discrimination she felt they face in Israel. Currently, the book has been translated into nine languages, including 2008 Malayalam, the dialect of Kerala in southern India.
“Although I have always rejected this fear of the other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. at the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand”
“Ghetto living is more than just a feeling of confinement; it is a sense of suffocation too.”