The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide. Susan Nathan

forced out of some four hundred villages by Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. I asked if her parents ever talked about this with her at home. ‘No, because they are afraid too,’ she said. ‘I ask them questions, but they don’t like to talk about it.’

      Rasha, it struck me, was living in fear of connecting with her past and her roots. Her eyes filled with tears. I thought, this is the story of this country. How can we educate our Jewish children about the Holocaust, the centuries of discrimination against Jews, and yet here sitting next to me is a Palestinian child who has been forced by the Jewish state to cut herself off emotionally and psychologically from both her personal and her people’s narratives, who is truly afraid to learn about her past? I asked her how she felt about not knowing the truth, and not being able to talk about it in her home. She replied: ‘I don’t feel like I have a future.’

      Other families told me of the massacres that took place in their villages and of the tactics used by soldiers to terrify them from their homes. These are not fanciful stories: they are supported by the research of respected Israeli Jewish historians who have spent years trawling Israel’s state and military archives.