NONFICTION : ENEMY IN THE PROMISED LAND: AN EGYPTIAN WOMAN’S JOURNEY INTO ISRAEL by Sana Hasan (Pantheon: $18.95; 324 pp.).

In 1974, long before Anwar Sadat journeyed to Jerusalem, Sana Hasan, daughter of the Egyptian aristocracy and a doctoral student at Harvard, flew to Israel as a tourist to “make a dent in the wall of prejudice and ignorance that separated us.” Her summer vacation stretched into an unprecedented three years. Feisty, open-minded, relentlessly honest, Hasan, in this memoir writes about her meetings with Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, fiery kibbutz discussions and the Tel-Aviv underworld, where she attempts to reform a Jewish prostitute. Hasan shows us the breadth of Israel through Arab eyes.

Unfortunately, Hasan’s perspective, while razor sharp, offers few fresh insights. Failing in the larger task, the memoir remains fascinating, illuminating the author’s struggle with identity. Upper class, vacationing in Europe, American educated and bisexual, Hasan shies away from most Arabs in Israel. “The world I had come to be most familiar with,” she writes, “was that of the outsider, the stranger, the exile.” She has shown us that class rather than nationality may be the greater factor in determining identity.