Sanaa Darawsha overcame adversity and abuse to become Israel’s top female Arab official. Now she wants to help other women in the country achieve their dreams
Sanaa Darawsha is recalling the most violent experience of her life, the moment in 2013 when she had to break up a fight involving three footballers and, in the process, took a stray elbow flush in the mouth. “It broke my teeth,” she says. “I had them fixed … but I want to fix them more.”
Darawsha taps the teeth in question and laughs for the first time on a bitterly cold afternoon at De Montfort University in Leicester. It is as if she is finally able to relax, having spoken for an hour about everything she has been through. It is serious stuff and, as such, no surprise that up to that point she too has been serious in tone and manner.