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| Volume VII, June 2000, Number 3 |
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| Book Review |
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For a printable version of this book review, click here.
Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, by Amira Hass. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co, 1999 (originally published in Hebrew under the title Lishtot mehayam shel'Aaza in 1996). 379 pages with index. $26.00, hardcover.
Al J. Venter
Middle East correspondent of Jane's International Defense Review and special correspondent for Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst
It is the anecdotes that strike a chord in a not-so-new book about an Israeli journalist who, to the surprise of her nation, lived for several years in Gaza. Like the comment made by one of her Palestinian activist friends that while the Israelis were around, they always wore their pajamas to bed. They didn't need to give IDF soldiers another reason to belittle them if they came storming in during the night, Hass was told. Or the daily routine of police loudspeakers blasting Hebrew songs and soldiers' duty schedules throughout Gaza's Rimaal and al Shatti refugee camp. In retrospect, some of the indignities visited by Jews on Arabs are unconscionable.
Amira Hass was nominated for the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Drinking the Sea at Gaza, and she deserves it for several reasons, the first being that her book offers a remarkable insight into a society about which, sadly, the average Israeli knows very little. As she says (following the establishment of the Palestinian Authority), "the Gaza Strip has become terra incognita for Israelis and easier now to demonize as a breeding ground for terrorist intrigue and fundamentalism."
Even more salient, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To use her words, "It represents the central contradiction of the State of Israel -- democracy for some, dispossession for others." As she declares, Gaza "is our exposed nerve." Gaza in the title, incidentally, refers to the Israeli take on the territory, which is summed up in a common Israeli curse: "Go to Gaza" in Hebrew means go to Hell!
Amira Hass is a chunk off the Golda Meir rockface. She is, in turn, intrusive, brave, curious and sometimes a little foolhardy. She quickly learned from Arab friends the secret of stealing through night streets emptied by the IDF curfew and slipping across the Gaza Strip's borders, sealed by Jerusalem's blockade. She has a gift for personal reflection that never bores, fuzed to a sharp reporter's eye. Also, she is very much aware of the consequences of her actions, which, had they taken place anywhere else in the world, probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. But this is Israel.
In essence, her book deals with a plethora of experiences as the first and so far the only Israeli to live voluntarily in this 147-square-mile piece of desolate real estate. Others have tried, but, as she explains in the penultimate chapter, Jerusalem has (sealed) up the strip hermetically. This is accepted by the majority of Jews as "the only way to deal with Gaza."
What Ms. Hass has also achieved is to raise hackles on both sides of the Near East political spectrum. While I was traveling on Amtrack between Washington and New York, a young Israeli visitor spotted me reading the book. Naturally he was curious. We started talking, and he introduced himself as Ron Dermer, who, I've since discovered, is one of the bright young minds of contemporary Israeli politics. Just then, he was working on a book on the life of Interior Minister Natan Sharansky, and there appears to be almost nobody in Israeli politics that he doesn't know.
Hass, he told me once we got going, was trouble: "she's always knocking the Israelis," he claimed. He was dismissive of her efforts. Having made his point, the subject -- as far as he was concerned -- was closed. Within the corridors of power in Jerusalem, his appears to be the accepted view of Amira Hass. Sadly, this is something one finds increasingly within the Israeli establishment: a hubris for which the nation will eventually be held accountable.
Dermer did admit that he hadn't read the book, nor would he. This is a pity. Whatever else one might think about Hass, she remains, misguided or otherwise, a remarkable power for good. Hers is clearly a motive for better understanding between two of the most fractious communities on earth.
Always the iconoclast, what this child of the holocaust did was ask her editors to allow her to spend time -- three years, ultimately -- on her own, and beyond the protection of the IDF, in Gaza. It was tough going, but she had the advantage of the occasional break back home and good food. More important, once she crossed into Israeli territory, she also had access to potable water. Because of the contamination of the region's aquifers, the water in Gaza is almost undrinkable.
She was only grudgingly accepted at first but quickly won the confidence of the locals, to the extent that this Jewish Israeli journalist was eventually embraced by almost all of those with whom she interacted. The only people who had tried it in the past had been spies. Hass quickly discovered that Arabs and Jews really weren't all that different. What did disturb her was that the distance separating Israelis and Palestinians "was far wider than the mere 50 miles between Tel Aviv and Gaza."
She offers a multitude of anecdotes, some hilarious. The common reaction of Palestinians upon discovering her ethnicity was shock:
"You mean, you're Jewish?" the women would say, lowering their voices and swallowing the last syllable. With their limited experience of Israel and Israelis, it was the women of Gaza who tended toward surprise and discomfort when they realized that yes, I was in fact Jewish.
Although she was of the "enemy", those with whom she dealt very rarely showed her any animosity. In a subsequent interview, Ms Hass said that she found Gaza a "very easy place . . . the people are all very easy to deal with and very open and hospitable and ran contrary to everything you hear about the place in Israel."
Towards the end, though -- once Arafat had been installed and she offered constructive criticism of what was going on in Gaza under the new regime -- she was "reprimanded" for being critical. Clearly, the respected Haaretz is closely scrutinized by the Palestinian hierarchy, as much for what it reports as for what it omits to publish.
Of particular interest towards the end of the book are Hass's comments about the confusion, delays and obfuscation that are coupled to an Israeli request for a permit to visit Gaza. These experiences, some of them absurd, almost make the former Soviet movement restrictions on foreigners appear trivial (the last pages of Chapter 13).
Nor is she blind to a deep groundswell of Palestinian/Arab animosity toward her people:
The negative associations of the word Jew are not limited to the occupation and expulsion, though. "The Quran teaches us that Jews don't honor their agreements," Hamas people told me more than once in connection with the Oslo agreements. "The Quran teaches us that the Jews are our worst enemy . . . ."
There are many other insights that she provides into Gaza's Arab community that only an Israeli could have noted. For instance, she shared Gaza's early euphoria over the peace process and also its subsequent despair as hope gave way to unrelenting hardship.
She also gives a fascinating insight to the start of the Intifada. Though some Israeli writers (quoting documents of Shabak, Israel's security service) claim it all began in the West Bank, the general consensus among Palestinians, she warns, is that "if it doesn't start in Gaza, it just won't get off the ground."
Particularly harsh are her comments about Israel's draconian closure policy since the Gulf War. While nobody within Gaza's great extended family starved, many communities had difficulty putting bread on the table each day. She recounts the hardships that some of the families with whom she associated weathered. And it's not over yet.
Hass also deals with those Israeli soldiers on active duty in Gaza, some of whom she ran into while going about her business. Almost all were surprised at the level of hostility they encountered among the subjected. One young IDF conscript asked her, "why are they staring at me with such hatred?" She admits that she was stunned by his genuine sense of victimization and persecution:
These were members of an occupying force that had imposed a rigorous curfew, incessantly checked IDs, stopped the movement of wage earners trying to get to their jobs "across the line" or firing tear gas or rubber bullets at people who protested their presence.
What was more, she suggests, it's been going on for almost 30 years!
Yet the soldiers weren't the only culprits. There were also the tax officers who would take hours-long breaks, leaving people standing in the hot sun; border guards who would kick over a vegetable stand as the desperate stall owner tried to salvage a few tomatoes; and the military base that would dump its garbage in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
"Break their bones," Yitzak Rabin allegedly said when the Intafada began. Many of the troops took him literally. And it all ended shortly afterwards. As she recounts, when that happened, "the soldiers were gone from the streets, along with their guns and noise and their condescension."
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