Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege

This book is as extraordinary and inspiring as its author. Hass is an Israeli, a Jew, a woman and an atheist who, uniquely in Israel, has chosen to live among the Palestinian people she writes about. To most people this would be as fatal a combination of attributes as could be imagined. Yet throughout her book she tells only of the warmth, generosity and acceptance she is offered, in a region regularly described as among the most dangerous on the planet. Many of the best, most relentless and devastating critiques of Israel's colonialism come from Israelis, and none more so than Hass. The most powerful passages are where she likens the lot of the dispossessed in Gaza to the experiences of her own family, Holocaust victims and survivors, in being uprooted by the Nazis from their ancestral homes in Romania. It was her mother's account of the indifference on the faces of the German women who watched as she and the rest of the human cargo were herded from the cattle train en route to Bergen-Belsen that convinced Hass that "my place was not with the bystanders". This book is no hagiography. She savages the Palestinian Authority leadership for their corruption and brutality (while giving it the necessary context of "a land under siege"). She meticulously documents the inferior position of women in Gaza - their exclusion from the few positions of authority, their lives of domestic drudgery while their unemployed husbands and brothers sit idly by. Hass gives voice, humanity and a history to a people who live wretchedly on the doorstep of the homes and the lands from which they were expelled barely fifty years ago; who must now accept that neither their own leadership nor the world at large any longer insists on their right of return. If you are thinking of buying Joan Peters's preposterous From Time Immemorial - a systematic denial of the Palestinians' history and identity, built on misused statistics and fraudulent records - read Drinking the Sea at Gaza first. Then save yourself the money.

Written by an Israeli Jewish female journalist living in the Gaza strip, this book portraits the lives of ordinary gazans during the first intifada and the first couple of years of Palestinian autonomous rule. Dealing with the daily lifes of normal people and describing the consequences of the military occupation by Israel first, and the continuation of Israel complete, even if indirect, domination of all aspects of life in the strip after the beginning of self-rule, this book goes a long way to dispel the prejudice entrenched in the believe hold by many westerners that Gazans (and Palestinians in general) are but a bunch of terrorists bent on nothing more than throwing the Israelis into the sea. The humanity and compassion for the people of Gaza transmited in this book is accompanied by an uncompromizing lashing of the top level Israeli policies (either explicit or implicit) and of the pratical implementation of them by the rank and file men on the field (the direct military rulers first, the Liason Committee people - which just happen to be stafed by the same old guys...- after 1994.) But the arbitrary and undemocratic practices of the Palestinian Authority are not left untouched, and the part of the book dealing with the Palestinian State Security Court (supported by US and Israel) is a shilling reminder of how far the PA is from democratic principles and practices, and of how convenient it is for Israel that things stay just like that. At times the reading becomes almost unbearable. The poverty, the humiliation, the discrimination and repression that normal people are subject to, together with the sheer powerlessness that they feel, and the apparent hopelessness of their plight is all too transparent in this powerful and deeply disturbing book. At times it comes to mind South Africa's apartheid policies. In other occasions one can draw parallels with descriptions of anti-semitic policies in central and eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. If any country in the world would treat the Jewish population under its sovereignty in the way the Israeli government behaves toward the Gazans (and the Palestinians in general) it would be classified as anti-semitic and the country would become a pariah state, and rightly so. Anti-semitism was outlawed in acceptable political discourse in Europe only after the Jews accross the continent suffered the most terrible catastrophe and were almost totally destroyed. Let's just hope that the Palestinians will not need to suffer a catastrophe of comparable proportions in order the outrageous policies they have been (and continue to be) submited be recognized as such by the international community.

Amira Hass is an Israeli citizen. She is the daughter of holocaust survivors. She is a reporter for the newspaper, "Ha'aretz".In 1992 she became a resident in the Occupied Territories (OT) because as a resident "I learned to see Gaza through the eyes of its people, not through the windshield of an army jeep...". She was warned that her neighbors were savage, violent and hostile to the Jews. Her experience proved to be quite different. Everyone knew she was an Israeli Jew; still they welcomed her into their homes. Those Palestinians who spoke Hebrew spoke to her in Hebrew.Palestinians in the OT suffer many indignities, harassments, and cruelties. The Israeli military, the IDF, is always present and watching. Palestinians are restricted to the OT and can leave only with permission. Obtaining a permit can be quite difficult. Even those with medical emergencies have been denied permits. Unmarried men and men under forty can not leave. Making a living is onerous. If a Palestinian is able to find work in Israel he will work at a low end unskilled job for substantially less than an Israeli doing similar work--but he would still be making more than someone who works in the OT. The Israeli military, the IDF, is constantly watching the inhabitants. People live in constant fear of arrest; being subjected to brutal, humiliating interrogations; being held for months, without seeing a lawyer, without being tried, without charges being brought against them, without being told their offense, without seeing members of their families. Homes have been demolished long before guilt or innocence has been extablished. The army, when searching for wanted men, will break into homes, usually in the middle of the night, and needlessly shoot, destroy and vandalize the contents. Mere suspicion will sometimes lead to long prison sentences, and those sentences will usually be accompanied by torture.Even though they earn less than Israelis they are taxed more heavily. Typical tax rates on identical annual incomes for Israelis and Palestinians would be: no tax against 4%; and 7% against 15%. The Israeli economist Ezra Sada, a member of a right-wing party admits that the tax burden creates hatred and is onerous, oppressive and arbitrary. Unemployed Palestinians can be taxed on a hypothetical income--the `life tax' (if you're alive, you must have income). Disputing the tax is useless.The bureaucrats claim they must raise a fixed sum to cover the civil administration's budget but Palestinians contend the money is not being used for benefit of the local population. The World Bank substantiates their claim. Israel's response, "Expenditures of Security"-- Palestinians benefited from money spent to suppress the uprising "Our taxes are paying for the bullets and the tear gas".There is a rotting infrastructure-a lack of clean running water, paved streets, reliable electricity, and modern sewage systems. A West Bank economist found that between 1967 and 1994 Israel had invested an av

For anyone who truly wants to understand the plight of Palestinians - in Gaza in particular, in Israel in general - this is the book to read. Compassionate and brave, the Israeli journalist Amira Hass holds up for examination the 1001 administrative rules which hold Palestinians back from the chance to live with dignity - rules which imprison and control every aspect of their lives. This book was a bestseller in Israel, read and discussed by all who cared about the nature of their developing country. It should be read with attention and admiration in America too.