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

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 average of $15 per capita in the OT compared to $1000 per capita in Israel.

The settlements are a particular sore point. The Israeli settlers occupy one-fifth of the total area of the Gaza Strip. They comprise only one-half percent of the people who live within its borders. The settlers receive an average of 280 liters of good quality water per day while the Palestinians subsist on only 93 liters of poor quality--foul tasting-- irregularly supplied water.

The people hoped that the Oslo agreement would bring normalcy, peace and quiet. Those hopes did not materialize. The Palestinian Authority took over certain administrative functions-but the Israeli military government remained. Living conditions did not improve because the Authority responds to instructions from Israel.

The newly formed Palestinian State Security Court became synonymous with speedy secret trials, and judges with little or no legal training. Lawyers for defendants had no advance knowledge of their client's cases and no time to prepare. Families were not kept informed of proceedings and the accused themselves never knew where they were being taken when they were hustled out of their homes without warning in the dead of night. There was a continuous stream of arrests and releases and secret summary trials. An Amnesty International report criticized the State Security Court trials for violating minimum standards of international law, including: the right to a fair and public trial by a competent, independent, and impartial tribunal; the right to have adequate time to prepare one's defense; the right to be defended by a lawyer of one's choice; the right to appeal to a higher court.

Reporters who dared transmit critical news were detained for long periods of time. One editor was arrested for an article on the economic monopolies; another editor was arrested for not printing a news item flattering to Arafat on his front page. Offices of an opposition newspaper were broken into and new machinery destroyed. An Islamic Jihad paper was shut down after it published an article exposing corruption. The message to all reporters: these subjects are taboo. What the papers don't print the people pass on by word of mouth.

With high unemployment, Arafat was able to create a local police force whose members felt a sense of loyalty and personal debt to him for the guaranteed monthly paychecks. Arafat exploited disagreements and personal rivalries so as to foster divisions within the opposition.

After the Palestinian Authority was installed, its elite profited extensively. Symbols of riches--gleaming new apartment buildings, lavish hotels, shiny king-size cars--contrast sharply with the economy's general deterioration. Monopolistic arrangements with several Israeli firms--on gasoline, diesel fuel, and cooking and heating gas--eliminated hundreds of Palestinian retailers, importers, and truck drivers. Consumers were adversely affected as prices rose.

These are just a few of the many facts that are exposed and explored in "Drinking the Sea in Gaza". Amira Hass is that rare journalist who is dedicated to the truth even when it conflicts with cherished beliefs, government policies, etc. She is set in the image of George Polk--the journalist for whom the George Polk Award was named (the Acadamy Award of Journalism). To learn more about George Polk try to get hold of an out of print copy of "The Polk Conspiracy".

If you have an open mind and suspect that the media has not presented this conflict with an unbiased perspective, read this book. You may come to believe, as I have, that resolution of this problem will take a long, long, long, long time!


An Important, if Difficult Read   April 28, 2001
52 out of 56 found this review helpful

As an American Jew, this book was highly informative if equally difficult. It isn't the writing that makes this book hard since Hass is clear and ultimately convincing. What was hard, small h, was the way she left anecdotes aside after the first few chapters and went into somewhat tedious details about Gazan lives, their suffering while losing her initial sense of story. Yet what was Hard, capital H, were the truths embodied in this book. As a loyal visitor to Israel, it was really Hard to know that what Hass documents about Israeli cruelty to the Palestinian peoples had the undeniable ring of truth about it. That what she says here is authentic, however hard to reconcile with how we lovers of Israel see "our" homeland. It helps that Hass is an Israeli citizen and that she is the child of Holocaust survivors--that helps to understand her empathy with suffering. I finally have decided that she is not anti-Israel but pro-Justice and that is the framework I suggest others use when reading this difficult, important report from the frontlines.


Take A Closer Look. Recall What It Was Like.   January 15, 2001
Timothy Ritter (Colorado)
36 out of 44 found this review helpful

It's well established that most child abusers were themselves abused as children. It's now apparent that the same cycle occurs on the national level. The Jews, having been abused for centuries and brought to the very brink of annihilation, now abuse millions of people with tactics and methods typically found in fascism. The fact that the government of Israel is not fascist does nothing to ameliorate the suffering of those within its borders whom it treats as refugees and prisoners of war and second class citizens.

Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist, has documented this appalling mess admirably. The ridiculous notion promulgated elsewhere on this page that "Drinking the Sea" is a Marxist tract "built on rage" has no basis in reality. Hass may or may not be a Marxist, but in 352 pages I saw nothing promoting communism or socialism--and I do look for that kind of thing. As for it's being "built on rage", one might as well sniff about Solzhenitsyn's work being "built on rage" or Elie Wiesel's or Harry Wu's. When it comes to the inhumanity described by these writers and by Hass, rage is not a bad thing. However, I did not see it in this book. To the contrary, I found her treatment of an outrageous subject very even-handed, almost blandly journalistic at times.

One shortcoming in "Drinking the Sea" was a the lack of a minimal background to place Gaza into an historic and demographic framework for those around the world who don't know Gaza from Giza. It could be easily done just by extending the chronology on page xv back about fifty years to the Thirties, when Jews began arriving in great numbers in Palestine, an unincorporated area roughly the size of New Hampshire or Belize. Already living in Palestine were roughly one million Muslims, who didn't claim any particular nationality for themselves. That number grew to about 1.3 million by the time Israel established itself in 1948. About 800,000 of them were driven out of their homes when the Arab states attacked Israel (note that the Arabs are distinct from Palestinians; the Palestinians have never had a military). Some of the refugees went to Egypt, some to Jordan, some to Syria, and some went to Gaza, a tiny strip of desert next to the Mediterranean. When Hass arrived there in 1993 to cover a story for an Israeli paper, it was home to close to a million Palestinians.

While ostensibly under the control of the nascent Palestinian state, Hass painstakingly explains how Gaza is in reality under the control of Israel, whose soldiers run it like a prison camp. I found it fascinating that within Gaza there are Palestinian roads and Israeli roads. The Israeli roads are for access to Israeli settlements within Gaza, and also for the Israeli army to patrol and shoot anyone who seems to be threatening said settlements. In other words, Gaza is to be under Palestinian control eventually, except for those areas that are settled by Israelis and those areas that the army needs to protects the areas settled by Israelis. In other words, Palestine is not to be a real state, but rather a well-guarded labor pool for Israel. And if the laborers get uppity in any way (rock-throwing, curfew violation, tax evasion, unauthorized movement), Gaza is "hermetically sealed".

Any house in Gaza suspected of harboring troublemakers (rock-throwers, pamphlet-writers) is destroyed. Young men are hauled away in the middle of the night to spend years in Israeli prisons. Men under the age of forty or unmarried men of any age are not allowed to cross into Israel to work. Those who try to build a business within Gaza are effectively crushed by the frequent sealings of the border. Produce rots before it can be released for shipment to export markets. Materials coming into Gaza must be inspected by Israeli officials, at their leisure. Storage fees must be paid by Gaza businesspeople while they wait, sometimes months, for the Israeli officials to inspect the shipments.

There is no justification for treating a people this way. Running off to Washington for meetings and photo opportunities is no solution. Tightening the vice on Gaza is no solution. The conclusion I draw from this book is that the solution lies in treating the Palestinians as the Jews would like to have been treated in Europe over the centuries: as a people entitled to the same dignity and humanity as those who wield the power.


Important and essential reading   September 21, 1999
35 out of 39 found this review helpful

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.


An excellent piece of reportage. Essential reading.   July 31, 1999
27 out of 31 found this review helpful

I thought this was a remarkable book - for its compassion and for its insight. This is an essential book for anyone who is interested in the Middle East. Hass piles fact upon fact, and observation upon observation, to demonstrate how coldly Palestinians are treated by the government of Israel. Hass makes her case by describing the details of daily life - for instance, that people born in Palestine, before it "became" Israel, live with the constant indignity of having the place of birth on their papers marked .... Israel. I was particularly disturbed by the ironies detailed in the chapters "A Tax on Being Alive" and "We Are from the Same Village." The amazon reviewer comments that this book is unlikely to change minds. I disagree. This book changed my mind and I hope I don't forget the lessons I learnt from it.