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

Rating:
Summary: Politics, politics, and more politics
Review: 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 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!

Rating:
Summary: Venomous
Review: Amira Hass is to be commended for bravely moving to Gaza and writing a book about the people there.

However, this book isn't going to help people of Gaza.

One of the problems in Gaza is the Arab war against Jewish rights. This has poisoned relations among Jews and Arabs. Blaming all this on the Israel and thus promoting more of the same, as Hass does, is not good for anyone. Instead, it sabotages what could have been an effort to promote human rights for everyone in the region. Meanwhile, the author's bias against Israel makes the book unreliable.

Rating:
Summary: An Important, if Difficult Read
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An Important, if Difficult Read
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Take A Closer Look. Recall What It Was Like.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Read this book first
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A powerful and deeply disturbing book
Review: 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.