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

By Amira Hass, Owl Books, 1999, 379 pp. List: $16; AET: $12.

Reviewed by Jennifer Mitchell

Although Drinking the Sea at Gaza appeared six years ago, when the Oslo peace process was still sputtering along, this comprehensive and often heart-wrenching account of life in the Gaza Strip is no less timely and relevant today. A balanced and thorough depiction of Gazan society from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Drinking the Sea captures the essence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its disastrous consequences for the people of Gaza.

Amira Hass began covering Gaza for Ha’aretz after the signing of the Declaration of Principles in 1993, and soon after became the first Israeli journalist to live there. She felt immediately accepted by the people of Gaza and never feared for her safety as she traveled throughout the Strip, making many friends and visiting their homes, thus enabling her to overcome prevailing Israeli stereotypes of Gaza as “savage, violent and hostile to Jews.” Throughout the book, she expertly blends her encounters with Gaza residents with a consistently astute analysis, in a style both insightful and captivating.

The book’s 14 chapters are arranged topically rather than chronologically, allowing Hass to explore distinct aspects of Gazan society in great depth. While a clearer delineation between the eras of Israeli occupation and Palestinian self-rule might have been useful, her approach reinforces the book’s major theme: that Israeli sovereignty over Gaza did not end with the transfer of authority to the Palestinians in 1994. Time and again, Hass demonstrates the extent to which Israel still wields ultimate control over the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.

Drinking the Sea includes a lucid description of Gazan politics and the beginnings of the first intifada. While noting the number of conflicting accounts of that “shaking off” (every political faction has tried to claim responsibility for it), Hass clearly leans toward the version in which Gazan union activism in the 1980s became an increasingly important facet of Palestinian resistance, helping foster cooperation among competing political groups, and eventually providing a forum for coordination of activities once the mass protests began. She provides a detailed analysis of the struggle for power and popular loyalty by the main political factions as well as the complex dynamics of the resistance movement. Resident Gazans and exiled leaders, young activists and elder statesmen, refugees and old Gazan families may have maintained a sense of unity to the outside world but fought bitterly among themselves.

Drinking the Sea is most compelling, however, when Hass abandons the purely political sphere and turns to the lives of “ordinary” Gazans. A chapter on the diverse interpretations of Islam in Gazan society and the ways in which political and economic developments affect popular affiliation with the Islamic factions should destroy the common assumption that Gaza is a universally fundamentalist society. A chapter on what has become a “grueling shared rite of passage” among Palestinian men—serving time in prison—contains almost unbearable depictions of routine arrests, interrogations and torture; the severe physical and psychological effects on men and their families; and the disruptive impact on society at large.

Hass also devotes considerable space to the family sphere. Gazans tend to marry young and produce large families; often several generations are crowded under one roof. While this extended familial support system is essential to survival given the extreme rate of poverty in the Strip, it also produces a fair amount of tension, as privacy is nearly non-existent and women in particular feel overshadowed by their elders. In one of her most haunting chapters, Hass presents a mosaic of female experiences while emphasizing the frustration and depression that many women experience due to the lack of autonomy and forced inferiority that traditional Gazan culture imposes on them.

Some of the most evocative stories in the book are those of the refugees of Gaza. Through them, Hass began to see an “invisible map” of Israel, a “vanished landscape” of villages that no longer exist. She recounts the 1948 expulsion and flight to Gaza, and the way in which village structures and traditions were reconstructed in the crowded camps of Gaza. A number of firsthand accounts demonstrate that “even if most Gazan refugees are now ready to accept the political consequences of losing their land, emotionally they will always see the villages as home.” Throughout, she presents a vivid portrait of the camps, where conditions are grim and oppressive yet a sense of life endures: a family pickles olives on their roof, a young woman writes poetry in her overcrowded house. These contradictions obviously fascinate Hass, and it is here that her immersion in Gazan society serves its greatest use.

In Part IV of the book, “Gaza Prison,” Hass turns her attention to the Israeli policy of closure and its disastrous impact on Gaza. No Gazan can leave the Strip without an exit permit issued by Israel, under arbitrary and unclear criteria. Whole categories of people (single men, for example) are unable to leave at all. When Israel hermetically seals the Gaza Strip (as it did 18 times between May 1994 and October 1996), all exit permits are canceled. While many Gazans assumed conditions would improve once self-rule began, the situation actually grew worse. Israel tightened its borders and left Palestinian authorities to serve as middlemen between the people of Gaza and the Israeli civil administration, which continued to dictate who could and could not leave the Strip.

In three horrifying chapters, Hass focuses on workers, businessmen and those needing medical care as they try (and often fail) to overcome the inscrutable bureaucratic obstacles to leaving Gaza. Their experiences reveal the brute impact the restrictions have on the ability to provide for one’s family or receive proper health care, and on Gaza’s attempts at economic development.

More importantly, these chapters demonstrate how Israel has subsumed the needs of the Palestinians in order to meet its own strategic goals. In the 1970s and 1980s, Israel encouraged economic integration, allowing open movement across the border and neglecting investment in Gazan infrastructure, in order to make future territorial separation more difficult. In the 1990s, its response to Palestinian resistance was demographic separation; Palestinians were, in effect, denied access to the resources they had been made dependent upon (although Hass notes that this separation was in one direction only, as Israel still considered Palestinian territory accessible for its own needs).

She dismisses the standard Israeli argument that its closure policy is dictated solely by security concerns, noting that closure began before the suicide bombings of 1994-95 and that many of those denied exit permits could hardly be considered threats (children needing medical treatment, for example). Instead, she attributes the policy to Israel’s desire to maintain control over the territories, even as it negotiated with the Palestinians. She offers a powerful indictment of Israeli policies that have eliminated freedom of movement of people and goods and effectively transformed the Gaza Strip into an enormous prison, in which an entire society endures collective punishment for the acts of a few.

Hass does not reserve all her condemnation for the Israelis. In her concluding chapter, she addresses the repressive tactics of the Palestinian Authority (including interrogation techniques learned from the Israelis and secret midnight trials) as well as its involvement in monopolistic deals with Israeli firms to the detriment of smaller Gazan businesses. She relates the disappointment of many in Gaza who had believed that the Israeli redeployment meant they no longer had to fear arbitrary detention, torture, and restrictions on speech and assembly. That the Palestinian security forces (the largest employer in Gaza) would treat their own people in such a manner created great disillusionment regarding the prospects for democratic rule.

There are few aspects of Gaza that Hass does not explore—although she does neglect to address how her role as a reporter may have colored her observations and experiences. Was she accepted in Gazan society more readily, and never threatened, because she was a journalist, not just an average Israeli? To what extent were people’s conversations with her (particularly those of politically minded people) honest reflections of their feelings and experiences and not tailored for the Israeli press? Hass may have felt that her journalist status had negligible effects, but it is an obvious question worth consideration.

Hass notes that, in the long run, the Palestinians will judge the Oslo accords “by measuring the breadth of their freedom as a people and as human beings.” As another intifada rages and the Oslo peace process is consigned to oblivion, her groundbreaking tale of Gaza continues to inform those who seek understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Jennifer Mitchell is a free-lance writer and editor based in Washington, DC.