Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege Paperback – 5 September 2000
by Amira Hass (Author), Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta (Translator), Elana Wesley (Translator)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 36 ratings
In 1993, Amira Hass, a young Israeli reporter, drove to Gaza to cover a story-and stayed, the first journalist to live in the grim Palestinian enclave so feared and despised by most Israelis that, in the local idiom, Go to Gaza is another way to say Go to hell. Now, in a work of calm power and painful clarity, Hass reflects on what she has seen in the Gaza Strips's gutted streets and destitute refugee camps.
Drinking the Sea at Gaza maps the zones of ordinary Palestinian life. From her friends, Hass learns the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and stealing through night streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early euphoria over the peace process and its subsequent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Palestinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized but eloquent, spiritually resilient, bleakly funny, and morally courageous.
Full of testimonies and stories, facts and impressions, Drinking the Sea at Gaza makes an urgent claim on our humanity. Beautiful, haunting, and profound, it will stand with the great works of wartime reportage.
Review
"Not only has Amira Hass done the reporting that makes this book a moving and eloquent advocate of Palestinian humanity, but she is also a blunt and beautiful writer" --Amy Wilentz, Newsday
"Shatters stereotypes ... Hass reveals the surprising contradictions of Palestinian society." --Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times
"Hass observes with something like despair, and writes with skill and passion." --Graham Usher, The Economist
About the Author
Amira Hass was born in Jerusalem in 1957, the daughter of Yugoslavian-Jewish refugees. A journalist for the Hebrew daily Ha'aretz, she covers Gaza and the West Bank. She received the UPI's International Award and the Sokolow Prize, Israel's highest honor for journalists. For her work in Gaza, Hass was been nominated for the Robert F. Kennedy Award.
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Richard Sterling
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent book
Reviewed in the United States on 28 February 2009
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This is a wonderful book. It is NOT a light or easy read. It is a lengthy, deep and profound work based on years of research, interviews and first hand experience by one of Israel's greatest journalists. The book is divided into chapters which cover different aspects of Gaza including the history of the current population (mostly refugees), the first Intifadah, the role of Hamas, the role of women, the Israeli economic strangulation. Although this book was first published in Hebrew about ten years ago it is still relevant. Just look at the subtitle "Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege". The main conflict and many of the principal forces and characters remain the same. There is a wealth of detailed economic analysis and statistics, much of it based on the excellent work of Sara Roy. There are also very interesting anecdotes and descriptions. Hass describes what it was like to be an Israeli Jew living in Gaza. What she recounts exposes many myths. This is a 'must read' work for anyone who wants to understand the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
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4Europe
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for everyone who cares about humanity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 April 2024
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This book should have been required reading for all the Western leaders who have permitted and aided war crimes since October 2023 on an unimaginable scale, and yet, if you were not familiar with the appalling crimes commited in this part of the world over the past 100 years, you will soon see why so many humanitarians were crying out from day one not to permit what was about to happen, and what was actually so evidently going to happen if certain nations didn't do their utmost to prevent it from the start.
There are plenty of reviews here that do justice to this book. My review is simply to state how necessary it is for us to read this, and hope that it is brought back into publication very soon. I recommend that you also read the excellent 'Gaza: an Inquest into its Martyrdom' by Norman Finkelstein.
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John W. Chuckman
4.0 out of 5 stars REVIEW OF AMIRA HASS'S DRINKING THE SEA AT GAZA BY JOHN CHUCKMAN
Reviewed in Canada on 27 January 2013
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The subtitle of this book, "Days and Nights in a Land under Siege," accurately describes the subject. The period covered is roughly from the first intifada, 1987, through the first election of Benjamin Netanyahu, 1996, and effectively the death of the Oslo Accords. It is not about the current situation in Gaza, but it provides valuable background material.
Of course, the misery of the people of Gaza documented here has grown only worse now that we are into the fourth year of Israel's blockade.
Ms. Hass is an Israeli journalist, living in the West Bank, who spent a great deal of time in the Gaza Strip, a situation giving her a unique perspective.
Ms. Hass has a clear journalistic style and an eye for detail, and her story is full of facts and observations you do not typically find in our press concerning Gaza and Israel. She definitely gives you a powerful sense of the frustration and pain of being a Palestinian in Gaza.
Here are just a few of her interesting facts. According to the organization, Physicians for Human Rights, during the five years of the intifada, a Palestinian child under the age of six was shot in the head every two weeks. According to United Nations Relief records, nearly 1,100 people treated at its clinics during the first four years had been shot in the head, with about 15% of that number being women. During the four years, over sixty thousand Gazans were shot, severely beaten , or tear-gassed.
With Israel's tightening of work permits - one of the important themes of the book - Palestinian per capita income fell by 7.14 % in 1992 and by 26.53 % in 1993 - this in a poor and overcrowded place.
The truly frightening thing that emerges in the book is Israel's gradual creation of a stultifying system of electrified fences, elaborate application requirements for work permits, refusal to grant all but a small portion of the applications, and frustrating line-ups for those with permits to use them,. Even the few with work permits had to show up at the exit check-point only at specified hours, then they often waited for hours to have their permits checked. The slightest thing out of order saw them ordered to return home. The logistics of getting back and forth to their work places often are horrific - once there were large numbers of taxis but even taxis are reduced to a small number - and Palestinians are not allowed to stay over at their place of work even if their employer desires it.
It is important to appreciate that with Israel's original driving of Palestinians off their land and out of their villages - and Ms. Hass describes some of the Israeli army's tactics to drive Palestinians out - Gaza became effectively a crowded refugee camp, inadequate to sustain a modern economy, and for many in Gaza, work in Israel is their only hope for a meager livelihood. With Israel's control of borders and even the sea, it is by default the only accessible market for the products and services of Palestinian businessmen.
Even before the current blockade, Israel literally had created a stranglehold on the (now) one and half million people of Gaza. They could not visit family in the West Bank or East Jerusalem without difficult-to-obtain and restrictive permits. They could not go to hospitals without the permits, and even when the permits were received in a timely fashion, parents often were not allowed to accompany children or spouses their mates, and for people on a course of treatment, as say chemotherapy, they must obtain new permits each time. Young people also cannot attend university or technical schools without permits.
When workers do obtain permits, they are not allowed to stay overnight in Israel, even though their employers may be eager to have them do so, as when working on a rush job. After waiting since dawn at the check-point to exit Gaza, and that often for hours, they travel with difficulty to their jobs, work for wages lower than an Israeli would receive, and must return home each night - an exhausting and costly routine, yet one these impoverished people are only too glad to do if allowed.
Israel also issued permits only to certain classes of people, men under thirty not being eligible. Imagine a society in which all the young men to the age of thirty cannot work, and we must remember that with high birth rates, Palestinian society is a young society with a relatively high proportion of young people.
During the period of the Oslo Accord, Israel had wanted to see businesses created in Gaza to employ people, yet they set the conditions that ultimately made this difficult or impossible. Israel began strangling the opportunities for businessmen in Gaza - farmers and small manufacturers - to export to Israel through its great increases in restrictive security measures. Although it was advertised in Israel as a part of the period of adjustment to Oslo, the entrepreneurs in Gaza found themselves starved of markets.
Israel gradually imposed immensely complicated rules for produce and goods being transferred from Gazan trucks to Israeli trucks. Given also the requirements for inspections and the often hit-or-miss nature of other arrangements, truckloads of produce not infrequently ended up wasted. The many small businesses doing things like running sewing machine workshops for Israeli clothing firms found themselves shutting their doors, putting people out of work.
While Ms. Hass does not use the term apartheid, that is precisely what we see established here. Gaza is a Bantustan in which large numbers of people are kept penned up, separate, and with almost no hope ever of building a viable economy.
As you read these pages, you ask yourself, what possible future is there for people bottled-up in this way? And I cannot see an answer. Israel simply has created a situation which is not tenable over the long term, although for today or tomorrow the Palestinians manage to cope.
They have been artificially removed from their original homes' and all their traditional ties of work and farming have just about been severed. Ms. Hass tells us how the older Palestinians, as when traveling through Israeli territory for work, know precisely the places now demolished and/or renamed as Israeli places and just where their homes and farms were located. Severed, too, were the family connections with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians are people for whom extended family is quite important.
It is a bleak, go-nowhere situation, which since Israel's savage attack and blockade has become only bleaker. The book offers no prescriptions or recommendations. Ms. Hass remains throughout that fairly rare being, a truly objective journalist.
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CQ
5.0 out of 5 stars drinking the sea at gaza - a life that the outside world does not know
Reviewed in the United States on 8 November 2013
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Amira Haas is an Israeli journalist who by choice lives among the palestinians to see the occupation through their lives. It is informative and gives palestinians a human face.
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Well Read
5.0 out of 5 stars Amira Hass CapturesThe True Spirit of Gaza
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 November 2000
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Amira Hass is a correspondent for Haaretz a daily newspaper in Israel who was honoured by the World Press in May 2000 as a Freedom hero. Hass understands Gaza and its people because she shared the every day reality their lives. As an Israeli who took the momentous step to live in the Gaza Strip, her account of the people and the life in Gaza is based upon respect and insightful journalism. Hass discovered what most expatriate workers find, that in the midst of human suffering and poverty there is a solidarity and dignity birthed through injustice that typifies the people. Drinking The Sea At Gaza is unique in that not least, it is written by an Israeli and a woman. Feeling at home with the people, Hass had their confidence and provides personal accounts of how the politics of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Intifada has affected their lives. In demythologising the popular held media image of the Gaza Strip as a small patch of anarchy where Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism rules, Amira Hass shows us the true spirit of Gaza, a gentle enduring warm family spirit. Statistics and social commentary is one aspect, however, more importantly we see a portrait of Gazans as human beings, ordinary people reacting to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords that heralded the post Intifada period and the 1994 return of Yasser Arafat. There are moments when the book sings with poignancy, frustration and humour as the people who confided in Hass leap from the pages. Some material whilst familiar takes on a new dimension through the eyes of the people. In terms of rating it is a five star book, especially for its portrayal of the true spirit of the people living in the Gaza Strip.
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Ruairi O Neill
5.0 out of 5 stars Book Condition
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2021
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The books condition was exactly as described and I am very happy with it. I haven't read it yet but I am looking forward to it.
It did take a long to arrive but I was made aware of this and I wasn't in a hurry to receive it and it did arrive on time.
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Joseph
4.0 out of 5 stars Even though the author became the williing Stockholm syndrome victim, the story of the Gaza peoples lives comes through.
Reviewed in the United States on 12 April 2013
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This author has a direct language that is central to telling the stories of those who live in the contested lands of Gaza. She is openly sympathetic to these people who believe they are the victims of a cruel oppressor, but at the same time they are people who will do anything to avenge a percieved wrong, thereby continuing the cycle of violence. The plight of the youngest children of Gaza leads one to believe the future is bleak and pool of suicide bombers limitless.
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Keren Avirame
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 29 October 2016
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Love her work ! This goes even deeper than the weekly articles in Haaretz.
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Philip
5.0 out of 5 stars The Impact of colonialism remains a destructive force
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 July 2021
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A brilliantly written view of Palestine.
Despite being written in 1996 one can only reflect on the depressive years in between where generations suffer so much human rights abuse
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Gary
5.0 out of 5 stars To be a Gazan in Israel.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 February 2018
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A powerful and convincing book drawing on the experiences of ordinary Palestians to tell their story.Tragic and inspiring, maddening and uplifting in the same breath.The strength of the human spirit unfolds in this readable and sympathetic piece of work.Amir is true to herself and her professional self - to monitor power and the centres of power in all its guises
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Margaret Burns
5.0 out of 5 stars Heartbreaking
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 June 2021
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A heartbreaking but essential read
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walmart79
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 October 2017
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Great book. Beautifully written.
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Red
3.0 out of 5 stars The covers were really dirty, but otherwise good.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 June 2022
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Good
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R-Naught
1.0 out of 5 stars Desperately in need of editing…
Reviewed in the United States on 8 February 2024
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This is one of those books where the author records every detail of every discussion and discloses every fact of a complex and, quite frankly, boring history, no matter how irrelevant, repetitive, or how little it contributes to the story. A magazine article would have sufficiently covered the relevant content. The book is an exhausting read and despite the author’s Palestinian bias, it helped me to understand why the Israelis are conducting operations in the Gaza Strip with such fervor following the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack. They have finally had enough. The Palestinian problem cannot be fixed and this book unintentionally describes why in painstaking detail. You will not learn anything new in the book other than that the Palestinians will never be capable of running anything, much less a country and they will continue to pay a very big price for continuing to engage in terrorism.
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