Asked what is the secret of her being drawn to Gaza in 1993, Amira
Hass writes: "What can I do if I am the daughter of refugees saved
from the Nazis? I took in my mother's stories to the extent that it
seemed to me that I was there: a prisoner of the German Gestapo in
Yugoslavia, taken in the summer of 1944 to the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in West Germany. When she and the others were
taken off the cattle wagon and led by foot to the camp, she noticed
German women riding comfortably on their bicycles, with a food
basket on the back of their seat, watching those being led off with
a dull, apathetic curiosity.
"On the way out of the Gaza Strip and its fences," she continues,
"one travels by Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz named after Mordechai
Anielewitz, leader of the Warsaw ghetto revolt. (1) The journey
takes five minutes, but it is as if Gaza, the refugee camps and the
people hungry for freedom there, don't exist. There in the kibbutz
roadside inn, a reply drawn from the experience of my parents,
refugees who were saved from the Nazis, is constantly reshaped
within me: I won't be with those who were riding the
bicycles."
These were the concluding words of an article called "Gaza,
Contours of Peace," which Amira Hass wrote in this journal in our
Winter 1996 issue. However, the identical theme is repeated in her
introduction to the book, if in slightly different words: in the
book, the cyclists became "a loathsome symbol of watching from the
sidelines, and at an early age I decided that my place was not
with the bystanders"(this reviewer's emphasis, here and above).
In her book she explains that her desire to live in Gaza stemmed
from that dread of being a bystander, from her parents' legacy of
"resisting injustice, speaking out and fighting back."
Why Gaza? Because she understood Gaza as "our exposed nerve,
embodying the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict… the central contradiction of the State of Israel -
democracy for some, dispossession for others. I needed to know the
people whose lives have been forgotten by my society and my
history, whose parents and grandparents, refugees, were forced from
their villages in 1948." And while the popular Israeli image of
Gaza was "savage, violent and hostile to Jews," the writer, who
always let it be known to the Gazans that she was an Israeli and a
Jew, notes that she "felt at home there, in the temporary
permanence, in the longing that clings to every grain of sand, in
the rage that thrives in the alleyways." Yitzhak Rabin said of
Gaza, "If only it would just sink into the sea," and Yasser Arafat
declared that those who oppose the Palestinian dream of an
independent Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem "can go
drink the sea at Gaza." Hass used this phrase for her title.
Written in Hebrew in 1996, Drinking the Sea at Gaza received
first-class reviews both in its Hebrew and its subsequent English
editions. The English translators, for their part, did an excellent
job. As for this reviewer, he usually marks in yellow those lines
in a book which are particularly significant and worthy of comment;
however, this method didn't work here because it turned out that
there was more yellow than white. Some of the material in the book
was first published in the daily Ha'aretz, for whom Amira Hass (44)
is a correspondent. Hastily written articles in a daily paper often
contain more than a little repetition but there is no such
"padding" in this book and it is extremely readable, with a freely
flowing narrative. It is a long book simply because it has much to
say.
Yet Drinking the Sea at Gaza is not an easy book to define.
As a journalist who went to live in Gaza in 1993, Amira Hass covers
the whole range of events there before and after the Intifada
(December 1987), and the coming of Arafat's Palestinian Authority
in May 1994. The book contains a wealth of information, including
statistics, on all aspects of life in densely populated Gaza, where
in 1948, 200,000 out of the over 700,000 Palestinian refugees found
shelter, outnumbering the original population.
Some of figures quoted on the period of Israeli occupation are mind
boggling: since 1967, 280,000 Gazans passed through Israeli
prisons, 80,000 during the Intifada; in the year 1988, 2,285 people
were shot in the head, 7,049 severely beaten, and 3,196 suffered
ill effects from inhaling tear gas. UNRWA figures show that in 4
years since August 1989, 1,085 people treated in its clinics had
been shot in the head, including 545 under the age of 16 and 97
children under the age of 6. According to the Palestinian
Physicians for Human Rights, during the 5 years of the Intifada, a
child under the age of 6 was shot every two weeks.
Speaking of health, 15 pages of the book are devoted to
illustrating how, in case after case, the inadequate health
facilities left by the Israelis in May 1994, after more than a
quarter of a century of occupation, necessitate urgent, sometimes
life or death, treatment in the more advanced Israeli medical
services. Hass quotes many cases like that of a baby who had
undergone eye surgery, adults requiring eye surgery, cancer
patients needing radiation treatment (this is not available in
Gaza), heart patients, paraplegics, etc., whose requests to enter
Israel for treatment are refused or delayed by the Israel
Coordination and Liaison Office (CLO). The patients are
Palestinians but it is the CLO which has the last word on entry
permits. The Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli organization
which tries to help the applicants, says that, for every case
handled, there are dozens who don't even know where to turn.
Restrictions preventing physicians from moving between Gaza, the
West Bank and Jerusalem also aggravate the way in which this dismal
situation threatens the health of the residents of Gaza, an area
where, in 1997, 40.4 percent of the population were living below
the poverty line and 15 percent of children under 5 showed signs of
malnutrition (caused not by a lack of food but by poverty,
pollution and poor distribution of resources).
Individual Lives
However, this book is far more than the work of a journalist
assigned a story and reporting diligently on the facts and figures.
The essence of Amira Hass's book in this reviewer's evaluation is
that the history and the politics of the period are primarily
conveyed through their impact on the lives of individual Gazans who
confided in the author, be they ordinary people, families engaged
in a grim daily struggle to make ends meet, or leaders from
different political streams. In telling all these stories, Amira
Hass gives a close human dimension to what is not, for the most
part, new material in itself.
I remember a book, which was to become a classic, about the Jewish
shtetl (Yiddish for small town) in Eastern Europe before the Second
World War, called Life Is with People. Amira Hass's book
could bear the same name. This sort of approach can only succeed,
as the author writes, first, because of "all the people in Gaza and
in its refugee camps who taught me about the [Gaza] Strip, hosted
me, accepted me as I am, and helped me," and, second, because "more
than anything else, they gave me the opportunity to experience the
humanity that can flourish under harsh and humiliating
circumstances." It is the combination of these two factors that
gives Drinking the Sea at Gaza its unique flavor.
The book is subtitled Days and Nights in a Land under Siege.
The Gaza Strip inhabitants saw themselves as living in a huge
prison, where their freedom of movement is denied and where leaving
even for a day requires a Kafkaesque process of screening and
permits in the sacred name of Israeli "security." At the infamous
Erez checkpoint, established in 1994, workers line up from 1 a.m.
in order to pass, from 3 a.m., through 5 Palestinian and Israeli
screening stations into Israel, perhaps ending their working day
some 15 hours later. When there is total closure there is no
movement at all but, otherwise, those who get to work in Israel are
the lucky ones, since they are, at least, able to provide for their
families.
Though they have been refugees for over 50 years, Hass writes that
the refugees in Gaza retain "an enduring sense of connection" to
the homes and the villages which they left behind in Israel. An
officer in the new Palestinian security force asks a civilian clerk
where he is from. The clerk replies that he is from Dimra, though
he actually lives in the Jabalya refugee camp. Asked where he is
from, the officer, who lives in the al-Boureij camp, replies
"al-Batani." Both these were destroyed villages in the Gaza
district under Israel, and both men were born in the Gaza Strip and
know of the villages only from their parents and grandparents. Thus
they maintain "an individual and collective inner truth that
refuses to die." Many entertain fantasies of returning to their
former homes, but when one family delayed enlarging their house,
even though they had the money, until 1994, the father explained
bitterly that it took the Oslo agreement to finally convince him
that he won't be returning to his village. The author thinks that
the refugees won't forget the pain of expulsion, but they will
accept a peaceful political solution as long as it honors their
rights and their dignity.
Limitations of space don't allow us to dwell on Amira Hass's
writing on a host of other important subjects like the role of
women in Gaza's patriarchal society, the centrality of the family
and the norm of large families, the Israeli prison experience, the
still-painful issue of returning the remaining prisoners from
Israeli jails, and various expressions of what she calls "the long
tradition of post-revolutionary disappointment."
Gaza, as we have noted, is one of the poorest places in the world
and, in 1994, about half the Strip's GNP was earned in Israel,
where wages, however low, are three times higher than in Gaza. One
Gazan, arbitrarily refused entry into Israel, had a fantasy of
kidnapping an Israeli soldier, but he wouldn't demand in exchange
the release of Palestinian prisoners or more effective
negotiations: "To hell with the negotiations," he says, "I just
want my work permit back." In imposing such economic dependence,
Hass sees Israel as being unable after Oslo "to shake off the
imperious, supremacist style of rule enforced [on the Strip] since
1948," when it was under Egyptian rule.
Responses to Occupation
Hass thinks that, contrary to the stereotype, the people of Gaza
are "not hotheaded but patient and slow to anger, their powers of
endurance bordering on apathy." This only goes to make the outbreak
of the Intifada, which started in 1987 in the Jabalya refugee camp
in the Gaza Strip, more remarkable. Amira Hass writes extensively
on Hamas and quotes one of their activists as saying that "if
Israel had recognized the PLO after it declared Palestinian
independence in 1988, there wouldn't be any Hamas." She discusses
Palestinian terror attacks against Israel on several occasions,
expressing the view that in their wake "every Gazan, regardless of
religion, sex or age, became suspect, a person capable of
committing an act of terror. But… resistance and terror are
responses to occupation [by a] foreign ruler," and "stopping terror
involves recognizing its social, economic and historical context,
and alleviating human suffering." "The attacks in February and
March 1996 which killed 57 Israelis have not changed my opinion or
that of the minority of Israelis who share this view."
Most Israelis probably justify collective punishment against the
population in which the terrorists live; were they to read Amira
Hass, they may not change their opinion, but at least they would
understand what collective punishment really means - not as a
nebulous generalization about security and deterrence, but as a
policy determining the everyday life of millions of men, women and
children who pay for a crime with which they have personally had no
connection. While Palestine was under the British Mandate, in the
1940s, the British general Barker - who said that in fighting
Jewish terrorism, we should hit the Jews where it hurts most, in
their pockets - was accused of anti-Semitism. Though the Israelis
did not make a similar announcement, the closure policies had the
very same result for the hard-up pockets of the Palestinians.
We have seen that though the political situation changed, Gazans
still felt "imprisoned" after 1994, when the Palestinian Authority
took over and ended direct Israeli occupation. Hass is at her best
when she explains the meaning in human terms to people and families
from all walks of life of the closures with which Israel responded
to Palestinian terror - confining some 1 million people to a
147-square-mile strip, with no exit to Israel, to Egypt or to the
West Bank. Because this collective punishment caused such massive
hardship in so many aspects of life in Gaza, she claims that
"'Oslo' and 'the peace process' [became] synonymous with mass
internment and suffocating constriction." Elsewhere she compares
the thin trickle of salty water available in Khan Yunis with the
plentiful flow of cool and sweet water in the Jewish settlement of
Neve Dekalim and writes that the water had "an aftertaste, the
bitter flavor - I couldn't help but imagine - of apartheid."
However, she also directs harsh criticism at the Palestinian
Authority's regime of "creeping encroachment on Palestinian
freedom." She notes, for example, the Authority's policy of
arbitrary arrests (which she compares with Israel's policy of
administrative detention [detention without trial] following terror
attacks against Israel early in 1996. She asks if this is part of
what she bitterly calls "the Palestinian Authority's imported style
of government," whether it is intended to force people's political
and ideological capitulation, and to what extent it was the result
of Israeli pressure. She concludes that "as long as the rift
continues to grow between a ruling Palestinian elite that has not
kept its promises and a people whose elementary hopes have been
crushed, this leadership will continue to depend on
intimidation."
A Soldier Called Yigal
Here and there, Amira Hass surprised this reader with some
unexpected item. For instance, the tale of a soldier called Yigal
in the army's Golani Brigade serving in 1991 in the Jabalya refugee
camp, who stood out for his ability to catch children on the street
during curfew, or to use his rifle to tear down washing lines
hanging between the houses in the alleyways, and pull down the
clothes. He urged all the soldiers to do this, until given orders
to stop. A fellow soldier told a reporter how they "beat the
hell"out of suspects and, once, Yigal "caught this guy and saw in
his papers that he had been in jail, so we all really went to
town."
The soldier was Yigal Amir, who was to assassinate prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. Amira Hass adds: "In the end Amir,
who had brutalized Palestinians as if born to it, turned his animus
on Rabin, who had once given him license to do so." This
observation is factually true, for it was Rabin as defense minister
who gave the order to suppress the Intifada through "might, force
and beating." Even so, some may perhaps see Hass's comment as too
harsh.
Though there may be some light at the end of the tunnel in glimpses
of humanity which break through here and there in relations between
Israelis and Palestinians, Amira Hass paints the picture as a whole
in somber colors. She doubts whether in view of Israel's overall
superiority - political, military, economic and geographic - a
peace agreement will allow the weaker (and in her view misruled)
Palestinian party to win equal rights or the application of
principles of universal justice. In her view, "effectively Israel
has declared that Palestinian prospects will always be subjugated
to Jewish needs, desires and strength."
Heroes of Journalism
In Boston in May 2000, Amira Hass was declared a World Press
Freedom hero, one of the 50 journalists chosen from all over the
world by the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI). The
IPI surveys press freedom in the world and supports journalists
whose defense of a free press, regardless of prevailing public
opinion, endangered their lives in repressive regimes. They are
called the century's heroes of journalism. The Palestinian
journalist who won the award was Daoud Kuttab, a member of the
Journal's editorial board since its inception.
Though her work in Gaza was carried out in difficult and even
dangerous conditions, it is doubtful whether Amira Hass sees
herself primarily as a hero of journalism. Nevertheless,
Drinking the Sea at Gaza is a fine example of genuine,
committed and uncompromising journalism. Such an outstanding book
and its author deserve recognition from abroad. It would be even
better if, at home, her call for equality between Palestinians in
Gaza and the people of Israel were taken to heart.
(1) In his last letter to the outside in 1943, Anielewitz
(24) wrote before he died that the revolt "fulfilled the last
desire in my life… I am happy to have been among the first
Jewish fighters in the ghetto."Why Gaza?