Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and nights in a land under
siege
Amira Hass
Translated by: Elana Wesley and Maxine
Kaufman-Lacusta
New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and
Company, 1999 (translation)
US$ 29
Available from: Bookshop at the American
Colony, telefax: 02-6279731,
email: usbooks@palnet.com
In 1993, Amira Hass, an Israeli woman reporter,
drove to Gaza to cover a story-and stayed for four years. Hass 
was
the first journalist to live in the grim Palestinian enclave, so feared
and despised by many 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 re- flects on what she has seen in Gaza's gutted streets
and destitute refugee camps. Drinking the Sea at Gaza maps the zones of
ordi- nary Palestinian life. Hass gives voice to Gaza's doctors and housewives,
its taxi drivers, farmers, and Islamic leaders. From her friends, she learns
the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and steal- ing through night
streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early eu- phoria over the
Oslo ne- gotiations and its subse- quent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting
hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Pal-
estinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized
but eloquent, spiritually resil- ient, 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.
was
the first journalist to live in the grim Palestinian enclave, so feared
and despised by many 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 re- flects on what she has seen in Gaza's gutted streets
and destitute refugee camps. Drinking the Sea at Gaza maps the zones of
ordi- nary Palestinian life. Hass gives voice to Gaza's doctors and housewives,
its taxi drivers, farmers, and Islamic leaders. From her friends, she learns
the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and steal- ing through night
streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early eu- phoria over the
Oslo ne- gotiations and its subse- quent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting
hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Pal-
estinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized
but eloquent, spiritually resil- ient, 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.