by JUDITH COLP RUBIN

After three years as the only Israeli journalist living in Gaza, Amira Hass talks about life in Arafat's kingdom by the sea.

Amira Hass is exasperated when told how brave she was to live alone for three years in the Gaza Strip. "Israelis should ask themselves why they would think this," says the former Gaza correspondent for the Ha'aretz daily. "Gazans know Israelis. They look at us as three-dimensional, and not one-dimensional, creatures. They know us better than we know them."

Not so Hass, the only journalist to have both lived and worked openly as an Israeli in Arafat's Gaza. In a new book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza, published (in Hebrew) by Kibbutz Ha'meuchad, she describes in detail her life in a place most of her countrymen know only through the eyes of soldiers and the General Security Service.

As she sips a late-night coffee in her Tel Aviv apartment, the 40-year-old Hass exhibits equal measures of sympathy and toughness. She is dressed severely in black pants and a black jacket, with the only color coming from a small felt rose-pin and a rust-colored, fringed scarf tied around her neck keffiyeh-style. Her hair is short, dark and curly, and she is bespectacled. In moments of contemplative silence, she pulls at several silver rings on her fingers.

Her knowledge of Gaza < all gleaned on the job < is as impressive as any academic's. She can reel off numbers and statistics, and the hometowns of Hamas activists. Her tremendous sympathy for the Palestinian plight becomes quickly apparent, and she is quick to sour when she believes anyone is "practicing an ideology of racism and superiority." But she smarts at any suggestion that such strong political beliefs might have adversely affected her reporting.

"The test of the journalist is to present reality as it is," says Hass. "Many people know today that what I wrote three years ago is accurate."

The title of her book comes from a favorite saying of Yasser Arafat, that anyone who opposes a Palestinian state can "drink from the sea of Gaza" < in other words: "go to hell."

"It's a title on many different levels which I let the reader play with," says Hass. "One level is how the dreams and visions of Gazans have not been fulfilled. Another is how I shared with them the hard times. But I also mock Israelis who say 'Go to Gaza,' (Lech le'Aza) as a way of saying 'Go to hell.'"(Lech le'azazel)

Hass takes a "sociological approach" in her writings, attempting to show the human side of the problems among the sizable refugee population. As the child of European refugees herself, she says she empathizes with the Palestinians' plight.

"It was a indelible discovery to see all this suffering and misery, and amid it all meet great people who have big hopes. There's a cynical self-humor among Gazans that I find very touching. They don't take themselves too seriously."

For example, when a friend from a refugee camp wanted to buy her car, Hass initially agreed, then changed her mind. "I've made two big mistakes in my life," said her friend. "One, that I was born; the other that I made an agreement with a Jewish woman. According to the Koran, one shouldn't make an agreement with a Jew because it doesn't stand up."

Hass tells the story with a laugh. "It's a kind of black or ghetto humor. It's a joke with many levels < it mocks tradition while expressing the sense that there's no meaning to life. As a child of Holocaust survivors, I can relate to it."

She also witnessed moments of pure joy among the Palestinians, such as when the Israeli army redeployed from Gaza two years ago. Hass was in the Jabalya refugee camp, which was celebrating the first time in years there was no curfew. She remembers the air was heavy with the smell of frying falafel, and the residents driving into Gaza City when it was pitch-dark because it was still under curfew.

"The difference was so sharp and I felt my friends were testing this new life at night," says Hass. She quickly adds, "It was normal to go out, everybody goes out. It's a Mediterranean culture. People revert to normal behavior very quickly."

Hass believes Gaza's problems are linked to economics. The closure imposed by Israel, she says, affects all spheres of society and shows the extent to which, despite the peace agreement, Israel "still controls the lives of Palestinians."

"I met a couple, she's 35, he's 50. She got a permit to receive fertility treatments and he didn't," says Hass. "I really came across such things every day: students who couldn't go to study, women who couldn't visit their grandchildren, sick people who couldn't get treatment. The whole nation has a permanent sense of feeling dishonored."

In particularly tragic cases, Hass says she tried to intervene. When the mother of Gazan friends was dying in a Tel Aviv hospital, Hass helped obtain visiting permits for the woman's husband and daughter.

Writing about Gaza was a natural outgrowth of Hass's upbringing.

Her mother, Hannah, was born in Sarajevo. A partisan fighter during World War II, she was captured by the Germans and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She later published a diary of her experiences during the war during the 1960s. Her father, Avraham, spent the war in a Romanian ghetto where the harsh winter froze off his toes.

As an only child growing up in Jerusalem, and later Tel Aviv, Hass says the Holocaust was a natural part of her childhood. "I never had the guilt or shame complex that other children [of Holocaust survivors] have."

Her parents taught her "never to pose questions to the victim." When her mother's book was published in Germany, an interviewer asked Hannah Hass, "How the Jews could be killed like that?"

Says Hass:"I remember her responding, 'How could the Germans kill like this?' You always have to refer the question not to the victim, but to the victimizer."

Equally important to her parents' identity was their membership in the Communist Party. Hass was "a red-diaper baby," who grew up immersed in Communist ideology and she learned a philosophy that still permeates her rhetoric and thinking. As a child, she attended demonstrations denouncing the military rule which was still being maintained in heavily Arab-populated sections of Israel. When Hass was five, she was playing with a group of friends in Jerusalem when the mother in charge noticed one [Image] child was not playing. When the mother asked why, the girl said, "Amira does not allow me to play." Shocked, the mother asked why. "I said, 'Of course she can't play, because she wants to pretend to kill Arabs,' " Hass recalls.

She was working on a degree in Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until she decided to drop the subject. "When you're a child you tend to accept things. I grew up grasping how terrible it was. But I came to a point where I just couldn't bear it anymore."

Looking for a job, she found a position as a subeditor at Ha'aretz in 1989. She also dabbled in reporting, and when the Communist government fell in Romania, Hass parlayed her childhood knowledge and contacts there into an assignment for the newspaper.

She was also involved with issues back home, and volunteered to assist the Workers' Hotline, a group advocating the rights of Palestinian laborers. During the intifada, Hass started visiting the West Bank and Gaza. "Before that, I thought you didn't have to see the occupation to really know it."

Although Hass has taken Arabic courses, her knowledge of the language is still very rough and she does most of her interviews in Hebrew and English. In 1993 she became Ha'aretz's correspondent in Gaza. She decided to move there, and the newspaper picked up the tab for her accommodation. She still marvels that anyone would wonder that it wasn't "easier and logical," to live there.

"How can you write about Gaza if you don't taste night curfew, shootings in the middle of the night far away and waking up at 4 a.m. with the muzzein and IDF soldiers shouting?"

For the first few months, Hass lived like a "gypsy," staying at the homes of various friends. Palestinian Authority Council member member Haydar Abd al-Shafi was one of the first to accept her. Such contacts provided not only lodgings, but helped dispel any suggestions that Hass was someone who could not be trusted.

"It was important to live in other homes," she notes. "That helped to gain people's trust; it was my personal calling card."

Hass eventually rented an apartment in Gaza's fashionable Rimal neighborhood. She took other foreign women as roommates since the apartments there, built for big families, are large and hard to clean. Her first apartment was a mere $250 a month, although prices rose after the Oslo accords.

Hass says her biggest frustration was dealing with Gaza's not infrequent electricity shortages and dead phone lines that almost led to a journalist's worst nightmare < missing deadlines. But that only happened once during three years of nearly daily reporting, which included the end of Israeli occupation, civil strife and the rise of the suicide bombers.

While in the beginning she may have been a "curiosity," to the Palestinians, Hass found that just as she was "very natural with them, they were very natural with me." Although she was up front about her Israeli identity, she found her status as a single woman often more difficult to deal with than her nationality. In the beginning, she felt most comfortable veiling her face, saying "it was not up to me to lead the feminist struggle in Gaza."

She notes that the extent to which Gazan women wore the veil was an "index of hope," reflecting the political situation. "When there is a tangible hope for a better life, you see the power of Hamas to force women to go veiled is much weaker. When hope is very concrete, you don't need promises of paradise. Just before the transfer of authority, the sale of hair products and cosmetics increased, because women who go without the veil have to take more care of their hair."

Hass did have her share of run-ins with the Palestinian Authority. An April 1995 article she wrote suggesting that the Palestinian High Court for State Security was frightening people and not preventing terrorist attacks, drew her a summons before a PA police officer who claimed there were technical problems with her press card and told her to leave Gaza. "We can no longer protect you," he told her. "Who knows what will happen to you or your car?"

But several friends, including PA officials, intervened on Hass's behalf, and within three days the issue was dropped.

One of her goals has been to expand her readers' knowledge "beyond the same three people who are known to the Israeli media, because everyone thinks they represent Gaza." Hass does not regret never having interviewed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, believing that she would have gotten little more than slogans from the meeting. She was rarely turned down for an interview with any other Palestinian, but was denied several requests to speak with the heads of the former Israeli Civil Administration in Gaza

"I think they rejected my requests because they knew that I'm very familiar with the situation there and my questions would make them uncomfortable," she says.

Hass is now planning her next move to Ramallah, where she will report on the West Bank. In the meantime, she is dealing with the requisit interviews and book parties spurred by the release of Drinking the Sea at Gaza.

As for leaving Gaza behind, she says "It became tiring, that's all. I didn't plan on moving to Gaza forever. I missed going to films and concerts in the evening and driving 80 kilometers just like that. Gaza is a big jail and you are confined to [a very small] area. People can't move. They see television and they're connected to the Internet, and they see the big difference between what life offers, and what actually happens in reality."