Sderot & Gaza

On Monday we traveled to Sderot, a town of approximately 20,000 people, in the southwest of Israel, less than a mile from the border with Gaza. Because of its proximity, Sderot has born the brunt of rocket fire from Gaza over the years. Since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, the frequency of these rockets has increased significantly. In 2002, around 500 rockets were fired, injuring ten, while this year over 2,000 rockets have been fired, killing four people and wounding 258.

Many residents have understandably left town. Shop owners pointed out windows that they’d had to replace, damage to the paint and plaster, and complained of the decline in business and the cost of repairs. When asked how many people in the town had been affected by the rockets, one waitress responded, ’20,000,’ the entire population of the town.

Of course it is terrible to live in a constant state of red alert, knowing that at any moment the alarm siren could go off, giving you 15 seconds to get to cover before a rocket hits. No one should live in that kind of fear.

But I wished that the people of Sderot could speak with the Palestinians who also live in constant fear. The families in the refugee camps who know that every night the IDF will come around arresting people, that fathers and brothers could be held indefinitely without charges in ‘administrative detention,’ that anyone could be caught in the crossfire of a ‘targeted assassination’ or a missile strike; or the hundreds of families, citizens of East Jerusalem, who have been forced to build their homes ‘illegally’ because Israel grants less than 50 building permits a year to thousands of residents and who could any day go off to work and come home to find their homes demolished; the villagers who could wake up to find their olive trees cut down or their children attacked on the way to school by fanatic settlers.

But unfortunately there is an 8m wall and an entire system of indoctrination and selective information between the people of Sderot and an understanding of the Palestinian people. Consequently on display in Sderot was the most blatant kind of racism: Palestinians are “all the same,” “primitive,” “Neanderthals,” “you can’t reason with them.” Given that opinion of the other side, their pessimism regarding the peace process was not surprising. Everyone we spoke with was convinced that the current cease-fire was doomed to fail and/or was just a ruse by Hamas to buy time to gather more weapons. “They don’t want peace. What can we do?”

In that moment he reminded me of Sari and his friends in Qalqilya who voiced the same refrain: ‘What can we do?’

We did an interview on Wednesday with Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, who remarked on the parallels between Israeli and Palestinian sentiments and the failure on both sides to recognize those parallels. He said that opinion polls have clearly demonstrated that a large majority of both Palestinians and Israelis are in favor of a negotiated peace agreement. Yet the same polls also demonstrate that neither side believes the other wants peace.

Each side places full blame on the other, and neither will acknowledge the role of their own behavior in perpetuating the conflict. Each side believes itself to be the innocent victim and therefore completely justified in doing whatever is necessary to defend people and country from a perceived threat of annihilation.

And it is true, both sides have suffered, both are victims. But what separates them for me are the simple facts of scale.

In the nine years since the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000, 1,057 Israelis (723 civilians) have been killed by Palestinians; 4,862 Palestinians (3,146 civilians) have been killed by Israelis.

Included in the civilian numbers are children. 123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians in the past nine years. 1,050 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis in the same time period. (Please see http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/remember2008.html for the names, ages, and circumstances of the deaths of each of these children).

As of July 2008, 4 Israeli children and 72 Palestinian children had been killed.

Of the 72 children killed this year, 67 were from Gaza.

Gaza is under siege. Launching a rocket offensive against the civilian population of Sderot is not excusable, but the militants of Hamas are fighting a war for independence without an army. The Sderot police station has a collection of some of the rockets fired, which prove them to be a shoddy assortment soldered together from leftover pipes and filled with scrap metal.

The Israelis are armed not only with one of the most advanced armies and air forces in the world, but with bulldozers, with walls, and with zoning laws.

Hamas is throwing stones at a giant, perhaps hoping that one will take out his eye, but the stones are doing nothing but making the giant angry. In 2006, a year after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier, causing the IDF to return in force. Rather than negotiate for his release, in what was known as Operation Summer Rain, the IDF leveled what remained of the infrastructure of the country, leaving over 400 civilians dead – one in five of them children. Do I support the kidnapping of soldiers? Of course not. But is this the value of one Israeli captive? Was this a proportionate response?

Israel has every right to preserve its security, but I and many others doubt that the occupation is really in the best interests of Israel’s security. The violence involved in perpetuating the occupation only begets more violence. From the Combatant’s Letter, “Courage to Refuse,” started in 2002 and since signed by over 600 soldiers (one of several protest letters in recent years):

“We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel…were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people…We shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel’s defense. The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose – and we shall take no part in them.”

The Israelis are afraid to pull out of the West Bank because of the security risk. Many point to the fact that as soon as they left Gaza, the extremists of Hamas took over and rocket fire doubled. After the apparent disaster of the Gaza pullout, they believe a withdrawal from the West Bank is unthinkably risky. But this position ignores the fact that pulling the army out of Gaza didn’t make it free. Gaza is a 365 square kilometer prison; it is completely encircled by a wall, Israel strictly limits everything that goes in or out – people, goods, food, medicine – its infrastructure and economy were left in ruins, and it is to this day subject to regular air strikes. Nor did pulling the army out divorce the people of Gaza from the Palestinian struggle for statehood and the continuing occupation in the West Bank. Support for Hamas rose out of the circumstances Israel created and perpetuates.

Given the circumstances of this withdrawal, I do not think the violence coming out of Gaza poses a fair example of what might happen if Israel were to truly withdraw its occupation of the West Bank and negotiate a sustainable and truly independent state. Were Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank with a just peace, I believe it would find itself more secure rather than less.

In the words of Rabbi Ascherman, “Who is really doing more for Israel’s long term security: the people that demolish the homes and cut down the trees and steal the olives and violate their rights, or those of us who rebuild the homes and replant the trees and help pick the olives and try to protect human rights?”

“The real Zionism today is working for an Israel that is not only physically strong but is morally strong and is living up to our highest Jewish values.”

Love,

Gabriella