(I
penned this comprehensive feature a few months ago during a day-long
visit to cities and towns adjacent to the border with the Gaza Strip
in the wake of yet another series of terrorist-launched rocket salvos
on Israeli cities, towns and villages on a 40-kilometer radius of the
coastal enclave. Due to the significant differences between the versions, owing to external editing, I'm reproducing the original here in light of the
near-constant steel rain on southern Israel since then, including two
to three rockets on Sunday, Aug. 26th, which slammed into two
factories in Sderot. If you choose to reproduce this, I kindly
request you use it all, without additions, and with my full name and
website: http://www.davidbrianbender.com - DB)
Southern
Israel: like bomb shelters with revolving doors
by
Dave Bender
One
of three Grad rockets fired by Gaza militants at Beersheba Wednesday
evening evaded the Israeli army's Iron Dome anti-missile system,
wounding one resident and sending 20 others into traumatic shock. The
other two were downed in open areas outside the city.
Air
Force craft later hit a rocket launching pad in northern Gaza, and an
arms smuggling tunnel in the south, the army said, confirming direct
hits. There were no reports of Palestinian casualties.
Despite
attempts by Israelis within a 40 kilometers radius of the Gaza Strip
to return to the “new normal,” rocket attacks since Tuesday's
informal Egyptian-brokered “cease fire” between Israel and
Palestinian militants left many wondering just when the first half of
the term “cease fire” would actually begin.
Seven
mortars hit coastal Ashkelon and Ashdod that morning, and a
Grad-model Katyusha slammed down in Netivot, east of the coastal
enclave, the same night night.
By
Wednesday evening, officials in the three cities rescinded an
announcement a day earlier for close to 200,000 students to return to
school, closed since Sunday.
An
editorial cartoon in the morning's Maariv Hebrew daily may have
summed up dizzying violence best: A family is seen exiting a
building's revolving door, above which a sign reads: “Protected
Space” – a bomb shelter.
Assessing
both internal and external damage
One
Beersheba resident I spoke with on Monday was so distressed over the
200-plus rockets fired into her city since last Friday, that she
broke into tears just enumerating her experiences.
“What
I feel right now is just totally, totally drained,” Barbara
Carter said after Wednesday's salvo.
“We
were eating pizza when the siren sounded, and when we came back
upstairs (from taking shelter on a lower floor of her apartment
building) I said I felt like I was going to throw up,” said Carter,
who is a retired American immigrant.
“I'm
very discouraged and disappointed that our government isn't doing
something; but at the same time I understand the ramifications of
going into Gaza,” she
said of a possible ground foray to halt the rocket fire made by army
southern Command chief, Maj.-Gen. Tal Russo.
"There
is no magic solution to the rocket fire from Gaza,” Russo said,
noting that, “There might be situations in which we would need
to launch a larger operation,” according to the Ynet news site.
Reporters
visiting the region Wednesday saw glaziers replacing blown out shop
windows from Grad strikes just days earlier, heard city officials
describe near-90 percent drops in business revenues since last
Friday, and toured rocket-pockmarked kibbutz kindergartens with
shrapnel-holed inch-thick security glass windows.
The
current round of violence began on Friday when Israeli Air Force
craft struck and killed a senior operative of the Palestinian Popular
Resistance Committees, preempting a major terrorist attack along the
Israeli-Egyptian border, the army said.
Guns
versus butter
In a
board room at Ashkelon's city hall complex, Mayor Benny Vaknin sits
before a PowerPoint slide showing dotted locations of every rocket
hit across his city over the last few years. The map looks like it
contracted the measles. He offers a thumbnail overview of the steel
rain's economic storm on the city's 120,000 residents.
“For
the last four days – I don't have the exact [figures] … almost
20, 25 percent of the people didn't go to their factories. This
morning I had meetings with all of the heads of the commercial
shopping centers … they told me that all the revenue – their
income – decreased maybe 80 – 85, maybe 90 percent,” Vaknin
said.
Smaller
“mom and pop” shops were especially hard hit by the sharp drop in
walk-in customers.
“We
have here hundreds of small businesses; from what they sell, they
eat. A lot of small businesses, small shops, they don't have a
reserve,”
he says, recalling a similar situation during the month-long
Operation Cast Lead in Dec. 2008,
“when
hundreds of families were in a very poor situation,” and
businesses saw, “tens
of millions”
in
losses.
Vaknin
says the uncertainty over where the next volley of rockets will hit
makes “people prefer to stay home; they are afraid. You know,
in October – in the previous cycle of violence – a man in
Ashkelon was killed. [Moshe Ami] was very famous culturally.” As
well, “Tens of people were wounded; they were outside, so
most of the people [now] prefer to stay home.”
But,
despite the glum present, Vaknin remains undaunted and recalls
agreements reached with Gaza City officials in the 1990s for mutual
municipal infrastructure, and distance-learning projects.
On a
trip with Gaza's mayor to the United States and Germany to raise
matching funds for both cities, “We succeeded to collect one
million dollars in donations from former Israeli Jews in the U.S.,
and started a youth-training project for Gaza and for Ashkelon.”
He
says still holds out hope that such goodwill will not remain a
tattered memory.
“'I
don't despair,'” he told me, 'because I believe that this way, we
can prepare the people for peace.'”
Dr.
Alan Marcus, Ashkelon's Director of Strategic Planning agrees,
despite the complexities of the present “fire-cease-fire” reality
between Israel, and Gaza militants.
“The
minute the feeling is that it is more important to do better for your
own people, instead of killing the other side – whether you have a
formal peace or not – we can do great things for both sides,”
Marcus told me after Vaknin's presentation.
Israeli
hospitals: healing both sides
Not
far from Vaknin's office, Naomi Maximov, a religious woman in her
late 60s sits in her room at the city's Barzilai Hospital.
She
says dozens of missile alerts since last week alone have left her
traumatized, and points to a heavily bandaged leg.
Her
apartment building doesn't have a bomb shelter, so when there are
missile warning sirens she and neighbors take refuge in the stairwell
– the innermost and safest place in the structure. But during one
alert, she tripped and fell running for cover, causing her injury and
hospitalization.
“I
am afraid – terrified,”
she
tells me.
"Even
at the hospital?" I ask.
“Absolutely,”
she
insists,
“I'm going to another hospital for rehabilitation, and if they
don't provide me with a 'safe' room, otherwise I won't sleep there.”
Maximov,
who covers her hair out of religious modesty, says that “Every
night – and I mean EVERY night, I prepare a nightgown, a hair
covering, slippers, and then get into bed. The moment there's a
siren, I run...”
Her
broken hip may heal sooner than her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
brought on by the around-the-clock sirens and explosions.
“I'm
always stressed breathless – 'what will be, what will be, what will
be?' – I'm always tense,”
she says.
Meanwhile,
several floors above, Muhammad Abudana tends to his wife, Kamla, a
cancer patient in her forties who was hospitalized at Barzilai 16
days ago. The two are from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.
Muhammad
requested that Kamla be operated on in Israel rather than at a Gaza
hospital. Authorities on both sides agreed, and the two traveled to
Barzilai for her treatment.
As a
humanitarian gesture, Israel annually accepts thousands of Gazan and
West Bank Palestinians for medical treatment at no cost at hospitals
throughout the country.
Muhammad
says the last few days of fighting between Israel and the
Palestinians was very difficult for him, especially when he had to
run for shelter with everyone else during missile attacks on the
city.
Ironically,
because of those very missile attacks, the hospital is currently
building a massive150 million dollar, 350 bed underground facility.
The facility's four surgical floors will hold ten operating rooms and
a 50-bed, mass-casualty emergency ward.
Coffee,
Kassams, and kindergartens
Carol
Simantov is the nurse at 300-member Kibbutz Nir Oz, next to southern
Gaza. The community's stuccoed one-story homes and schools sit less
than three kilometers (under two miles) from the heavily-guarded
border fence, it's verdant fields lay even closer.
Missile
have been slamming down by them for a decade, and Carol says
one member lost both legs in a rocket attack, and a second died of
wounds.
Standing in front of a pockmarked outer walls of one
of the village's kindergartens, she points to where shrapnel from a
nearby Kassam hit one morning a few days ago. Several steel shards
ricocheted straight through an armored glass window, and sliced
through the ceiling tiles – shortly before the mothers and children
arrived.
Across a footpath a few children play on a
swing hung from branches of a tree that faces the kindergarten.
Fist-sized shrapnel gouged deep into the trunk and roots, and on the
walls of a home a few meters away.
What do you do when a
rocket lands?
“What
do we do?” she
answers with a sigh,
“... now that most of us have home shelters, it's
not as frightening as if it was a war.”But,
she continues,
“If you're out on the streets, it's very difficult because you have
about ten seconds from the siren – it kind of screams at us 'Color
Red! Color Red!' – and that's our code warning. If we're close
enough, we have spread out through the kibbutz oversize sewer pipes
that we can hide in. We have bomb shelters for 'normal life,' –
[but] there's no normal here anymore.”
Simantov,
who immigrated from Pennsylvania several decades ago, recounts a
pastoral, yet jarring image she shares with friends back in the U.S.
“...I
sit on my patio on a summer evening having my coffee, and listen to
the sounds of war in the background,” she
says, laconically.
But
while she admits that life alongside a war zone certainly “isn't
easy,” Simantov says she has no plans for pulling up stakes for
quieter areas further away from the front.
“...they
don't understand why I'm here,”
she says of worried family and friends abroad.
“They
keep saying, 'when are you coming home?' and I say 'I've been here
for 38 years already – so sometime you have to accept that
this is home."
