The latter two halves of this siyur were profoundly boring, unnecessary, and, frankly, frustrating. But I'll get to those in a second.
I have always wanted to visit Sderot. For those of you who don't know, Sderot is the city in Israel that suffers most heavily from rocket and mortar fire from the Gaza strip. The Operation that Israel undertook a little over a year ago in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, was (arguably) supposed to decrease rocket fire against Sderot. In the past nine years, Sderot has had literally thousands of rockets and mortars fired at it. While the majority of them, due to their technological simplicity, have not killed people, plenty of them do both damage to the city and injury to civilians. To date, 13 people have been killed by Kassam rocket attacks.
In Sderot, there is an alarm warning system for these attacks known as "צבע אדום", "red color." When a tzeva adom siren goes off, citizens have 15 seconds (on average) to try to find shelter before the incoming rocket or mortar lands. Thus most buildings have attached or nearby bomb shelters--not built to withstand a direct hit, but to repel the shrapnel from the explosion. While it's true that the situation could be worse if Hamas (representing the majority of the rocket fire) had better technology, it's still awful--think about the psychological effects this has on the population. The municipality itself estimates that 10-15% of the population has left since the attacks began in 2001. In addition, many kids in the town still wet their beds and sleep with their parents until ages considered older than usual (sometimes even until 18). Although Sderot is in a period of relative peace right now (questionably due to last year's operation), our tour guide told us that the last rocket that fell on the city was this past Sunday. Our first stop on Thursday was right outside of the police station, where the city keeps an infinitesimally small sample of some of the rockets:
After this, we went to a playground. In Sderot, everything has to be designed with the idea that somewhere nearby has to serve as a shelter in case of a tzeva adom. Thus this playground had a caterpillar play structure built to double as a shelter:
I don't really know how much there is to say about this. Its existence kind of speaks for itself.
The last thing we did before lunch was walk to the top of a low hill on the West side of town to see just how close Sderot is to Gaza (less than a mile):
That's Gaza. Admittedly, my camera has pretty good zoom, but it's damn close. :P
Of course, there's an obvious question to be asked here: if these people are suffering from the attacks so much, why not just move? I have always thought that if Israelis moved away from every area that Hamas could hit with rockets, it would not only be a sign of tremendous weakness but also eventually force us to move out of Israel (current estimates say that Hamas has rockets which can hit Tel Aviv, after all). In addition, families have been living in this town for generations--it's not so easy to just up and leave. Scott and I asked our tour guide what he thought, though, and he brought up an interesting point I didn't know about. For families that do want to leave, it's almost impossible: the housing market here is terrible (sometimes down as much as 50% of the national average), making it almost impossible to sell real estate here and move somewhere else with the money. The tour we got was, of course, pretty biased, as it only talked about the situation of those in Sderot, thus it's also important to remember what happens to the people in Gaza, too. It was cool to be so close to it...maybe someday I will be able to visit (not in military uniform).
The most messed up thing about the siyur in Sderot, though, was that the whole time I (and I was not the only one) was thinking to myself that, were a rocket to fall and a tzeva adom go off while we were there, it would easily be the best and most exciting siyur we'd ever been on. I guess this is easy to say when you don't live there--and it would be terrible if that theoretical rocket hurt anyone, but it's within our nature to be curious of the experience. I say "our nature," because everyone else who I asked about this basically responded with "yeah, I was thinking that, too."
Now, on to less serious and less interesting things:
At Yad Mordechai, a honey kibbutz nearby, we did nothing with honey. Disappointing. We heard about the story of the kibbutz's namesake, which was so lackluster and bland that I have forgotten it literally two days later. We then went to an equally uninteresting museum before leaving the kibbutz. It's not that I don't appreciate history, just that this was not worthwhile.
After that, in Nitsan, our dead-from-boredom horse was beaten a bit more by an old woman with some videos of people who lived in Gush Katif (an area in Gaza) before the 2005 disengagement. This part of the siyur was literally her talking to us for 10 minutes and then watching 20 minutes of video of people reminiscing about their lives in Gush Katif and crying, wishing to someday return to their old homes within the Gaza strip. While I feel bad for the people that were forcibly removed, I don't think we should be there, and that ultimately the disengagement was a good idea. This is a complex and long argument to be had, however.
When we finally got home on Thursday, it was about 7, and we ended up pretty much relaxing in the apartment that night. Later on, we hung out at Lizzy's for a while with various people (one of which was Andrew, back from Marva for the weekend, whose company I greatly enjoyed) before heading back home to sleep.
Friday morning, I awoke and went to the bus stop to go to Be'er Sheva to get to my grandparent's house in Netanya. I had initially planned to take a bus to Be'er Sheva and then a train the rest of the way, but this is not what happened at all. While waiting on the bus (which I had awoken late for), three more random people showed up at the bus stop, and we sat for about 10 minutes all together before one of them hailed a taxi and informed us that we could all go to Be'er Sheva in it for 12 shekels. I figured since the bus costs 10 shekels and wasn't coming for another half an hour, why not? Thus I took a quiet taxi with 3 strangers to Be'er Sheva for a mere two shekels more.
Upon arriving in Be'er Sheva, I found that the train station was mysteriously closed, so I ended up taking a bus to one of the Tel Aviv train stations. From there, I took a short train ride to Netanya. That night, I had Shabbat dinner with my grandparents and Uncle Yuval's family, which was good as usual. Then today I woke up late, did some laundry, and it started to rain a bit. I'm going to return to Arad pretty soon, it's been nice to have a relaxing weekend with full meals. :) שבת שלום to everyone, I hope all is well and we talk soon!
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