JustASC

Just back from a three-day fact-finding mission in Sderot and Ashkelon. Some quick thoughts:

Quiet streets at noon. Damaged buildings. Residents living as emotional refugees.

The crisis in Sderot is a slow motion Katrina, playing out over seven years and thousands of missiles.

I don’t know what you do or don’t know about Sderot, a town a little over an hour from Tel Aviv, but more importantly within crude rocket range from the border with northern Gaza. Before I spent two days there this week, I thought I had a pretty good picture of the toll the almost daily bombardment of Kassam and Grad rockets, fired from Gaza, had taken on this one-time development town. I had heard the stories of the “tseva adom” sirens that wan of an incoming attack, the 15-second scramble for shelter in safe rooms and makeshift shelters (if you’re lucky - if not, your best best is to lay flat on the ground, or dive under a desk or table). I had heard of quiet efforts to staunch the slow but steady exodus of residents with the means to get out, and the services, funded in large part by Diaspora Jews, to help those who stay cope with their fear and emotional trauma.

I’d also been aware that Sderot is a town on Israel’s periphery, its residents, mostly new immigrants and their children, feeling ignored by a government and fellow Israelis who might otherwise be forgiven for being distracted by the cultural pulse and economic vitality of the country’s center.

You can know all this, and still be drawn up short by the nearly empty streets of a weekday morning, a time when a typical Israeli town or city is alive with commuters setting off to work, shopkeepers rolling down their canopies, and children marching off the school under the weight of their backpacks. Sderot is much bigger and much less scruffy than I imagined, which made the ghost-town atmosphere only more poignant.

But there is life in Sderot, and the next surprise was the deep wells of resilience that were being tapped by the residents I met. I visited Sderot as the guest of the United Jewish Communities, which together with its partners, the Jewish Agency for Israelad and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, has spent some $19 million fromits Israel Emergency Fund (a fund launched in response to the Second Lebanon war, well to the north, but which needed to be as flexible as Israel’s antagonists).

UJC and JDC officials introduced me and a number of my colleagues in the Jewish media to the team of therapists, psychologists, and volunteers who are helping residents cope. Most talk of post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that loses its utility when the trauma never seems to beome “post.”

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.