JustASC

More snapshots from my Sderot trip:

“There is no safe place in the neighborhood,” said Talia Levanon, director of the UJC-backed Israel Trauma Coalition, which brings together some 45 NGOs. “Therapists and patient can run for shelter three times in a session.”

At the Alon Madaaim elementary school, a JDC-funded “Havens of Calm” program leads kids through daily stress reduction exercises that can include yoga and pet care, held behind the blue doors of one of the school’s safe rooms. Six- and seven-year-olds talk with uncanny fluency in the language of self-help, fully aware that the fun and games are techniques to reduce stress before the next siren interrupts their lessons.

At the Sderot community center, Nitai Schreiber, a self-described “social entrepreneur” who helps organize local empowerment projects, showed off the art projects submitted as final exams by his twin, 17-year-old daughters. Nitzan’s shows a typical teen’s room shattered into fragments out of a Dali landscape. Shaked’s depicts a bright globe, full of light, threatened from all directions by black shards. Shaked once asked him, “If I get wounded, will we leave? And if the answer is yes, what are we waiting for?” But Schreiber says he has a responsibility to stay. The urban kibbutz he helped found is his life’s work, as are the 2,000 people touched by the various projects he helps coordinate.

Dan Pe’er, 24, a gym manager at nearby Sapir College, offers a more prosaic response when asked why his Ukrainian immigrant parents stay, despite the alarms that reduce his mother to tears each time she hears them. “My parents are almost 62,” said Pe’er, a gentle athlete who spent a recent summer as a counselor at the NJY Camps in Milford, Pa. “They can’t leave at this stage of their lives. They own their house and no one will buy it. They have no choice but to live with the situation.”

[subhed: The search for solutions

For all this frustration, I was surprised at how few people spoke with the violent emotions that often characterize Mideast debate in the Diaspora. Again and again, I heard residents demand a solution to bombings by Hamas and its affiliates. But when asked what the solution might be, they tended to shrug. Pe’er doubts that there is a purely military solution, but despairs that “there is no one to talk to” on the Arab side. Like others, Pe’er is convinced that were Sderot closer to Israel’s center, a solution would have been found “three to four years ago.” But asked to describe that solution, he too shrugs.

Brig. Gen. (res.) Shalom Harari, who briefed us one night, didn’t have a solution either, but talked about the current policy. The IDF pushes Hamas infiltrators and rocketeers back from the fence, “kidnaps” (Harari’s word) and interrogates Gaza Arabs, sends helicopters to hunt rocket launchers, and imposes blockades on goods and services, like cigarettes and electricity.

I slept one night at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a few hundred yards from the Gaza fence, and heard the crackle of gun fire before sunrise. My host, a 45-year member of the kibbutz, also shrugged, saying it was a nightly occurrence. Three of his grown daughters moved to the country’s far north. His youngest daughter will soon join them as a student at Haifa University. The day after my visit a rocket fired from Gaza seriously wounded a Palestinian worker at the nearby fuel depot.

A hilltop outside Sderot offers a clear view into Gaza City, across the yards of patrol road and high-tech fencing that separates Israel and the strip. On Tuesday morning we crowded into a control room at the Nahal Oz Military Base, where woman soldiers stare into video screens monitoring every inch of the Northern fence. (MW: And where they relax in a modest recreation rooms refurbished by givers to the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.) A hand-painted poster in the room announces they are the “eyes of Gaza.”

Of course where Israelis see a border patrol, the Palestinians and their supporters see the “siege of Gaza.” I couldn’t look across the no man’s land without imagining the lives of the Arabs there. And don’t think this is a hopelessly American empathy. At the Sderot elementary school we asked if the kids ever talk about the “enemy.” Said a nine-year-old named Eden, “I am not angry. They feel they have a reason, just like we have a reason.” The principal quoted another child who wanted to know, “How can we solve the problem without hurting the kids on the other side?”

Thursday evening at Ben-Gurion Airport, I stood on line among the thousands of American kids who had just wrapped up their 10-day, first-ever trips to Israel with Birthright. One recent Columbia University graduate asked what brought me to Israel. When I told her about Sderot, she said, “Oh, I’m not familiar with that. We didn’t talk about that this week.”