Solidarity with Israel - Visiting the South
Solidarity with Israel - Visiting the South

Tragic is the geographic situation of the State of Israel. 800 kilometers of borders with no natural defenses. Here, the geography of fear has no saving graces for the map of the Jewish state: from the border with Lebanon, to the deserts of Sinai and Gaza, the lives of all, here, go on every day shadowed with the ghost of insecurity.

And if there is a region which embodies the siege of Israel the most, it is the southern one.

Israelis measure the distance from Gaza in time, not meters. It is the time you need to find a shelter when the siren sounds.
I visited southern Israel to understand the reality on the ground. But I was also determined to do my part to show the people of Israel that they would not face solitude.

In the south, the Israelis measure the distance from Gaza in time, not meters. It is the time you need to find a shelter when the siren sounds. Overlooking Gaza is the town of Sderot, which in the minds of the Israelis is synonymous with poverty and danger. Sderot has, in fact, the highest number per capita in the world of shelters: 200. On this small city, the Muslims from Gaza fired 8,600 rockets. So far the Israeli government has invested $ 120 million in Sderot to provide the shelters.

“Sderot is the front line of Israel and Israel is the front line of Europe”  Avi Sulemani, who heads the community center, told me. The control center of the city is under a bunker which monitors what is happening in every corner of the city. “Every house and building in Sderot will be protected by shelters. We withdrew from Gaza, and Hamas has interpreted it as a sign of weakness. A tunnel was dug in the last war two hundred meters from the city’s borders. But despite everything, they destroy and we rebuild”.

In 1956 the fedayeen entered Sderot and killed five Israelis in a park. It is now called “the park of the five”.

“Today Hamas fires rockets on this park” says Sulemani.

In Sderot, the architect Ami Shinar has just inaugurated the new railway station. It is all fully missile proof. But trying not to give the impression of a bunker, it actually looks like a postmodern building. Recently, a children’s playground was opened in a building reinforced with concrete for withstanding missiles. Much of the funding came from the Jewish National Fund, but also from the American Christian John Hagee.

In Sderot, many motorists do not wear their seatbelts so that they can get out of the car in case of alarm. Because those who live here have only fifteen seconds to find a shelter.

A generation of children born and raised in Sderot is clinically considered in “regression”, they do not want to sleep on their own beds, they are in fear at school, they are afraid to leave their homes.

A recent study of the nearby Sapir Academic College reveals that “75 percent of the residents of Sderot suffer from post traumatic stress”. Here existing drugs are important, these help the besieged people to live better: Lorivan, Clonex and Valium, tranquilizers after a rocket; Seroxat, Cipralex and Cymbalta, antidepressants for longer therapy; and authentic psychosis are treated with neuroleptics such as Zyprexa, Geodon, Clopixol.

Israel is like Pompeii, the city at the slopes of a volcano. Except a volcano is a natural phenomenon.

Meanwhile, a few miles from Sderot, at the Erez crossing, the Palestinian Arabs are crossing the border. Erez, which resembles an airport with passengers, is the only passage for Palestinians who want to enter Israel from Gaza.

The economic division of the IDF, a few meters from the Strip, explains what they are doing after the last war this summer: “350 trucks pass every day from Israel to Gaza to supply food, building materials, everything they need. The supermarkets in Gaza today are full of goods, nothing is missing. Every day Palestinian patients are treated in Israel. Ten Israeli power lines are supplying Gaza with energy. Five million cubic meters of water every year enter in Gaza”.

Iron Dome protects the futuristic building of the Erez crossing, but not the kibbutznikim around it. Nahal Oz looks like a military fortification. The kindergarten is not even visible behind the concrete wall over ten meters high. In the kibbutz, every barrier was decorated with flowers, trees, drawings, to make it seen less confining.

Then I went to Ashkelon. During the last war with Hamas, the city was hammered day and night by missiles. I visited the city with a doctor who lives there, Adriana Katz, the director of the clinic in Sderot, where she treats the victims of the missiles. “Peace will never come. I believed in the peace agreement until the Israelis in Gaza left their homes. Terrorists fired missiles before, but now it is more and more intense”.

We pass alongside beautiful villas built on the beach front, the property of the wealthy class and some Israeli oligarchs. “Here we build continuously. It makes for a strange effect. Meanwhile, nobody stops the terrorists, who want everything. I would give them half of Jerusalem for peace, but the Arabs want Haifa, Jaffa, Ashkelon. When the right told me that many years ago I laughed, but now I agree. And what’s left for the Jews? The sea”.

There is Barzilai Hospital. “Here, they are building a giant bunker under the hospital. During the next war, they will bring all the patients under the earth”.

On the road to Tel Aviv one passes Nitsan on a hill. “It is the village where the government has put all the Jews evacuated from Gaza in 2005. This place was supposed to be ‘temporary’. It is now ten years. We are all provisional here".

Is Israel to be a great hitnahalut (settlement)? Will Israel be dismantled like Gush Katif? But this time, where they will put six million Jews? In Madagascar?

The Israelis will need shelter soon again. And the world that isolates the Jews deepens the awful wounds.

The Israelis are full of courage. But I fear for Israel.