Sderot in Canada
Sderot in Canada

Presenting the human side of the Israeli town of Sderot and the western Negev communities would seem innocuous enough, as it is the only region in the western world where rockets and missiles target a civilian population. The people of southern Israel have a story that should be easy to share.

Yet after a 13-day coast-to-coast visit to Canadian college campuses, organized by the on campus Jewish organization, Hillel Canada and the CIJA umbrella organization of Canadian Jewry, it would seem that even Sderot residents must fight for their legitimate right to live in the land of Israel.

 The purpose of this trip was to balance the the anti-Israel  “Gaza narrative”, exactly one year after Israel's 21-day Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip.

On Canadian college campuses, the challenge became to justify the very existence of the city of Sderot—and of

Even Sderot residents must fight for their legitimate right to live in the land of Israel.

Israel.

This was best exemplified by an article published in a Winnipeg student newspaper, penned by a Palestinian-Canadian sociology student. This student amazingly attacked the credibility of another student for sharing her experiences visiting Sderot . The latter student had described her shock at the ’15 second’ alarm, known as the “Color Red,” which warns Sderot residents of the few seconds they to escape to safety from the time a missile is fired at them from Gaza to the time it explodes in Sderot .

The Palestinian student showed little sympathy for Sderot under fire, instead unashamedly rewriting history :

 “ 'Sderot’ is actually a settlement on the Palestinian land of Najd, an illegally occupied territory stolen from Palestinians. It is a town created on the ashes of an ethnically cleansed and defaced Palestinian village...You want to talk about ‘terror’? Najd’s Palestinian villagers were expelled on May 13th, 1948 by Israeli forces before Israel was even declared a state.”

This well-educated student, born in Canada of Palestinian descent, called the Israeli town of Sderot an illegitimate “settlement” constructed on the ruins of an Arab village abandoned during the 1948 war. This same student made no acknowledgement of the historical fact that between 1951-1953, the Jews that settled in Sderot were some of the 850,000 Jews expelled en masse from Arab countries in the Middle East. During and after the 1948 war, only 670,000 Arabs left Israel at the encouragement of their leaders or fled from their homes due to the war.

This Canadian-Palestinian college student was not the first to rationalize the thousands of aerial attacks and terrorizing of Sderot and southern Israel civilians.

“You know why Sderot is under rocket fire? Because there was an Arab village called Najd,” began a BBC reporter in an interview. I recall the reporter sitting in our Sderot Media Center office trying to find a ‘reasonable excuse’ to justify rocket fire against a civilian population.

Most Israelis/Jews do not even know that Palestinians and their leadership define Sderot as an illegal ‘settlement,’ although under international law it is undisputedly a city in the State of Israel.

The first question I often ask student audiences during presentations is the following:

“If Sderot is called a settlement and if two miles northeast of Sderot lie the ruins of the Arab village called Najd, which the Palestinians say had a population of 30 families who now live in the United Nations refugee camps in Gaza, how does that affect the justification for Jews to live in Sderot or anywhere else in Israel?”

The challenge today is to ask these basic questions first, before discussing answers or solutions for the modern Arab-Israeli conflict.

“What is our right, as Jews and as Israelis, to this country as our homeland? Do we have any rights to this land at

Do we have any rights to this land at all?”

all?”

This is the one way to present Israel’s perspective to Muslims, pro-Palestinians, Israel bashers and to the international press. By asking this basic question, we ask everyone to realize that Israel is the only independent country and member of the United Nations in the world, whose legitimacy as a state is questioned.

The leadership and governing bodies of the Palestinian side do not even recognize Sderot's establishment in the first years of the creation of the Jewish state, while most Israelis/Jews have accepted a two- state solution.

Another Canadian-Palestinian student expressed himself during the presentation at Carleton University in Ottawa, in a quite matter of fact manner:

 ”You Jews dreamt to go back to your home land after 2,000 years… Why do you think we will stop teaching our children to dream to return to our homes in Al-Majdal (Ashkelon) after only 60 years?”

Sderot and Ashkelon are far inside the proverbial “Green Line”. They were part of Israel’s original boundaries, unaffected by the 1967 war that resulted in the conquest of Judea, Samaria and Eastern Jerusalem by Israel.

In other words, educated Canadian born Palestinian students living comfortably abroad, view Sderot quite simply as an illegal settlement, wish to take over Ashkelon and do not recognize the Jewish State of Israel. They do not accept our existence as Israelis.  Neither does a Palestinian raised in a United Nations refugee camp, who has not been resettled for the past 60 years, even though the UN has resettled more than 50 million refugees worldwide since World War II. Why should that Palestinian recognize my existence as an Israeli?

Instead, Palestinian education focuses on the preparation of the Palestinians who left in 1948 for the ‘right of return’ to homes and villages in Israel, homes which no longer exist.  These were within and near cities like Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, and more which have all been under terrorist missile fire.

“So, what’s your solution to this reality?” students asked at each Canadian campus that I visited. In the hundreds of presentations I have given in the past three years I always answer, “I’m not here to present you with a solution, I’m here to articulate the problem.”

The answer I give to the above question is that there may not be any instant “solution.” That should not exempt students from knowing the reality of what people in Israel have to cope with – and, in the case of Sderot, that their unique miraculous rocket reality is like no other in the world right now. Rockets have become a daily routine of life in Israel, where one civilian population is being targeted by rockets and rocket-launchers take cover under another civilian population on the other side of the border.

Can this definition of terrorism be understood from a typical 5-second daily news broadcast in Israel in the past four years?

 “Two rockets fell outside of Sderot today. No injuries, and no damages,” is how the typical broadcast or news update would read, followed by a weather report in Israel.

These five-second news reports have now tallied over 310 attacks including 20 different types of rockets, Iranian missiles and mortars fired from Gaza towards southern Israel, since the end of the military operation in Gaza on January 18, 2009.

 If our rights as Jews to live in Israel were clear to the world, I would not have found myself providing a testimony to a Jew, Judge Richard Goldstone, in Geneva. I was allowed a 30-minute presentation where I described to the Goldstone Commission the eight-years of life under rocket fire and concluded by raising my hands in front of them:

 “I do not have enough fingers on my hands to count the amount of times rockets exploded only 10 meters from a kindergarten packed with children…”

 “Why do we have to wait until a kindergarten or classroom full of children suffers a direct hit by a rocket, in order to have international support and sympathy to do what is right to protect our own citizens?”

This question, put forth to Judge Goldstone and the rest of the panel of UN judges, was met with stony silence.

In Canada, Jewish students are increasingly threatened by Arabs and those supporting their points of view. We have to give them the tools to answer and defend Israel verbally, Canada has to decide to defend them physically.