Reflections on a Visit to Shderot

What is there to say about the Shderot I visited two weeks ago? This is not occupied territory. This is not disputed territory. It’s a provincial town with 25,000 inhabitants, with a fire station big enough to serve 50,000. In the past seven years, it’s been the target of over 6,000 rockets from Gaza, and the rate of shelling has escalated since Israel ceased to occupy Gaza.

Shderot means avenues – its streets are wide and crossing one to take cover in the air raid shelters which have replaced bus stops can take longer than the 17-second air raid warning.

Most of Shderot’s children and adults suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Its teenagers don’t feel able to go to school. The younger children go, but now walk past a five-foot concrete facade before they see the school windows; the building receives no natural light; their voices are stopped up in their schools.

I see five year olds rush out at going-home time. The school guards says,

Where is there for you to go? Stay back and wait for your parents.

He only says it once. The children remembered quickly and drew back against the wall until they are bussed away or pulled into cars by parents who look so 21^st Century that it’s impossible to believe their situation, their dull eyes, their wooden movements, their grey skin, their lack of gestural animation.

I see two youths in a playground smoking under a concrete gazebo. Ah, I think, rebels. But they’re guards.

All over Israel the ban on smoking inside buildings is observed. But in Schderot’s tired town hall, everyone is smoking. George, a Council employee, takes me to the police station and shows me a yard stacked with the detritus of homemade kassam missiles. These are made from sliced sections of hollow Israeli traffic-light poles, smuggled to Gaza in tunnels by Bedouin. Each Gazan hamoula group designs and paints the Kassams it fires at Israel. Now they are just stacked pipes splayed like peeled bananas. Pipes with sharp tail fins. Pipes five-foot long. Cardboard boxes full of metal fragments, metal nails, off cuts of the shards which women stuff these pipes with. Each stacked item is labelled with white markings. Date, time, location picked up.

Schderot’s bus stops all stand in rows, as though waiting to march back to the streets once the barrages end.

There’s dismay in Schderot at their own government’s restraint. Confusion at the world’s failure to intervene. Why are civilians bombed day and night, as schools discharge their pupils, as the town tries to do work or sleep?

In Burger Ranch, a group of young professionals eat and laugh quietly, talk like young people anywhere. They look so different to the despondent people I’ve seen so far.

Who are you, do you live here, everyone looks so depressed why do you look different? I ask.

We’re from the area; we work at Amdocs here in Schderot. Why wouldn’t we?  You don’t just stop in real life, they answer.

The graffiti in Schderot says, ‘Wake up Ariel Sharon, Olmert is sleeping’ and ‘Our state you have abandoned us in war’. The parents have rushed the children home. The streets are expressionless. The shops wait for the thousands of people who flood in from all over Israel on Fridays to support Schderot’s beleaguered economy by buying their groceries for the Sabbath. Residents who have somewhere to go have left. Their houses are unsellable. The ones who stay have no choice. They’re not idealists. Not the frontline. Not Israel’s Dodge City. They’re just unregistered victims. Unregistered in the Israeli psyche. People have forgotten the constant bombardment of Kiryat Shmona. Israeli Jews, Arabs and Christians bombed during Lebanon 2 in August 2006 don’t even understand the Gazan onslaught which has lasted seven years. The national debate centres on withdrawal from the West Bank and people on both sides of the argument ignore Schderot. The Friday shoppers are mainly the moderate modern orthodox men wearing jeans and crocheted skull caps and women wearing head kerchiefs (if they’re married). They are given to measures on the micro scale. Prayer not politics, shopping not shouting. They don’t form themselves into power groups. They’ve organised a rally in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square with but no widespread action across Israel.

Schderot has lived with this ignominy for long enough to build a trauma centre for its children, long enough to fortify its schools, long enough for its teenagers to have lost hope, long enough to have crushed its idealists, long enough to extinguish the inclination of even one mayoral candidate to run for office against the incumbent when he wanted to resign, and long enough to suspend the Israel’s watchfulness over its own. But not long enough to destroy the young Amdocs employees steady resolve to take up employment.

If the range of Hamas’s missiles extend, will the industries of Ashkelon, Eilat and Tel Aviv be able to retain that sort of resolve?