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David M. Weinberg is director of public affairs at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and director of the Canada-Israel Committee's Israel Office. The views expressed are his own.
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By David M. Weinberg
June 21, 2007
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I experienced deep shame in Sderot last week, for which the Kassam missiles are only very partially responsible.
Another five Kassam missiles fell yesterday on Sderot. But during the ten hours I spent in the city, visiting families to evaluate and catalogue their needs for the impressive Lev Ehad volunteer group, I saw no Kassam damage nor experienced any missile alerts. Walking out on the streets wasn't scary. The bone-chilling part was inside Sderot homes.
Here, I discovered shame and suffering that runs far deeper than the challenge coming from Gaza. The Kassams of Hamas are merely a security blunder. It's outrageous, of course, that we've allowed a city of twenty thousand people to wither away and empty out under enemy fire. Nevertheless, that is the smaller part of the problem.
Much worse is the fact that we've left the forlorn people of Sderot ? the most destitute, downtrodden, and drained citizens of Israel in normal times ? to take the hit, and we're not shaken to the very fiber of our souls. That's an unforgivable social crime.
Olga (not her real name) is destitute. Her mentally-ill ex-husband left her with enormous black-market debts, she has bouts of depression along with heart trouble, and her daughter has chronic and severe asthma that has led to lengthy hospitalizations. Loan sharks broke her front door two years ago -- it still doesn?t close. The water and electricity have been cut off a few times. She lost a brother to Chechen rebels back in the CIS, where her kids would sleep under her bed during night-time mortar attacks.
A Kassam missile landed in her daughter's Sderot schoolyard during class, and the eight-year-old is traumatized. She won't leave her mother's side, nor return to school. Once again, she sleeps under her mother's bed. "Just like Chechnya," says Olga. Both mother and daughter have been diagnosed with clinical post traumatic stress disorder and depression. Prior to the arrival of my friend Dr. Mordechai, and I, nobody from the grand, wide world of central Israel or the Jewish Diaspora ever had been in to talk to them.
Similar stories repeated themselves in other homes. Rachamim has an incapacitating social-cognitive disability that prevents him from working, but his understanding of the situation is keen. "We are imprisoned at home by fear of the missiles," he says. "It's like having a guy coming at you from behind with a knife," he explains. "You're constantly looking over your shoulder." His wife won't let the kids walk to school, and Rachamim's social worker won't travel into Sderot from Beersheba in order to treat him.
And so, Sderot is tragedy upon tragedy. The rockets of Hamas are a layer of misery piled atop the misfortune and deprivation that already was the lot of many residents. They are truly the forgotten people of Israel -- now more than ever.
Echoes of Amalek reverberate in me as I drive back to civilized, privileged, central Israel: "(He) smote the hindmost of you, all that were feeble in your rear, the faint and weary" (Deuteronomy 25:18). And I wonder: where is our shame?
The ugly truth is that we're not mobilized to really defend or significantly assist Sderot -- because its residents are third-class Israelis at best.
Had it been the upwardly-mobile, well-connected people of Ramat Hasharon, Kochav Yair or Tel Aviv that had been targeted by Hamas for months of unremitting bombardment -- can you imagine Israel doing so little? IDF tanks would be rolling into Riyadh if that is what it took to halt the bombing; and every government ministry, corporation, postal clerk and animal rights organization would be marshaled to lend a helping hand to the distressed people of Herzliya and Caesarea.
Fortunately, our naked shame is being covered-up a bit by the dozens of idealistic youth I met volunteering down in Sderot. The day after receiving my visit report, they went to fix Olga's front door and do schoolwork with her daughter. They brought candies and chocolate too, along with medication for Olga from a non-profit dispensary. The electricity bill was paid. They drove Rachamim's frightened teenager to and from school. In the evening, they marched through the city streets, singing and dancing; spreading cheer and dispelling fear.
Sderot is our frontline, socially as well as geo-politically. Its neglect is a metaphor for the ebbing away of a caring Jewish-Zionist society. It's time to take up arms -- against Sderot's anguish and our own indifference.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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