Living with Rockets: Skewed perceptions

Last Sunday, several South African diplomats and a political science professor from an American university came to visit Sderot. It was a typical tour through Sderot with rather atypical reactions from the visitors.

Usually, foreign visitors express shock and sympathy towards the victims of rocket terror. I was then, more than surprised when the visitors asked a Sderot grandmother whose home was recently wrecked by a Kassam rocket, the following questions.

"Do you feel for the Palestinian grandmother who is in the same condition as you?"

"What would you say to the women in Gaza who are also suffering?"

"Why do you think Hamas launches these rockets at Sderot?"

As the tour guide for this group, I had to translate these questions to the elderly grandmother, Sima, who is now homeless because of the rocket fire. In a reasonable tone, she patiently answered their questions.

Sima relates to the South African diplomats that she remembers a time 20 years ago, when she used to travel to Gaza freely to buy goods from the Arabs living there. "The Arab fish market seller would come to our home here in Sderot and sell us fish as well," she says. "My daughter's bedroom furniture and our home's kitchen fixtures were bought in Gaza."

"The Arabs don't want us here," explains the grandmother. "They purposely target our women and children and our homes. Our neighbors here learned [to terrorize] from the Arabs in the north, who were launching rockets at Israel from Lebanon for years and years."

There was no anger or hatred in the Sderot grandmother towards the Palestinians in Gaza. She sympathized with the innocent Palestinians and her attitude was prevalent among the other Sderot residents who we visited during the tour, including a Sderot school teacher at a religious school.

"Every time the siren goes off, the kids hide under their school tables and sing the Psalms," says Esther, the vice principal of Amit Religious Science school. "As teachers, we tell our children to be strong, to have faith in G-d." At the end of the visit, Esther gives the visitors a book of Psalms to take with them.

As we eat lunch, one of the South African diplomats, who describes herself as a believing Protestant, asks me "why as a Jew do you have a right to come back to this land when you have not lived here for thousands of years?"

I respond to her that when I open the Bible and read of our forefathers, Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, whose offspring were promised this land for eternal time, I as a practicing Jew believe in this and it is the reason why I have come back. "The longing and yearning for our land is embedded in our national subconscious--we have prayed to return to the land of our forefathers for thousands of years. The land of Israel and Jerusalem has always been the center of our Jewish prayers, holidays, and celebrations," I tell her. Besides, there have always been a tiny minority of Jews living in Israel since ancient times.

The political science professor from the US tells me that the Jewish people have never been a nation. I almost choke on my felafel at this point. I have never heard this statement before. I tell her to check out the Bible again, because Israel is referred to as a nation countless times.

We broach upon the murder of the eight yeshiva students from Merkaz Harav a few days before. "It was an extremist-Zionist yeshiva," tells me the political science professor. "They teach the boys to settle the land." "And that justifies the murder of Jewish teenage boys?" I ask, shocked.

Not the typical conversation to have in Sderot. At the end of the tour, the South African diplomat tells me that if South Africa was able to solve the apartheid, Israel should be able to do so as well. "Blacks and whites live in peace now," she tells me.

As I relate my experience to my little sister who arrived to Israel a couple months ago, she tells me that I was dealing with anti-Semitic remarks. And it finally hits me, that no matter what I would have said otherwise, people who harbor anti-Semitism in the form of anti-Israelism will always use the most irrational and unreasonable forms of argument to communicate a timeless hatred of the Jewish people.

The image of an old Jewish Morrocan grandmother sitting among the remains of her home, devastated by a Palestinian rocket, therefore, will never evoke compassion from people who harbor such sentiments.