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The context :
On both sides of the border : Sderot (Israel) and Gaza (Palestine)
A small Israeli town next to the border of Gaza
Sderot is a small Israeli town of 24,000 inhabitants (roughly one half immigrants from Morocco, the other half from the former Soviet Union), situated less than a mile from the border of the Gaza Strip. It was founded in 1951 on land which belonged to the Palestinian villagers of Najd who were expelled to the Gaza Strip in May 1948.
Sderot is a town that has been abandoned by 1 in 5 of its inhabitants, due to their fear of rockets fired from the Beit Hanoun area, across the border. It is reported (by Dr Adriana Katz, of the Sderot Medical Center) that more than three quarters of the people in Sderot suffer of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is either ignored or deemed insignificant by most observers, compared to the intensive damage inflicted to Gaza in retaliation for these rockets, and for many people Sderot has become something of a ghost town that doesn’t really exist anymore. Nobody wants to go to Sderot.
This is precisely when we get involved, as humanitarian volunteers concerned with the understanding and the alleviation of human suffering. Unconcerned with prejudices, unbiased, willing to hear everything the people had to say, one of us in December 2007 finally decided she had to see for herself, and took the bus from Jerusalem to Ashkelon, and then Sderot. She visited as much of the city as she could, from the City Hall to the Candle Factory to the market to private homes. In one street, a local TV team was busy as one more rocket had just hit a house (pictures above). An instant before, the mother and one of her daughters had been in the kitchen, and ended up in the emergency room.
Daily life in Sderot : Since the first rocket was fired upon the city, on August 25, 2005, barely three days after Israel had concluded its evacuation of the Gaza Strip, you find shelters scattered everywhere (pictured above). Even bus stations have been transformed into concrete shelters, as well as the new train station, inaugurated on December 24, 2013, which has been armored, conceived to be “rocket-proof”. Every time the sirens wail for a “Red Code” alarm, people have 7 to 15 seconds to rush to the shelters. When we are told, in Gaza or elsewhere, that these rockets are unguided and ineffective, do they really not know about the thirteen people who were killed by rockets, and the dozens who have been wounded through the years, to speak only of this one small town, Sderot ? What if a rocket hits a kindergarten, or the market place, as happened in Sarajevo (the Markale massacres) in February 1994 and August 1995 ?
April 2011, one evening, we were walking in Sderot, when an eerily familiar sight struck me, carved into the asphalt, taking me back to the days in Bosnia when granata were raining from the sky, and such ominous shapes were everywhere to be found on the streets. The students who were there just shrugged : to them, this was so common that they had become numbed to it somehow. How can we live under such stress and pretend this is “normal” ? The instant a 120 mm mortar shell, or a 115 mm Qassam rocket of 40 kilos, with a warhead of 10 kilos, impacts a place packed with people, both sides are doomed : beyond the appalling condition of the victims and witnesses, not just those who fired it, but the whole human group around them, as could be seen in Bosnia, again, in the final confrontation between Serbs and Bosniaks. In Sderot, the backyard of the police station is filled with dozens of such exploded rockets, dated and stacked on shelves (see above). It is reported that 1,628 Qassam rockets and mortar shells were fired upon Sderot in 8 months (up to 6 a day average), from June 2007 through February 2008.
Rockets are blind, rockets are counter-productive. From the first drop of blood to the last, only people, on both sides, pay the price for these speculations and strategies of tit for tat. Our conviction is that there has to be an end to this. To quote from the mayor of Sderot in May 2011, David Buskila : “Believe me that I feel bad for my children, for the children who live in Sderot, but I also feel pain for the children who live on the other side of the border, in Gaza… We can create another quality of life, it is so close !”
“Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that defences of peace must be constructed.” stated the UNESCO Constitution in 1945. To construct defences of peace, and “create another quality of life”, still one thing is missing though, in educational systems : to feed the minds of the children, teenagers, young adults, with the needed nutrients and tools to build up strength, conquer fear, and develop a higher sense of creative solidarity and humanity.
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On the other side of the border
“Gentlemen, stop firing rockets!” pleaded President Peres by the end of 2008, after a growing rain of unguided rockets from the Gaza Strip. To back the plea, Operation Cast Lead was launched, which razed whole areas, and left 1,400 killed in its wake (their names on the Wall, 3rd picture). Mahmoud Mattar had left his home to get some bread from the nearest bakery. A missile exploded before him. His face was badly burned, and he will never see again.
As can be seen in the 1st picture taken in April 2011, a number of buildings and houses in Gaza could not be rebuilt, for lack of funding, cement and iron rebar.
In terms of proportions, the ratio of casualties in 2008-2009 was of 1 Israeli to 100 Palestinians. Compared to 200,000 victims in nearby Syria, as of the end of 2014 according to some sources, these figures in and around Gaza have gradually faded away, as if horror were in numbers only. As if 1 counted for 0, and 1,000 for close to 0.
Strange as these pictures may seem from the outside, this is what we have been working on in Gaza – and these quotations from our “little red book”, The spirit of Luther King, were posted on the walls of a boys’ high school a few kilometers from the border.
The best part, actually, is that this work was done months after I had left Gaza, as our friends there had taken the matter into their own hands, come what may. Admittedly, it has been a bit surreal to start our bilingual programme with Nobel Peace Laureate Martin Luther King, Jr, given the level of separatism and violence the antagonizing communities have reached through the years. Still, we had to start somewhere, and in the words of Dr King, “somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe.”
How exactly you do that in the long term is another story, that remains to be told at this stage, as we are still waiting for another permit to enter Gaza, as of tonight, February 9th, 2014. If a brand new train has been connecting Tel Aviv to Sderot for a few weeks now, there is no train to reach Gaza, from anywhere, nor are there any buses to get you there, or airplanes for that matter. Once you have been granted the providential permit, you need a taxi to drive you to the one and only public access from Israel, provided that you also have permission from the Gaza authorities to get in.
1,8 million people live in this enclave of only 360 square kilometers (slightly more than twice the size of Washington, D.C.), with 64.4% of the population under the age of 24, and only 2.6% over the age of 65. The median age is 18, and 40% of the young under 24 are unemployed. Likewise, 40% of the people live under the poverty line. The GDP per capita is estimated around $3,000 (2.200 €). Meaning the average Gazan has to live with about 180 € a month.
Illiteracy among the young is low though (1%). You count 640 schools in Gaza (383 State schools, 221 UNRWA schools, and 36 private ones) for a total of some 440,000 students; 5 universities and 8 new schools under construction (source UNRWA).
Daily life in Gaza (in between military operations) : Since the beginning of the Gaza siege, which can be set at the end June 2006, when Sergeant Shalit was captured, the Gaza Strip has been exposed to six military operations. Their code-names : Summer Rains (summer of 2006 until the end of November), Autumn Clouds (October-November 2006), Hot Winter (February 2008), Cast Lead (December 2008-January 2009), Pillar of Cloud (November 2012), and the ongoing Mighty Cliff (also known as Solid Rock, or Protective Edge), in July-August 2014.
The total toll of the first five operations is estimated at more than 2,000 for the Palestinians (with a peak of 1,400 in between 2008 and 2009) and 26 for the Israelis.
By the end of August, it reached 2,192 for the Palestinians (1,523 of them civilians, 519 of them children – 70% of them under the age of 12), 72 for the Israelis (66 of them soldiers and officers). Source : U.N. OCHA. 469 Israeli soldiers and officers and 87 civilians were wounded. Around 11,000 Palestinians were reported wounded by the Ministry of Health in Gaza. In our experience, from hospitals to classrooms, the wounded represent the hardest core of suffering among the children and teenagers, the people at large.
Not to mention post-traumatic disorder, for which little care is provided, and which affects each and everyone, to various degrees. Not much of a “regular daily life” to really speak of, in between the Summer Rains, Autumn Clouds, Hot Winters, and other assorted forms of military climatology.
For the first five operations altogether, close to 7,000 persons were wounded in Gaza (almost 6,900), 587 on the Israeli side.
A fact that too many people ignore : the population in Gaza is composed of 800,000 children under the age of 14, and 400,000 young ones from 15 to 24. Two thirds of the population.
Our conviction is that the battle for justice, freedom, and dignity (i.e. “peace”) has to be waged right there : among these two thirds of the population, through texts that will empower them, and provide them with the means to break the psychological and intellectual blockades to which they are exposed.
