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Stories from the Ground: Sderot & Gaza It is hard, when reading about the violence in Gaza and Israel, to get a genuine sense of what the people on the ground are experiencing, their terror, their sorrow, their hopes for tomorrow. In order to try to bridge that gap, we bring here two first-person accounts, one relating the realities in Gaza, the other in Israel. It’s important to note, however, that this is not the only source for such information. Please also take a look at: “Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot” blog, written by two friends, one who lives in a Gaza refugee camp, the other in Sderot. They blog, they say, because “the media coverage on both sides has been extremely biased. “Comparative Judaisms” blog written by Rabbi Leonard Gordon about his experiences during a Masorti (Conservative) Emergency Mini-Mission to Israel. "Human Rights in Gaza & Israel during the hostilities: Reports from Israeli human rights groups" blog includes personal testimonies.
My name is Nancy and I am a Palestinian immigrant from Gaza living in the United States. I feel I must remain anonymous, because I am afraid that it may hurt my family if I go public. I hope that you will read this carefully and consider what you can do to help. Thank you. Every day I try to call my family in Gaza. Some days I get through and we talk, but most of the time I cannot get through at all and am frantic with worry. This is what I hear directly from my family in Gaza: Ever since Israel imposed the economic blockade in 2006, life has been hard. Since the elections that brought Hamas to power, they have always told me they did not like Hamas. They saw Hamas as extremists, and were frustrated with their ideology and the divisions they caused among our people. Several of my younger siblings attended a United Nations school and sought visas to go abroad for their university studies. Only one was successful in getting out. One of the main problems has been getting food, and the lack of electricity and gas. International food aid is sporadic and so they depend on a garden to provide ongoing sustenance. At one point they had nothing, and told me that they were eating weeds. Last year – before this current war – an Israeli bomb hit my brother as he sat outside with my father in the garden. Israel said it was targeting Hamas militants in retaliation for rocket attacks, but there had been no militants nearby nor was anyone firing rockets from around there. My father was not injured, but my brother’s face and body were badly burned. He lost his nose and his vision in one eye. At that time, they were angry with Hamas for making them vulnerable. I tried to find help for my brother. Some Jewish Americans told me about an NGO that quickly got permission to bring my brother into Israel for medical treatment. But my mother refused. She was afraid my brother would be tortured into becoming a collaborator for Israel. This made me very sad. When the current bombing first began my family felt afraid that they were going to die. The borders are closed and Gaza is very small, and there are no bomb shelters. They never knew when the bombing would start or where it would hit. They started running to schools and mosques—places they hoped Israel would not bomb. Last week my young nephews, my sister’s children, were hit by missiles without warning as they were picking tomatoes in their garden. Their father went out to get them when he heard the explosion. He found one completely blown up with pieces of him everywhere and the other partially intact with his intestines outside of his body and his arm blown off. He carried his son to an ambulance. We’re told that he was taken to Egypt, but don’t know anything more. After a few days, the Israelis started dropping warning leaflets, maybe 5 to 10 minutes before they start bombing. Now that schools and mosques have been hit, there is absolutely no place for shelter. They give you just enough time to think that you are probably going to die no matter what you decide—stay put or run to a school or mosque. My brother says, "they want you to run like a rat in the street and die there." Last week during a brief call with my brother, he told me that my parents and other siblings were separated from him as they all ran for shelter during a bombing. He thought they were probably among the dead. My brother couldn’t leave the shelter to look for them. For several days after that I tried to call my brother to find out if he found anyone alive or dead. I was able to get through two days later and he told me he finally found them at my sister’s home, which is already roofless due to bombing but it is better than their home, which is now rubble. I was told that Israelis are going house to house and rounding up many of the males. My family says that all they can do is tell the Israelis they are not Hamas and hope for the best. They told me that if a male goes to pick up food, often he doesn’t return. They say the Israeli soldiers are afraid too, and sometimes they just shoot anyone--women and children too. My brother and sister spoke of the many bodies in the street. According to Muslim custom, dead people are to be buried within 24 hours but they are afraid to leave their homes. There are drones overhead and maybe they would detect movement. Food is growing more and more scarce. My father said, "if we are not going to die from bombs, we will surely die from hunger. The children are asking for food and water and there is absolutely nothing left." But no one is willing to go where food relief might be distributed. They are a scared it’s a ploy to kill more people. They have no electricity, no gas for the stove, nothing--they are cold and hungry. My father keeps repeating that they will surely die of starvation. He says it will be better than going out and being bombed and surviving without a limb, or unable access to medical attention and suffer a slow painful death. In my family, they are all in agreement that it is a war of genocide against the people of Palestine. Before they wanted nothing to do with Hamas, but now they support Hamas, because it is “defending us.” I am paralyzed with fear and anxiety about what my family is going through. All told, so far, three family members have been killed, and one brother is missing. My aunt was hit with shrapnel, and she is in critical condition, and my brother-in- law is in critical condition with phosphorous burns. When I last spoke to them, my parents wept, saying that they were happy to hear my voice before they die. Though I am far away from the violence, my life now revolves around it. I have missed several days of work this past week and my children are too upset to go to school. Sometimes I want to go back and be with my family and starve with them. I have so much guilt about being here. I came here as a bride. I never wanted to leave my home. My two oldest children keep asking about our family in Gaza who they remember quite well. When they see me crying, they begin to cry so I decided to try to be strong. My oldest son has not been eating and is not able to focus. I tell him and my other children that their grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins are ok and that I speak with my father everyday and he sends his love and we will see them soon. I tell them this so they can function, but they are not buying it. It is so hard to be strong for them. It seems like there is nothing I can do to help.
“You did not start this war for me, or in my name. The bloodbath that has been going on in Gaza for the last two weeks will not increase my security. Demolished homes, wrecked schools, thousands of new refugees – none of this is done for my sake or in my name. In Gaza, they don’t have time to hold funerals, and the corpses are being put, two by two, into morgue coolers, it’s so bad. Here lie the bodies of police officers with police officers, children with children?. Neither quiet nor security have I gained from this war. After the crucial ceasefire, which allowed all of us to heal emotionally and spiritually and experience sanity again, our leaders brought us back to the same old, fear-filled rut. The same humiliation as I run, frightened, for a safe place. Don't get me wrong. Hamas is a terrible terror organization. First and foremost, for its own citizens. But beyond this despicable regime, there are human lives: simple men and women from both sides of the fence who labor to erect small bridges of humanity. This is what the "Different Voice" group from Sderot has been doing in trying to break a path of human communication into the hearts of our neighbors. But while we in Sderot enjoyed five months of ceasefire, they were weighed down by the blockade – a young Palestinian told us that he will never marry or have children, because there is no future for children in Gaza. A warplane undoes our gestures in a moment, drowning them in an abyss of despair and blood. I am afraid of the Qassam rockets. Since the war broke out I hardly dare to cross the street. But I'm much more frightened by the monolithic and incendiary public discourse, which cannot be broken through. I am scared when a friend of mine, a member of the "Different Voice" group, is attacked by residents of Sderot, while he is being interviewed expressing opposition to the war, and then receives threatening phone calls and is afraid to walk back to his car for fear of violence. I'm willing to pay the price of isolation, but not that of fear. It scares me to see my town put on a festive décor, and garland its streets with national flags; to witness groups of supporters hand out flowers to passersby and to hear people honking their horns with excitement whenever they hear a bomb dropping on their neighbors [in Gaza]. I am frightened by a local resident who, flustered, confesses that he had never been to a concert, but that the bombardment of Gaza is the most beautiful music that he had ever heard in his life. The self-satisfied interviewer who does not even think to challenge those words frightens me as well. I'm scared by the fact that under the Orwellian language and the photos of dead children from Gaza that the media blurs as a service to the public, we are losing our ability to see the other side, to feel, to shudder, to empathize. Under the code word “Hamas,” the media creates for us a mighty and dark demon which has no face and no body and no voice; one and a half million nameless human beings. A dark and deep undercurrent of violence is infiltrating into the veins of the Israeli society like a sickness, and it is growing stronger from one war to the next. It is odorless, and formless, but it is easily perceivable from where we live. It is a kind of euphoric joy of war; a power-drunk lust for revenge that tears down the ancient Jewish imperative: "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls" (Proverbs 24:17); a moral sense that has become so soiled that no wash could cleanse the stains. In this fragile democracy, you find yourself weighing each word carefully, lest harm will come to you. The first time that I felt that my country was truly looking out for me was when the ceasefire agreement was reached [last summer]. I am not responsible for the actions of Hamas, and, therefore, I can only ask our own leaders: Did you do everything possible in order to prolong the quiet? In order to prolong the ceasefire? To reach a long term agreement? To solve the problem of the crossings and the of the siege, before the outbreak of the violence? Did you travel to the ends of the world to find suitable mediators? And why did you so casually brush away the French initiative for a ceasefire after the war had already broken out? Why do you keep postponing all offers of negotiations? Have we not reached the quota of Qassam rackets that we can absorb? Have we not reached the quota of dead Palestinian children that the world will tolerate? And besides, who vouches for our capacity to overthrow Hamas? Didn't we already try this somewhere else? And who will take its place? Global fundamentalist organizations? Al-Qaida? How will the moderate voices of peace manage to raise their heads from beneath the rubble, the hunger, the cold, and the dead? Where are you leading us? What kind of future are you securing for us here in Sderot? And how much longer will you weigh us down with that old bag of lies and clichés: There is No Partner; This is a War of No Choice; Let the IDF Finish the "Job"; Break Down Hamas; We All Want Peace - the great lie of force and more force, as the sole solution for the problems in the region. And why is it that every interview with the representatives of "Different Voice" routinely begins and ends with the same mocking question "don't you think that you are naive?" How did it come about that the options of dialogue and negotiation, the striving for agreements and understandings, has become synonymous with naiveté? Whereas opting for violence and war is always considered as rational and irreproachable? Have eight years of senseless, ceaseless violence not taught us anything about the naiveté of power? The IDF has destroyed, demolished, shot, bombed, hit and missed - and what have we gotten in return? Just a rhetorical question. It is very hard to live in Sderot nowadays. During the night, the army pulverizes structures and people in Gaza, and the walls of our homes shake. During the day we are targeted by the rockets, which are growing more sophisticated with time. A person leaving for work in the morning doesn't know if his house will be standing when he gets back. In the afternoon, we bury our finest men, who sacrificed their lives for yet another so-called "just" war. At dusk, we manage with great difficulty to communicate with our desperate friends in Gaza. They have no water, no electricity, no cooking gas, no food to cook, nowhere to escape. And I am haunted by the words that a fourteen year old girl, whose school was razed and whose classmate had just been killed, in an email that her mother managed to send: "Help us, because we are all human beings.” It is not heart-warming, Mr. Ben-Eliezer, not heart-warming
at all. A ton of cast lead weighs down on me, and my heart can
hardly contain the sorrow.
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Alliance for Justice and Peace
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