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Forgotten residents await Palestinian
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26
December 7 2006
:N
wing sets and slides are
empty. The children of this
working-class border town
have no time to play.
Listening for alerts for falling rock-
ets from Gaza, they scurry between
home and school. It's a routine that
has intensified in recent weeks. Even
in the days after a fragile cease-fire
goes into effect, the unease continues.
"My kids won't sleep upstairs any-
more," says Sigal Avitan, 38, who grew
up in Sderot and cannot imagine leav-
ing — not even after more than 1,100
rockets shot at the area in little over
a year. "Every night I have to spread
out blankets on the floor of the living
room. My two oldest sleep there; my
two youngest
sleep in my
bed," she says.
"This is no
kind of life.
This is not
normal.
"This morning, my daughter said
she did not want to go to school and I
told her, `But there is a cease-fire now!
She replied, `Yesterday there was also a
cease-fire and a rocket fell while I was
walking to school:"
A sleepy town of low-rise buildings
and eucalyptus tree-lined streets in
southern Israel, Sderot is comprised
of a hodgepodge of immigrant groups
— extended Moroccan families that
first settled here in the 1950s and
more recent arrivals from Ethiopia,
Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Russia and other
countries of the former Soviet Union.
The wave of Russian-speaking
immigrants to Israel that began in
1990 more than doubled Sderot's
population to 24,000.
Sderot is far, by Israeli standards,
from the country's more prosperous
center. But in the last six years it has
found itself unwittingly on one of the
front lines of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
Its location, about two miles from
the Gaza border, has made Sderot an
easy target for terrorists' Kassam rock-
ets. Before the partial truce went into
effect last week, fighting had escalated,
especially in recent months, between
the Israeli army and Palestinian ter-
rorist groups. Two Sderot residents,
both Russian-speaking immigrants,
were killed in the past two weeks.
After Israel's historic with-
drawal from Gaza was completed in
September 2005, the rocket fire that
had been aimed mostly at Gaza Jewish
settlements was turned to the next
available target: Sderot and surround-
ing villages and farms. However, even
in the five years before then, rockets
were launched sporadically at Sderot.
Residents say they're frustrated by
a feeling that they don't matter to the
government or the rest of the Israeli
public. They feel stuck in a state of
second-class citizenship even as they
put their lives on the line.
"Nation, be ashamed. You have for-
"Nation, be ashamed. You have
forgotten us in this war."
gotten us in this war;' reads a small,
hand-printed sign taped to a pole
along the roadside.
"This has become a depressed
place," says Hanan Klein, 24, who
knows many people who have moved
out of town recently. "Living here is
like playing Russian roulette. You hear
an alert and the rocket will fall where
it will."
Business has plummeted at the hair
salon where Klein works. Those with
appointments cancel after a rocket
scare. Others prefer to get haircuts and
do errands outside. of town.
Bloria Dadon, 55, the owner of a
small business in Sderot, wore a sign
that read "Save Our City" at a dem-
onstration by local businesspeople
Monday. "We want security and busi-
ness — we don't want pity or dona-
tions," she says. "It's been six years [of
Kassams] and no prime minister has
visited us even once?'
"They think we're weak:' she adds,
referring to the country's image of
Sderot. "We are simply good, quiet
people, but now it's time to start
speaking out." II