Sderot for the Afternoon

Wednesday afternoon, I decided that my time here in Israel would be incomplete if I did not take it upon myself to visit Sderot. For those who don’t know, Sderot is a town less than a mile from Gaza and has been an ongoing target of rocket fire for the last 8 years. The residents of Sderot have a security system that can warn the citizens when rockets have been fired; a siren goes off and they have 15 seconds to find the closest shelter. So what exactly did I see?

The first and most overt sign of the situation, are the ubiquitous shelters. The idea in Sderot is that because there are only 15 seconds to run to shelter, there is no stretch of street without a shelter within close running distance. As a precaution, the bus stops were turned into shelters. Just to give some imagery, a shelter is essentially a giant slab of concrete, held up by four concrete walls and just enough room for maybe 8-10 people. I had an amazing opportunity to happen to walk by a large, empty parking lot where the city had created a graveyard for the old bus stops. After walking through the city, and noticing the fact that the bus stops had been replaced, it was especially profound to see the swap. My dad asked me after I returned if Sderot looked like any other city, or if it felt different in anyway. This city feels like a suburban Floridian town. Beautiful houses, palm trees, and with a profoundly nefarious twist. Schools have no windows, playgrounds have painted shelters, there are notices all over the city explaining what to do should a ‘tzevah adooma’ goes off (red warning).

Before going, we were told there are three must-sees: the police station, which stores hundreds of qassam rockets that have hit the town, a specific playground, and a hill on the edge of town that has a view into Gaza. Unfortunately, the police department doesn’t allow visitors to see the rockets (except for our friends that had pleaded with the officers) so we were unable to see the collection. However, just 30 feet from the station were two exploded rocket shells, propped up by metal wiring on the street. Although its truly impossible to get a real sense of what life is like living in this town, every piece like this helps. Just looking at the rocket, you see how crude of a weapon it really is. With explosives that can be made of everday materials, the shell itself can be, and is often, simply a pipe.

At one point, in trying to find the police station, danny (my roommate) and I asked a few people on the street where the police station was. We asked ‘where is the misrad mishtarah (police office)? We heard there are rockets there’. A man responded ‘well… theres a qassam over there. And another right there. And one more over here.’ Although he was not actually pointing us in the right direction, he was making a comment about the ubiquity of the attacks; that no spot in Sderot has been left unfazed by the rocket fire.
At some point danny and I began to navigate our way towards the hill with the view of Gaza. Unfortunately, this spot is on the absolutely opposite end of the city. On our way across the city, I noticed myself doing something: without even really thinking about it, I would be looking as to where I could run should a rocket fall at the particular moment. At one expanse, there were no shelters and I thought, well, there’s a concrete house to my right, I could jump in there. Along the way, we saw a playground with a large caterpillar and snake structure in the middle. We walked into the playground and quickly saw that they were in fact giant concrete shelters painted to appear, a little more aesthetically pleasing, as a caterpillar and snake. This cat and mouse game has become a day-to-day routine for the residents of Sderot – this is extraordinarily terrifying.

As we got to the top of the hill, we were exhausted. We plopped down and glanced up. Directly in front of us, less than a kilometer was Gaza. I have at this point, experienced this phenomenon many times. Sitting at the top of a mountain and looking into Lebanon, or the point where Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Egypt meet, or staring into the West Bank – it never becomes less profound. This is a phenomenon that thankfully Americans never have to experience; Most of the world never has to experience – staring down the throat of your enemy, wondering if they will attack you at any moment.

I spent much of my time on the way home to Jerusalem reflecting on how heavy an experience I had just been through. I hope I never become too jaded to brush off the profundity of such a place.

languages

sorry for the short tid-bits of blog entries, but here's another piece i wrote a while ago on languages:

I want to share I sentiment I’ve been feeling, that I think will stay with me for quite some time.
To properly share what I’ve been thinking I’m going to share three anecdotes.

I’m sitting in a train compartment, with five other people including Tal Kita (an administrator on the trip), and a Bulgarian train director comes to collect our tickets. We discover that we do not have tickets but rather reservation slips. However, we certainly did not discover this by the director telling us. Very quickly we learn that the director speaks very, very little English, and is trying to convey his point in Bulgarian. Tal knows half a dozen words in Bulgarian and is trying to explain our case. She does so with few words and many more hand motions. Standing next to the director is a woman that speaks German and Bulgarian, and asks us, in broken English, if someone speaks German. Through all the ruckus, we are speaking Hebrew in our compartment as to not tell the Bulgarian woman our situation; as well as to mock them both. We then find two students on the trip, Micha, who speaks some Yiddish he learned from his family, and Ariela, who speaks German she learned in high school. Between them, and various hand motions, we finally are able to understand one another.

In Bulgaria, we visited a city called Plovdiv. Plovdiv is the second largest city in Bulgaria and was home to a large Jewish community before WWII, when the majority of the Jews made aliyah. In Plovdiv we visited a Jewish old age home and listened to the stories of the residents. Most of the speakers only knew Bulgarian and some Hebrew, so they required translators for the groups to understand. However, one group had a sweet woman that somehow knew Spanish. My roommate Danny, who was in that group, whose parents (from Venezuela and Mexico) spoke Spanish in the house, was able to communicate with the woman in Spanish. It then came out that the woman also spoke French, and was able to communicate with Natannah, who spent months there on an exchange program. Between the Hebrew (which most of the group could understand), Spanish (which Danny could translate), French (which Natannah could translate), and broken English, the entire group was thrilled to hear and understand her story.

The last anecdote took place last night. A Moroccan Jew came to speak to us last night with a tremendous life story: he was born in Morocco, went to college in France, studied Hebrew in college, made aliyah, and spoke to us in English. At the end of his lecture, I asked him a question. “I’m curious. You were raised speaking Darija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, with some French influence), you spoke French and Arabic at home, you studied in French and Arabic in France, studied Hebrew in college, speak Hebrew in Israel, are speaking to us now in English with a French-Israeli accent… what language do you think in?” He said a few very interesting things. He said, “When I read, I mostly read in French. When I speak to my family, I insist they speak in Darija. At work I speak in Hebrew. If I were in Morocco and talking about my feelings, I would speak in French. If you were to read my journal, sometimes I write from left to right and sometimes visa versa. If I stay in France for any more than a week, I dream in French. I dream in Hebrew now.”

There are countless conversations of language on Kivunim. How could there not be? After spending time in Greece, where efharisto, thank you and merci are all acceptable ways to say thank you, after experiencing such profound experiences as the ones I just shared, and living in a place where the street signs say welcome to Jerusalem, مرحبا بك في القدس, and bruchim ha’ba’im l’Yerushalim. It simply amazes me. I spent my entire life living in Manhattan, where I rarely was forced to encounter much else other than gracias at my corner bodega. And now here I am, speaking in Arabic to a kitchen staff member and my dorms, Hebrew to my councilor and English to my friends. What a world this is. In each country we go to, there will be no overlapping languages. Morocco – Darija, Spain – Spanish, Greece – Modern Greek, India – Hindi, the prospect of such a thing is mind-boggling. It was perhaps those moments that I mentioned above that really opened my eyes to the idea that people simply cannot communicate without language. Hold on. Don’t worry, I understand the simplicity of that statement. But the repercussions are tremendous.

Ha'Shukim

this was a small creative piece I wrote for class reflecting on the two shuks:
The grand bazaar. Enormous, ornate and modern as hell. I almost felt like I was in a mall in the States. I had built up so much excitement after hearing how huge it was that I was torrentially let down when I finally saw it. After experiencing the shuks of Marakesh, Jerusalem, and Amman, and frankly any other in the Arab world, I was shocked to see a bazaar that paled so enormously in comparison. This is not to say it was not fun, exciting or aesthetically stimulating, but seeing it after Marakesh was psh. Even relative to the shuk of Izmir I was let down. Now, to go beyond the shock for a moment and some actually reflection. I am hardly surprised. Istanbul, the simple of the straddling of east and west, modern and tradional, European and Middle East, would naturally have a shuk to reflect that struggle. Sure enough, there it was.

oh boy – Machane Yehuda. Quite literally my favorite place in Jerusalem. If you really twist my arm, you may just get me to say my favorite place, period. Everything about the shuk (except for the Aroma) is genuine. The smells, the people, the yelling, the pushing. Every Friday afternoon since October 24th and our arrival in Jerusalem, I have visited the shuk at its most bustling moment. And, boy, is it wonderful. From the moment you walk up Agripas and catch a whiff of Marzipan, to being screamed at to buy oranges you know you’re in Israel. In Jerusalem it is all to easy to live in the bubble, totally naïve to the fact that you're in Israel. You can speak English constantly and never meet and Israeli. Consider this my window even if all too brief.