The Agony of Sderot

SDEROT, ISRAEL – This small town of 20,000, located within walking distance of Israel’s southern border with the Gaza Strip, should be on everyone’s mind. As things go in Sderot, so they will go in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And, for all who truly desire peace, what’s happening to Sderot, and how the predicament of its residents has been virtually ignored, gives scant hope. The international community ought to be paying closer attention.

Sderot, and other communities in the western Negev region of Israel, has been the target of some 2,400 rockets since the beginning of 2007, and thousands more since 2000, launched by Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. That’s about one rocket every three and a half hours over the last year, targeting almost exclusively civilians. Imagine trying to live, raise children, conduct normal civilian activities under these conditions.

On December 14, following a direct hit on a house that wounded a woman, the Israeli Cabinet placed the Sderot region under what it calls a “special situation.” This is a technical term empowering the army to take charge of civilian safety. “Special situation” indeed! Sometimes bureaucrats speak with unknowing eloquence.

The predicament of Sderot is “special” primarily because of the suffering caused by the relentless rocket attacks since 2000, when, in response to Israel’s historic peace offer, with U.S. backing, at Camp David, the Palestinian Authority launched the so-called “second intifada.”

However, the situation is also “special” because what is happening to Sderot reflects the main reason the peace process is in jeopardy. Unless the safety of Sderot’s citizens can be assured, no peace process will have traction.

How, given situations like Sderot, will an Israeli government promote a permanent peace agreement to Israeli voters? Any such accord will necessarily involve withdrawals from the West Bank, placing some 80 percent of Israel’s population within rocket range of an independent Palestinian state. Would any of us agree to such conditions when the current nightmare in Sderot is such a dismal portent?

It was not supposed to be this way. In August 2005, in a dramatic, courageous and, in many ways traumatic, move, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, transferring the entire territory to the Palestinian Authority. The Israelis left behind an agricultural infrastructure that could have provided jobs for thousands. And, the international community offered extraordinary amounts of money to help build a prosperous Gaza.

But everything quickly fell apart. Within weeks of the withdrawal hooligans looted the agricultural infrastructure. When the Palestinians held elections in January 2006, they chose Hamas, a terrorist organization that glorifies Islamicist supremacism and is committed to destroying Israel. Hamas has operated hand in glove with likeminded Islamic Jihad, which is fully controlled by Iran, to continue the rocket barrage of Sderot.

Gaining control over Gaza gave the Palestinians, for the first time in their history, a tremendous opportunity to begin building the foundations of an independent state. After all, Egypt occupied Gaza from 1948 to 1967, when Israel, in a defensive war, captured the tiny territory along with Sinai from Egypt. However, Egypt did not want Gaza and its population back when all of Sinai was returned as part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979.

One would have hoped in 2005 that all Palestinians in Gaza would agree to disarm, desist from terror and rocket attacks on Israel, and focus on erecting, with substantial international financial aid, a productive and stable economy.

But, it seems almost impossible to break from long-held ideologies that celebrate violence and martyrdom. The rocket barrage has continued unabated. Even when the world was focused on the Hezbollah assault of rockets on Israel’s northern communities in the summer of 2006, Sderot was battered from Gaza.

For a while the Palestinians had a mixed government, with the presidency in the hands of Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and the government in the hands of Hamas. Hamas staged a violent coup earlier this year that took over the Gaza Strip.

The rocket crews now enjoy a free hand. They are using it to make a mockery of the peace process. It has become a cliché to suggest that Israel must take risks for peace. However, like the Israeli voters who will have to approve a peace accord by referendum, Sderot’s agony must give us pause.

Unless something is done about the thugs in the Gaza Strip, pessimism is in order about any successful negotiations that might lead to two independent, secure states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace. Too much is at stake to allow silence about Sderot to go undiscussed.

Rabbi Ed Rettig is associate director of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel/Middle East Office and coordinates its relief project in Sderot.