Tuesday's Rocket

On Tuesday morning, as I was getting ready to leave my home, a woman’s voice said “Tzeva Adom! Tzeva Adom! Tzeva Adom!” over Sderot’s public speaker system. I had already heard this alarm a few times that morning, and several hundred times since I moved to Sderot. It meant that a rocket fired by Hamas in Gaza would explode somewhere in or near Sderot in about fifteen seconds. I went about my business, turning off my computer and packing my books, as I awaited the explosion. When the inevitable happened, I heard that unmistakable cracking sound at the tiny fraction of an instant, the KA of the KABOOM! It indicated the Arabs had been lucky this time and hit somebody’s home, instead of their rocket’s landing in a field whose mud muffled the blast. One learns to pick up these subtle differences in kinds of explosion if one lives in Sderot. Less subtle was that my building shuddered, and my windows danced in their frames; I felt the slight shove of the shockwave going through my body. I knew that this Kassam rocket had landed within a few blocks of my home.

I gathered up my books and my notepad and set out to find it. I usually walk along asking people I meet, most of whom point me in the general direction of where the Kassam fell, until I arrive at the bomb-site, but this time the rocket was easy to find. The whirling red lights of ambulances drew my eyes down the alley that opens immediately opposite my building. An old man stood on his porch staring down the alley at the ambulances. I followed his stare until I saw which house had been hit. I walked slowly toward the ambulance’s flashing lights. I noticed myself unconsciously slowing my pace. This is the moment when I always feel fear – fear of what I will see when I get to the house the bomb hit.

Having spent a year opposite the entrance to this alley. I recognized the home and the faces of those who lived in it. The ambulances had been present for a few minutes by the time I arrived where they had parked to take on wounded. As I stood there, the ambulance crew wheeled an old woman wearing a bathrobe to the back of an ambulance. The chair in which she sat had been designed to collapse into a kind of stretcher when pushed up against the rear entrance of an ambulance. The woman herself appeared stunned into passivity. Her face was immobile, but her hands and her body shook as she stared into space. Though conscious, she made no eye-contact with those around her. A younger woman ran up to her yelling, “Ima! Ima!” - “Mother! Mother! in Hebrew. The ambulance drove away with the old woman and some younger people whom I guess were members of her family. Magen David Adom crew-members whom I have interviewed told me that they prefer to evacuate Kassam-victims together with members of their families who are uninjured in ordered that the uninjured will support those who have been hurt.

The house that had been hit stands on the corner of that alley and the street it meets. Police were hanging up marking tape to exclude civilians from walking around and getting in the way of those who had work to do, or of being hurt by any bomb that might be hidden in the home’s rubble. Neighbors, firemen, police, reporters, photographers, even the one or two retarded kids who seem to show up whenever there is a bombing – they all made a busy scene. In a small town like Sderot, people know each other, so the neighborhood folks greeted the police and the other officials who arrived as old friends as well as helpers.

We all stood on the broken glass covering the street and the sidewalks. These rocket attacks all produce huge amounts of glass shards. This particular rocket had landed directly on the roof of the home, sending many of baked clay, Italian-style shingles flying into the alley, the street, and even into the yard of a home across the street – thus accounting for the loud CRACK! I had heard just as the rocket exploded.

A sapper walked into the house to verify that no other bomb was about to explode and kill us all. Somebody else shinnied up an electric pole, probably to turn off the house’s electricity. A young man, whom I assume was a son of that family and a grandson of the old woman who had left in an ambulance, leaned over the fence surrounding his front yard. Newspaper reporters asked him to tell what had happened about fifteen minutes earlier. One of them, evidently English, took notes while an Israeli with him translated the conversation for him. Another Englishman asked this reporter if he had seen the old lady taken out who was shaking “like this”, demonstrating her movements with his own body. The two Britons looked genuinely shocked by what they saw in Sderot.

The young man whom they tried to interview had a look I have seen many times in Sderot on faces of people a short time after they have had a narrow escape. I cannot easily describe him, but he looked calm at first glance. After speaking with him for a few minutes, however I noticed a certain flatness of expression in him, though, both verbal and facial. He spoke in a quiet, almost mechanical manner. This quiet manner is not the same thing as calmness.

As we stood on the sidewalk talking to him over his fence, he told us that he and his family had carried mattresses, the television, and some other things into their family shelter, and that they had been living in it since the recent escalation began. They emerged only to use the toilet and the kitchen. The family had been inside their shelter at the moment when the rocket hit their home. For this reason they are still alive.

I listened to him for a while, and then I crossed the street to say hello to Prosper Peretz, owner of the Peretz Shefa Market on this street, Mivtza Sinai. His shop stood immediately opposite the home that was hit, and he surveyed the scene from the sidewalk in front of his foodstore. I often shopped in his little store, which his parents had founded. They had been among the first Moroccan families to come to Sderot and live in the old pachonim, or tin prefabricated boxes of fifty years ago. His father had opened this shop, and Peretz inherited it. He lives above it with his wife and children, all of whom help run the family business. I asked Peretz if he had been present when the rocket exploded. A calm and soft-spoken man, who spent much of his life in army uniform, he nodded his head. I asked about damage on his side of the street. He pointed to blown-out windows above his shop. Peretz was polite, but evidently not in a communicative mood today.

I walked inside to greet Peretz’s daughter and to buy a chocolate bar. I asked her about her experience of the bombing. She told me she had been upstairs when the rocket hit her neighbor’s home across the street, but that she ran downstairs just in time to see her father taking care of “the one who was wounded.” My eyebrows went up. “What’s that?”, I asked. She told me she ran downstairs and saw her father bandaging a bleeding man who was lying on the sidewalk outside their shop. Prosper Peretz, a man with the calm, humble demeanor of the professional soldier, had told me nothing of that.

I went out to ask him what he did. He smiled slightly and told me that one of the sons of the family whose house had been hit had been walking down the street, either to or from home, when the alarm went off. Hearing the recording, he tried to run into the Peretz Shefa Market, but he did not run fast enough. The man had received two shrapnel wounds, one of which made a gash on his cheek. The second piece of metal opened the artery on the left side of the young man’s neck. Blood being pumped up to his brain was squirting out in bursts, each burst in accordance with the heart beat that sent the blood in the direction of his brain. The young man would clearly have bled to death soon had Peretz not taken action. His daughter walked downstairs to the sidewalk to see her father saving a life. She went into their shop to call an ambulance. This ambulance had left just a minute or two before I arrived, carrying the man whose life Prosper Peretz had saved.

“I see”, I said.

Peretz told me he was able to do that because of the good training he had received in the army.

“And by the way, why are you wearing a mere undershirt on a cold and rainy day?”

“I used my shirt on the guy’s neck.” I pointed to what I now understood to be bloodstains on Peretz’s undershirt, and he just nodded his head – “It happens here.”

I stood there trying to think of a way to express my admiration for someone who had just saved a life, but who had no wish to display that fact, when the alarm sounded. Peretz, bystanders, police, and I went inside his shop. We stood looking at each other for about fifteen seconds until we heard the explosion. It was elsewhere in Sderot – not very close. We walked outside together.

My thoughts on what had happened were interrupted by yet another alarm announcing yet another rocket coming our way. People in front of the bombed house were running inside. Bystanders like me are not allowed into a building just after it has been hit, but in Sderot it is normal for anybody to run into any home when the alarm sounds. I hopped over there and inside the door. I wanted to see how the house looked.

Those of us inside hurried into the indoor shelter in which the family had been sitting when the bomb hit. It looked like an ordinary room, though with no windows, and mattresses instead of beds. After the rocket explodes – again, not close to us – we filed slowly toward the front door, walking through a hallway that opened onto what had recently been a living-room. The roof was gone, so that I could look up and see the sky above us; more of those clay shingles lay scattered about the floor; and dust lay everywhere. This little hallway itself was under half an inch of water. Pipes tend to burst in houses that rockets hit.

I stood around for a while looking at the scene and talking to some people. Prosper Peretz blended into the crowd. A few of his friends showed up to ask him what had happened. He told the story of how he stopped the young man’s bleeding several times, shortening it a little each time, as he became tired of repeating himself.

I did my shopping in his store, and I went home.

THINKING ABOUT THE CEASEFIRE :How Much Longer Do We Have?

A ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas government of the Gaza Strip went into effect on 19 June, 2008. This kind of ceasefire is called a tahadiya in Arabic, and it contrasts with a hudna, which is another kind of ceasefire having different implications and other time-limits. That there are two flavors of ceasefire is not accidental, but rather legally stipulated in Sharia, which is the Moslem legal system. They are based on arrangements Mohammad and the other early Moslems made with the tribes with whom that first Islamic generation fought.

Moslem terrorists of today identify with the old jihad warriors of centuries ago. They view themselves as continuing those wars against modern enemies. During the early wars of conquest, when the Moslems first defeated all the non-Moslem tribes to conquer the whole Arabian peninsula, and then burst out to conquer much of the Mediterranean world, as well as the whole Middle East, thus imposing themselves on the nationalities between Morocco and India, the conquerors frequently made temporary ceasefire agreements with those they were about to conquer.

The Hudna kind of ceasefire is an agreement to be entered upon with an enemy for a period of ten years. It is signed and settled between the two parties. A tahadiyya, in contrast, can be for any period, and it is a much less formal agreement. The Arabic word “tahadiyya” is the ordinary word for calming. It means that both sides agree not to shoot for a while. It might be for a specified period, but it might be that the Moslems simply state that they will not be shooting “until the next time”, and that there should be peace and quiet for a while.

The Moslem side agreed to a ceasefire in ancient times when they felt they could benefit from having one, and that by a cessation of hostilities their forces would be able to come back stronger than they had been. The Moslems made peace in order to make war.

The present tahadiyya of 19 June, 2008, was agreed upon for six months. During this time, a number of kassam rockets have been fired at Sderot and other Israeli communities near the border with Gaza, but things have indeed been quieter down here than they have been for several years.

Hamas agreed to the ceasefire because the leadership thought it was for the benefit of Hamas to cease its fire against Israel for at least some period of time. The benefits Hamas appears to have reaped from the present calming are several.

Hamas having agreed to the ceasefire, it can use the ceasefire as an excuse to take control of the other militias and terrorist groups in Gaza . Hamas gives itself a license to control, if not to smash, Islamic Jihad and the other smaller terror groups in Gaza . Israel of course wants the ceasefire to continue, and so Israel is in effect blessing the Hamas terrorists’ continuing conquest of Gaza and its domination over the other terror groups there.

Hamas thus takes on more and more of the functions of a state, which is what they want to be, even as they aspire to take over the whole of the West Bank and end the Abbas government there. Israel gains too, at least in the short term, because Hamas now becomes the sole address, and it can be held responsible for keeping quiet on the other side. The long-term consequences of doing deals with creatures like Hamas might be less beneficial to Israel. The tahadiyya does help Israel at least somewhat and for the short term, though, because Israel need not attack Gaza constantly and lose soldiers there.

In domestic politics, Hamas is able to present itself to the Arabs living in Gaza as having forced Israel into a ceasefire with it – something the PA was not able to do in Gaza . It makes Hamas look strong and important – “We are the guys with whom the big boys and Israel must negotiate.” A ceasefire with Hamas makes a shlemiel like Mahmoud Abbas look like a shlemiel.

Hamas further benefits from the ceasefire by being able to build itself up militarily. By refraining from firing rockets at Israel for this half year, Hamas has immensely increased its stockpiles of these rockets and other weapons to use against Israel in the future. These things, or at least their raw material, are mostly smuggled in through tunnels dug under the border with Egypt . It is thought that the first days after the ceasefire will see many, many rockets fired at Israeli civilian targets. These rockets are much heavier and have longer ranges than the kassams do. Hamas will be able to hit not only Sderot, but also Ashkelon , Kryat Gat, and much of the southern part of the country. Hamas’s aim is to make all of Israel into one big Sderot. As the Moslems did during their first wars of conquest, so they do also today: they make peace now in order to make war later.

It is very important to understand that even if the Arabs are not firing rockets at Israel for a period, they still have a large part of the advantage of firing those rockets at Israel , because the terror of anticipating the rocket that might fall five minutes from now remains in the heart of everyone living in Sderot. We all know that the Moslems still have those rockets, that they have used them often enough on us in the past, that Israel ’s armed forces have not destroyed the Arab capacity to make war on us, and that it can all start again. For Hamas , a ceasefire is rather like shooting and not shooting at the same time. This little ceasefire improves the lives of children in Sderot somewhat, but every child knows the rockets can return at any moment. The psychology of being shot at remains.

The six month tahadiyya will end on 19 December of this year. People are nervous about that date. Nobody knows what will happen then. It is possible that Hamas and Israel will sign an extension for another half year, but Hamas might feel ready to take Israel on again. Other observers view Hamas’s larger interest during this period as undermining Abbas and his people. Abbas can be the appetizer; Israel, the main course, will be served later.

Another important date will come in January, when Abbas’s term as president of the PA ends. Abbas appears to want to extend his term indefinitely. Hamas contends – correctly, under the PA constitution – that Abbas will have to step down, and that the speaker of the Palestinian legislative body will become president. That man is from Hamas. This mess has the potential for civil war among the Arabs. If Israel decides to support Abbas against Hamas, in accordance with Israel ’s general policy of helping the side it views as more moderate, Hamas might start shooting at Israel again, and the rockets will return to Sderot.

The third possible scenario for the end of the tahadiyya is the eventuality of Israel’s taking out the Iranian nuclear missile industry. Both Syria and Hamas are allied to, and substantially dependent on, Iran . If there is war between Israel and Iran, Hamas might well enter that war. Hamas might also not; they would be risking everything they have built up if they attacked Israel at that time.

The fourth possible date for the end of the ceasefire is all the other dates, hours, minutes, and seconds between this moment and the end of the world. The Arabs might start shooting at Israel again at any time. Everybody in Sderot lives with that possibility, and people know that the pleasure they take in walking around in public parks again during this ceasefire can end with a sudden bang.

The Falafel and the Bulldozer

Thursday Jul 03, 2008

Living with Rockets: The falafel and the bulldozer

Posted by David Farer

Coming to Jerusalem to work for a few days seemed like a welcome break from the Kassam rockets that Arab terrorists fire at Sderot. In Jerusalem, the method Arab terrorists prefer to kill random civilians is suicide-bombing. The Israeli army has largely controlled that kind of murder by building a barrier to prevent Arab terrorists from infiltrating Israel. Whenever I come to Jerusalem, I feel liberated, because I do not automatically look around me for a wall to crouch behind as I walk down the street. People living in Sderot develop skills to use when the alarm announces that a rocket is flying in their general direction and will detonate in about fifteen seconds. We automatically, almost unconsciously, look for potential shelter wherever we go. In Jerusalem I need not do this.

Yesterday, Wednesday, about noon, I decided it was time for a felafel break from the primitive form of SEO my employer naively thinks I know how to do. Some of the best felafels in Jerusalem are in and around Mahaneh Yehuda, the open-air market near where I am staying. I decided to try a particular felafel shop on the other side of this market. I had not eaten in it for some time.

While walking through the market to get to Jaffa Road, I noticed many people standing in little groups talking; they seemed tense to me. Many appeared to have been running seconds earlier. They looked around to see if they might need to run again. Police and soldiers were walking pretty briskly toward Jaffa Road, where I was going for my felafel. Sirens wailed in the distance; ambulances were on their way. Helicopters flew overhead.

Right after a rocket hits us down in Sderot, there is usually a lot of air action as the helicopters and the jets go looking for the bad guys in Gaza; in Jerusalem, the helicopters are more to observe the general area where the attack took place. Attacks on Sderot come from elsewhere, but the terrorists who attack Jerusalem are almost always physically present at the target they attack.

I asked people what had happened. They said that a bulldozer had just driven down Jaffa Road running people over, smashing cars, and that it had attacked a couple of buses. I continued to walk forward to Jaffa Road. I entered the street, which is one of the major roads of Jerusalem. This road was once the link between Jerusalem and the port of Jaffa, along which pilgrims of many religions, camels carrying the goods for the merchants who whipped them, and the armies of the Ottoman and British Empires had marched. The city of Jerusalem had expanded along this road more than a hundred years ago when people first built neighborhoods outside the walled city.

I turned out of the street through Mahaneh Yehuda market and into Jaffa Road. My first reaction was silence; to its early history, the street must add that today it was a mess. Cars sat broken and bleeding gas and water, which dripped onto the pavement. The cars were grotesque. Some were crushed perfectly, so that they looked like piles of spare parts; most of the ruined cars seemed to be flattened on one half, with the other half in good shape.

The dinosaur-looking creature that had wrought this carnage stood with its huge shovel of a mouth, ringed by jagged, steel teeth, pointing defiantly upward. An ambulance crew had covered a corpse on a stretcher next to the yellow dinosaur. I was later to learn that this was the corpse of the murderer.

Women were walking around crying; the medics and ambulance staff, almost all Chassidim, looked into broken cars for broken people. A bus was on its side, medics were delicately placing wounded into stretchers. The huge bulldozer stood silently, threateningly, presiding over the chaos it had created. Police cars and firetrucks were arriving in great numbers, as well as ambulances and medics.

The authorities began to impose order. Police placed tape around the crime scene. A young policewoman told me and some people with whom I was speaking to leave. As she shooed us away, hundreds and hundreds of high school aged Chassidim began collecting on the sidewalks and on the roofs of neighboring buildings to watch. Some had cameras. Professional camera crews began filming people. A terrorist attack in Israel unfortunately produces many people to interview, because such an attack takes place in public and with many witnesses. I chatted with an Italian journalist for a while. I happen to speak Italian.

It took a few moments for the wandering crowds to dissipate into the town, so I walked over to one of the buses the yellow monster had attacked. This bus lay on its side with its front window broken. I later learned that a policewoman had smashed this window to let the passengers out after the bus was already lying on its side. I knelt down to peer at the packages and the bags of food people had bought for their shopping that day. The yellow bulldozer had wrecked the bus's bottom as the Arab terrorist used his front-loading shovel to flip the bus over. The passengers being flipped had landed all in a heap on the wall that had suddenly become a floor. The stains on that wall were made with their blood.

"Now you must GO!", the policewoman ordered. I looked around me. Everybody in the perimeter either had a job to do or was wounded. I walked out and beyond the tape. I stared at the yellow monster, the bulldozer that had killed three people and wounded dozens more, and would have killed everybody in that neighborhood had not an Israeli soldier and an ordinary cop killed its driver. Israel is luckier to have such citizens - luckier than the Arabs are to have so many psychopathic murderers.

I walked back to Mahane Yehuda market. People were already going about their business, buying food and whatever else markets sell. I saw the felafel place that had been my aim in coming to this neighborhood. While eating my felafel, I fell into conversation with the owner. He told me what he had seen during today's attack. We talked about the several suicide attacks he had seen and heard. When I mentioned that I had moved to Sderot, he expressed doubts about my sanity for going to a town where rockets come down at any moment. I replied that I was not sure which of us would take the gold medal in the Crazy Olympics, if he continued to sell felafel in a place where suicide bombers and bulldozer drivers might kill him at any moment. In the end, we decided that the best way to live our lives was for him to make his felafels, and for me to eat them, and for life to proceed, no matter what the terrorists do.

And that felafel was damn good!

SATURDAY NIGHT IN SDEROT

During Saturday afternoon, I heard a number of alarms followed by a number of loud explosions as rockets hit this town and exploded. I did not know where they had hit. I decided to go looking for them when the sun went down and the Sabbath ended.

A constant problem here is that we hear the loud KABOOM! when the rocket lands, but we often have no way of knowing exactly where the explosion occurred - unless, of course, the rocket went through the roof of my house. We too are dependent on the news media to learn exactly what has happened, but the TV and radio do not mention the address where the rocket fell, because most of their audience does not live in Sderot.

I walked along the street using my customary rocket-finding method of asking everybody I met until I found somebody who knew. This man was standing behind the counter in a little cafe that he owns. He told me that a rocket had landed just across the street from him that afternoon. Other people in the cafe were astonished to hear that the rocket has been so close.

I crossed the street to look at the mess. The Kassam had fallen between two blocks of old-fashioned shikun apartment houses. I knew these buildings quite well. I have interviewed people who live there. These apartment blocks were among the earliest buildings built in Sderot in the 1950's and the early 1960's.

I looked at the courtyard between them. Nearly all the windows of the two buildings were broken. Glass was everywhere on the ground. I have seen quite a few of these rocket attacks by now, but it never stops amazing me how many shards of glass even one broken window could make, and here were dozens and dozens broken simultaneously.

People were walking around in this courtyard talking with each other. Those whose electricity had been knocked out were trying to run electric wires up the stairs to get an emergency supply of power. Children were everywhere, police and firefighters were present.

In the middle of this courtyard was the hole the blast had made. This crater was about two feet deep, and two feet by three feet wide. It had thrown earth and rocks up and out of the ground. Everybody wanted to see it; children, evidently those who lived in the neighborhood, were pointing this hole out to their friends. If you live in Sderot, you learn what different kinds of craters a rocket can make - what it looks like if it lands on pavement, in contrast to this kind of hole on naked earth and rocks.

I walked around to the other side of one of the buildings. I spoke to some teenagers there. They told me they had come to visit their grandparents, who live in the building. They pointed out their grandparents' flat to me, and one of them offered to take me up to meet them.

We walked up the stairs together. The young person introduced me to his parents and to his grandparents. It seems that, when the rocket hit, the grandparents immediately called their children, who live at the other end of Sderot, to tell them that they had been hit. These people walked over to their parents' home as quickly as they could. Several adult children of the grandparents were there, as well as young children, the grandchildren of the old people.

A daughter offered me something to drink, apologizing for the mess, and for the fact that the Coke was not cold. It seems that the refrigerator had stopped working when the rocket hit. All the windows on the side of the building were blown in, leaving piles and piles of broken glass on the floor. Much of this glass had been cleaned up by the time I arrived, but they will surely be finding bits of broken glass underfoot for weeks.

This same daughter then gave me a tour of the flat. She showed me each broken window, as well as clothing on a clothing line that had a couple of holes in it from flying shrapnel. Fmily pictures of their great-grandparents and other family members from Morocco had been blown off the walls.

The old grandfather had been saying his Sabbath prayers in the kitchen. Had he been less religious, he would likely have been in the livingroom watching TV, and he would have received a shower of hundreds of pieces of glass. "The Sabbath preserves from death", he told me - in this case, literally true.

The old man seemed in good spirits, bantering with his grandchildren and telling me about his first years in Sderot half a century ago, when they lived in pachonim, which were big tin cans deposited in the desert. From those remote beginnings came the city of Sderot. This family, who had been part of those beginnings, were now dealing with rockets in their old age.

The grandmother looked rather dazed. She spoke little. This attack was their second; another rocket had landed next to their home some months ago. The family cursed the government for allowing these rocket attacks to continue for years and years. Having spent their youthful energy building Sderot up, they must now watch Arabs blow it down.

On the way out, I met a younger man sitting on a park bench in front of the buildings. He told me that he had been sitting in his little garden enjoying the day when the alarm sounded. He stood up and walked into the entrance hall of his building. The crater of the rocket was a few feet from where he had been sitting; had he not walked inside, he would probably have been killed.

I asked him what he was thinking about. He, like almost everybody in Sderot, cursed the Israeli government for not doing enough to protect them. Of his narrow escape, he said, "There are two things to say. The first is Thank God, and the second is also Thank God."

Last Thursday in Sderot

I went to bed on Wednesday evening about 9:30. I heard the rocket alarm a few minutes later, while in the happy state between wakefulness and sleep. The alarm in Sderot is a recording of a woman's voice repeating, calmly but firmly, "Tzeva adom! Tzeva adom" several times. This Hebrew phrase means "Color Red! Color Red!" It tells me to seek cover. The home I rent has no bomb shelter. People who have no shelters are supposed to go into a hallway or other room in the middle of their homes, in order to keep away from windows. Flying glass is the major hazard; the rocket is unlikely to kill anybody who is inside a building, unless the room in which he is sitting takes a direct hit. Being outside is much more dangerous. The shrapnel and small bits of metal the Arabs pack into their rockets shoot in every direction with the force of bullets. If you stay inside and away from windows, you increase your chances of survival, because these bits of shrapnel will hopefully not penetrate walls, but they can break windows.

My bedroom has only small windows, and the possibility that a rocket will hit my bedroom is not greater than that it might fall on my hallway, so I stayed in bed. I did pull the blanket over my head, in case my windows were blown in. If the rocket came directly through the roof, I reasoned the blanket would be useful to whomever had to carry my remains out of there.

As the seconds passed, the alarm sounded a again, because the radar had detected another rocket being fired at us. The first rocket exploded quite loudly, shaking my house, and the windows rattled in their frames for a second or two. The woman's voice had not finished chanting the alarm for the second rocket when the first exploded. I waited for the next rocket to hit. It made a softer noise, probably because it landed farther away. The alarm began chanting again, now rather confusedly, because we were being hit by a barrage of rockets, and not just one or two, as usually happens. I lost count of the alarms and of the rockets, but at least one more was close enough to my home to shake the windows.

The whole barrage, with its attendant alarms and blasts, lasted had somewhat less than a minute. I debated whether to get out of bed and go looking for where the rockets had fallen, but I knew the emergency squad of Beit haMitnadev, or Volunteer House, would phone me if I were needed. I also knew that my usual method for finding where the rocket landed would not work at this hour. I generally ask people I see in the street where it landed, assuming there is no mushroom cloud over the site, and they point in the general direction. I go further, getting closer every time somebody points a finger, until I find it. At night, however, few people will be in the streets, and darkness will prevent my seeing any cloud. While thinking these thoughts, I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up and walked to Volunteer House to open the place up, as is my job. After a while, other people came. I asked one of them if he knew where the rockets had fallen last night. He told me that one had landed near our building, so I went to look at the site.

This rocket had landed in a little parking lot or square that is surrounded by small shops. As always when a rocket explodes anywhere near windows, the ground seemed to be paved in broken glass. This carpeting of glass shards was much thicker on one side of the square than on the other, because every window on that side was knocked out. Shops on the other sides of the square were missing some windows, and some cars had some nasty-looking holes in their bodies, and also no glass windows.

People were standing around watching; a group of volunteers called Lev Echad were sweeping up glass. Some bystanders loudly cursed the government in general and Ehud Olmert in particular for allowing these attacks to go on year after year - I hear these complaints every time I go to a bombsite.

The owners had opened some of their shops for business. Women stepped over the broken glass to enter them and go shopping. Lying on the floor, just inside a display window, covered with glass, lay a manikin. This model of a woman's body was twisted into an ugly and unnatural position. The clothes it had been displaying were blown off. A number of holes I assume the shrapnel had made were clearly visible the length of the manikin. Had the rocket fallen at this hour instead of at night, that manikin might have been a woman who had just stepped in to buy herself a new skirt.

Here is the grotesquenss of it all: life in Sderot is the union of opposites. A rocket has just exploded. What it has damaged is a very ordinary shop. The next morning, men and women do however go shopping, stepping over the shards of glass to enter the stores, walking into the very stores people had damaged with that rocket. The people who did this damage would have preferred to kill the women who carried plastic shopping bags, rather than damage the shops. The rockets the Arabs had fired the previous night might just as easily have gone through the roof of one of those women's homes.

That people carrying shopping still walk into shops that have just been bombed is a sign that the people of Sderot can take it.

First Post: Introducing Sderot.

I live in the Israeli town of Sderot. Sderot is a small town in the northern corner of the Negev Desert. It borders on the Gaza Strip, which is only a couple of miles away. This closeness makes Sderot an inviting target for Arab terrorists to shoot at. Those who shoot at us are mostly Hamas, but Islamic Jihad and other Moslem terror organizations join in the fun as well.

We are generally hit with rockets known as Kassams. These rockets are primitive and have a short range and little accuracy. Kassams are of slight military value, because they cannot be properly aimed, and they do not go very far. They are good for only one purpose: Terror attacks on civilians. The target is a town. The enemy has chosen this town because it is so close to the border, and therefore to them, and because Sderot is big enough for them not to miss. The Arabs do not aim at a particular building, but rather at the town itself. Their rockets have a reasonable likelihood of landing within city limits. Because Sderot is a pleasant, green town with many open spaces and parks, most rockets do not strike a building, nor do they wound or kill anybody. When the alarm goes off that informs us that we have between twelve and twenty seconds to take cover, none of us knows whether this rocket will be one of the many that makes a tremendous explosion that terrifies many inhabitants, or one of those that comes through the roof of somebody's house and kills him, as has happened a number of times.

The people who live here are Israelis, mostly immigrants, their children and grandchildren, who moved here from Morocco and other countries during the 1950's. Sderot is small enough so that most families tend to know each other; one does not speak of "the street named X", but rather "near the Y family". More recent waves of immigrants include Kavkazim, who are Jews from the Caucasus Mountains in Dagestan, in what used to be the USSR, and Ethiopian Jews.

When I first arrived, I thought that the rockets were the major story, but I have learned that the lives of these people are not less important. The real story requires a synthesis between the two: how an occasional rocket exploding in the neighborhood affects daily life, and how people have adapted themselves to terror bombing during the seven years since the enemy began shooting at their homes.

Ordinary people are being denied ordinary lives. They do however continue to work and to live. I have been part of that life for about four months. I hope to present it in a book, and also in this blog.