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.