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.