“You should be ashamed of yourself, you have forgotten us in war. Signed, the children of Sderot.” (graffiti in Sderot)

A direct hit to a classroom in Sderot a few days ago.

“Because not all of our classrooms are protected, we have to study in shifts. We have no gym class because there is no safe place to practice… During the night we can’t fall asleep because of the drones and helicopters flying overhead, and during the day we can’t concentrate because we are too tired.” -Gon

“We have no normal life. We never know what will happen the next hour when Qassams fall; we are not only afraid for ourselves, but also for our families. It’s traumatic to think that someone close to us will get hurt. It’s just terrible.” -Bar

“I have a hard time concentrating in school, and the Qassams affect my entire life…Every time I want to do something, I give up because I think that the alarm will go off at any moment. I can’t study and I can’t even play soccer.” -Niv

quotes from Ynet News Sderot kids: Can’t Remember Life Without Kassams by Miri Chason

Dear World,

I am very sad about some of the awful things that are happening to my country right now. I am sad about the events themselves and I am sad that my country refuses to protect its citizens because of the shame and ridicule she feels from the international community.

Our country was designed to be a place where Jews could finally be safe and escape persecution. Instead, we have become sitting ducks for those who hate us most. Yesterday, 35 rockets landed in Israel proper and 35 people were injured (ironically one for every rocket fired). Today 16 rockets landed in Israel proper. More were wounded. Actually, Kassam rockets fired from Gaza have been landing in Israel, primarily in southern towns such as Sderot, almost every day for several years now.

You might be surprised to learn this. After all, it hardly ever makes international headlines anymore. It doesn’t make headlines because Israel has done little to make it stop. Without Israeli retaliation, dead and wounded Jews don’t make much of a news story. Nobody cares. Our government is too scared to do anything because it doesn’t want you to hate us more than you already do. Our leaders seem to be the only people in this entire country unwilling to accept that no matter how much restraint we use, you still hate us.

So, let’s take the example of last night again. In the first round of rockets, an apartment building was directly hit. A mother was critically wounded. She was found lying on the living room floor, her children also injured from fragments crying hysterically at her side. While the MDA (Magen David Adom) paramedics were treating her, another “Red Code” alert was sounded. The paramedics continued to treat victims of the first round of missiles while additional missiles were falling all around, meters away. Sometimes they protected the wounded with their own bodies. They admit that they are frightened but they say matter-of-factly that this is just part of their job.

The rockets fired into our borders hit nursery schools and community centers, gas stations and homes, soccer fields and restaurants. All of this largely in part because we got out of Gaza two summers ago. Some of us thought it would make you like us more and that it would make the Palestinians like us more. Instead, the Palestinians have turned the land we gave them into a killing ground with which to reach Israel proper with rockets.

We forced our own people kicking and screaming out of their homes, homes that the government encouraged them to build on once barren desert land that the government asked them to settle in the first place. They transformed this land into a lush paradise with exotic greenhouses and exported more produce than anywhere in the country.

The dignity of the residents of Gush Katif was uprooted along with their homes and their livelihoods. Today most of them live in tent cities, like refugees. No permanent housing solution has been found. Many are unemployed and none have been adequately compensated by the government for the loss of their homes and livelihoods. A significant number of the youth are no longer religious. They can’t believe in G-d anymore. Many of the former residents of Gush Katif have lost their faith – faith in the State of Israel, faith in the Zionist idea, faith in the government, faith in G-d, and for what?

For this. So the elderly woman minding her own business in her apartment could wake up this morning and be critically wounded by a rocket. And for this I am sad, sad for my country, sad for the Zionist idea, and sad for the cowardice of our own leaders.

When you don’t explicitly hate us, you look at us with pity and disdain and think “Let both sides kill each other” and then you look away. We leave a sour taste in your mouth. World, please give us a chance this time. We need you. We need the permission to defend ourselves. We are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, daughters, and sons just like you. We are overall a good people. We treasure and love life. More than anything, we just want to live normal lives like ordinary people. Stop cajoling and threatening and judging us. Let us defend ourselves. And to our leaders – please show the world that Jewish blood isn’t so cheap. And let us defend ourselves. Always remember, that’s a big part of why we created this land in the first place.

World, I leave you with this message: Today children in the south of Israel couldn’t go to school because of the rocket fire. Photographs in the newspapers show them standing outside, their eyes wide with terror, looking skywards. I pray for the day when the children of Sderot will only look up into the sky to see fireworks or the stars at night instead of rockets raining down.

The Price of a Passion for Life

I enjoy writing observations about the things in Israel that I find to be somewhat novel or unique – the type of endearing and ‘ethnic’ things that I think might interest those back in the Old Country. The relationship between Israeli culture and Jewish culture is often a blurry one, given that we do live in a Jewish state. Sometimes the problem is that these lovely cultural practices are a bit TOO familiar. In my opinion, many aspects of Israeli culture are just extreme manifestations of obnoxious, stereotypically Jewish behaviors.

For an example of what I am talking about: the Israeli workplace and the whole meeting phenomenon. Israelis LOVE their meetings in a way that borders on unhealthy fixation. In my opinion, this meeting fixation/fetish has a distinctly Jewish origin.

In college, I was very involved in Hillel. I enjoyed Hillel very much and we did a lot of really great things. However, the one thing I could just not stand were the endless meetings. There were always meetings because no one could ever keep quiet for longer than three seconds or agree on anything and thus nothing could ever be entirely resolved, therefore warranting another meeting.

A three item agenda could easily take over two hours as everyone weighed in at great length as to whether straws were really necessary for the bagel brunch on Sunday and if so, whether they should be bendy straws or whether straight straws would do the trick. You get the point.

No other meetings were as lengthy, ineffectual, frustrating, and inefficiently run as our special Jew meetings – whether it was Hillel student board, Hillel alum board, Hillel personnel committee, the Hillel director search committee, or even our short-lived Hillel book club – whether it was young Jews, medium-aged Jews, or senile Jews the overall governing theme was my insatiable desire for a fire alarm, real fire, or medical emergency. Anything to make the torture, I mean meeting end.

I realize all of this information might come as a shock to those who know me in real life as pretty good-natured, like the whole part about wishing personal harm upon myself or even possibly others in order to make a meeting end.

My favorite meetings in college involved organizations with high concentrations of non-Jews and science majors, two populations known for being people of considerably fewer words.

So, yes, getting back to Israel. I naively imagined that the end of my Wellesley College Hillel days would mark the end of the Jewish torture meeting phenomenon. This was before I settled into my first Israeli job. If it’s even possible, these lab meetings are worse than the Hillel meetings. For one thing, since the meetings are in Hebrew, I have totally exhausted one month’s worth of concentration in comprehending approximately four sentences. According to this calculation, it takes no longer than 2 minutes for my ADD drooling glazed eye vegetable coma to kick in.

In addition, here in Israel, the mastery of the “let’s sit in silence for 30 seconds and gather our final thoughts…oh wait someone has one last thing to add now let’s repeat this routine 395 more times” ritual is beyond proportions I ever thought possible. Inevitably during these meetings I am either shivering cold or melting and either my bladder is about to explode or I feel parched dry and in addition I have inevitably lost feeling in one or two or four of my extremities due to my sitting position. This element of physical torture serves to mirror the depth of my psychological torture.

The reason for the excessive length and inefficiency of these meetings is that we Jews love to talk. Everyone has a passionate opinion on everything and in addition, the conviction that his/her thoughts on every topic, no matter how mundane or ultimately inconsequential or how completely unrelated to one’s area of expertise are a)correct and b)deserve to be heard and c) absolutely need to be heard or his/her universe will cease to exist.

However, even though these meetings are often a form of extreme torture and even though everyone is really self righteous (in the most endearing way possible) in his/her unshakeable belief that his/her opinion on every conceivable issue is so important, isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it wonderful to be part of a culture that so values an individual’s opinion? Isn’t it wonderful to be raised in a culture that says to a kid that your opinion is important and deserves to be heard?

Well, we certainly aren’t an apathetic people, that’s for sure. If this is the price I have to pay for the free exchange of ideas, I’ll happily pay it because isn’t it wonderful to live in a place where there is such an abiding passion for life that everyone wants to squeeze life to its fullest and argue and discuss and overanalyze everything to death until there is truly nothing more to say? In the mean time, I should probably be working on how to fake a nosebleed without red marker.