Today's Situation

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

The Sderot syndrome

Sound familiar? Ehud Barak was the prime minister, the 'terrorist-infested' area was south Lebanon, the nearby Israeli town was Kiryat Shmona and the year was 1999-2000. Barak announced his plan to pack up and leave south Lebanon, where Israeli troops had been dying at the rate of about 25 a year serving in a 'security zone' meant to keep first PLO and then Hezbollah gunmen out of Kiryat Shmona, and to strike, whenever possible, at their Katyusha rockets, which rained on the settlements on the northern border with a nearly predictable routine. Barak followed through on his plan – and a little more than four years later, less than 10 people have been killed on the border since the May 2000 withdrawal, no Katyushas have flown into Israel from south Lebanon (though the army says the Hezbollah has thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets aimed all the way to Haifa port). The resorts of the northern Galilee are packed every weekend and every holiday and Kiryat Shmona is thriving.

That doesn't satisfy the Israeli Right. It claims the Palestinian intifada was the direct result of a Hezbollah victory and that Israel is a kind of pitiful giant, deterred by the rockets of a terror organization. The Left, of course, argues that the prosperity in Galilee is a direct result of the quiet border – and the intifada was the direct result of years of Israeli procrastination in the (now defunct) peace process.

Woman Crucified # 2 by Silvia Rosenberg, mixed media on recycled paper, 20x30 cm.

ow, a similar scenario appears to be emerging on the Gaza border, after Sharon's announcement of the so-called unilateral disengagement plan. Since 2001, there have been dozens of Qassams fired from Gaza's northeast corner at the town of Sderot, a sun-stroked Negev town known for producing Amir Peretz, the Histadrut chief, and a series of popular rock bands. But Sderot, like Kiryat Shmona, is also one of Israel's marginal development towns and ever since the first Qassam struck it, without causing any damage or casualties, its residents have felt abandoned by the government, just like the residents of Kiryat Shmona felt in the 1970s and 1980s, despite all the rhetoric about solidarity with them.

Until this week, the primitive rockets landed ineffectively, and the sleepy routine of the little town would go on, with the Likud mayor, Eli Moyal saying that he would not let his town go the way of Kiryat Shmona – while demanding that the town get the special subsidies the government gives to 'front-line border towns,' a concept from the 1950s, when all Israel's borders were front line.

The government meanwhile promised that the army would take action against the rockets, and that new budgets would flow into the town's school system, but in reality, there was nothing the army could really do against the rockets, short of reoccupying northeast Gaza and while some new budgets did trickle into the town, the government's Thatcherite policies slashed welfare and unemployment compensation to many of the town's residents, further depressing its economy. And every once in a while, a particularly lucky miss of a Qassam would even earn the town a headline in the tabloids. But so did the semi-annual reports on the towns with the most unemployment.

This week, after it suffered its first casualties from Qassams – a three-year-old and a 49-year-old – Sderot was in the headlines in a big way, especially since the rocket attack, the first to actually kill or even hurt someone in the town in the last four years, came less than a day after an estimated ton of explosives blew up under an IDF fort in the heart of the settlement bloc of central Gaza, killing a soldier.

uddenly, the comparisons to Lebanon were being made – and refuted. The army was at first against the Sharon 'disengagement move, but has come around, indeed now is whispering to Sharon that his plan to withdraw in stages (a compromise plan he worked out with recalcitrant ministers from his own Likud party) is a mistake, because every day that Israel remains in the territory will mean more terror attacks as Palestinian organizations compete for the title of 'the party that drove Israel out of Gaza.'

The Right is against the move, arguing it is a prize for terror and that there is a way to defeat terror – 'fight it, day and night, for as long as it takes,' as former minister Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party, told Israel Radio this morning. If that means reoccupying Gaza completely and going house to house, so be it, he explained, warning that after the withdrawal, the Qassam rockets will rain on Ashkelon, to Gaza's north, because 'the terrorists will take over the settlements Sharon wants to abandon' in the northwest corner of Gaza.

The Left is in favor of the so-called disengagement, though somewhat reluctantly, because it argues that the best way to quit Gaza is to engage in dialogue with those forces on the Palestinian side who, once Israel leaves, could take control of the Strip and disarm the local militias. But Sharon refuses any dialogue with any Palestinian for the purpose, because his entire plan for disengagement from Gaza (and the four settlements in the northern West Bank near Jenin) is based on the principle that it is supposed to be a punishment for the Palestinians for refusing to take action against the armed organizations and one does not engage in a political process with people who need to be punished, he explains.

Meanwhile, despite the Qasssams, Sderot doesn't have its own local Magen David Adom emergency medical ambulance service – it's not cost efficient for the organization to maintain an MDA station, says the state-subsidized emergency service. As a result, claimed residents yesterday, the baby died while the nearest MDA ambulance drove in from the next town. But the politicians don't seem to mind that the Sderot locals feel so lonely. Sharon himself lives only five kilometers away from the town but he hasn't visited it in months. His sons maintain a bank account for their farm in a local bank branch – that's public knowledge because of the police inquiries into the Sharon family's finances. But he knows – as does Finance Minister Netanyahu – that Sderot, like all the development towns, will continue voting Likud, despite everything, because the Left is identified with Oslo, and Oslo is identified with Arafat and Arafat is identified with the intifada, and the intifada, this week, is identified with lethal rockets landing in the Negev town, killing toddlers on their way to kindergarten and 'if there's a disengagement,' said one Sderot man in a man in the street interview to Israel Radio, 'the terrorists will dig a tunnel from Gaza to Sderot and blow us up.' Nobody at Israel Radio's studio even pointed out that maybe that's rhetorical exaggeration, that it's five kilometers between Gaza and Sderot – and the entire point to the withdrawal from Gaza is to dramatically deprive the Gazans, if not all Palestinians, of much if not all their reasons for hostility to Israel.

Meanwhile, a settler who allegedly conducted illegal business with Palestinians in the PA, was found murdered near a Palestinian village, and while the Fateh-affiliated Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed credit, the man's criminal background, said police, was no less a direction to investigate to determine what happened. And in the Knesset, the personal clash between Likud MK Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon broke out into the open, with Steinitz and Ya'alon issuing mutual recriminations about distrust of each other and leaks from each other's institutions. Yaalon doesn't like the way Steinitz has been critical of the army, and Steinitz doesn't like the way Yaalon has openly said so.

You're reading 'The Situation' Monday-Friday mid-day reports from Israel by Robert Rosenberg The text on the Ariga Home Page changes Monday-Friday, around 2 P.M. Tel Aviv time (GMT+2, EST+7, PST+10). Photo of the Day, courtesy of BauBau changes on average once every 12 hours Paintings by Silvia Rosenberg (unless otherwise noted) change weekly.

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