Young Judaea Year Course - Program In Israel - Ben Freed - Conflict Within The Community

Normally I try to write fun updates that deal less with the conflicts in Israel and more with everyday life. I try to portray amusing events and fun occurrences that highlight my time on Year Course and make it a truly special year. Today, however, I have to strike a more serious tone, and for the first time delve into the world of politics, war, fear and pain.

Israel is not a big country. It took all of 45 minutes to drive from where we live in Bat Yam to our destination in Sderot. Sderot is a town of about 19,000 people (about 5,000 fewer than lived there eight years ago) situated less than one kilometer (about half a mile) from the Gaza Strip in southwestern Israel. For the past seven years, it has been subjected to more than 8,000 rocket and mortar attacks.

Israel used to be a presence in Gaza, with both civilians living there and military patrols throughout. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew all civilians and military from within the Gaza Strip. We spent the first part of our day visiting some of the civilians who were withdrawn (or as they prefer, "expelled") from the Gaza Strip by the Israeli government. Many of them are still living in temporary housing ("cara-villas") in communities that range from 20 to 500 families.

The community we visited, Nitzan, was one of the largest with about 500 families living there. Many of these families are still living in temporary housing because the Israeli government has yet to fully compensate them for the land they were forced to give up in Gaza. These people's homes were razed by the army after they left, but the buildings they left standing, including synagogues, greenhouses and community buildings, were burned, looted, desecrated--in the case of the synagogues--and utterly destroyed by Palestinians.

It was a great debate in Israel--and continues to be a bitter dispute--as to whether the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was a good idea. Israel hoped that with some of its land free of Israeli interference, the Palestinians would begin to set up a national infrastructure, including joint ventures with the Israelis on things like factories, a power plant and other sources of income, jobs and economic viability. Instead, the Palestinians took Israel's leaving as a sign of weakness, and when Hamas ran in the 2005 elections as the ones who "kicked the Jews out of Gaza," they won an overwhelming majority of the votes in the Gaza Strip. This idea that violence works has created a dangerous precedent that continues to cause problems for Jews living in Israel.

Sderot is now a virtual ghost town. Though there are still 19,000 people living there, even on a beautiful sunny day you can count on two hands the people you see walking on the sidewalks outside. The fear these people are living every day is truly palpable on a quick tour around the town.

It is a miracle that there have still been less than 10 people killed by these rockets, despite the fact that they have averaged shooting three a day in recent weeks. Do we really need to wait until a full kindergarten classroom is hit by a rocket before we do anything?

I see only three alternatives to the policy of collective punishment, and none are particularly appealing. One is air strikes against the people responsible for these attacks. Israel already carries out attacks in Gaza, but only against people who are about to fire, or who have just fired, a Qassam missile or a mortar. The problem with carrying out attacks on either the supplies or the makers of these missiles is that they are located in civilian buildings.

The second option is a ground invasion of Gaza. Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, and there is nothing Israel wants to do less than go back in. Unofficial intelligence estimates are that a ground invasion of Gaza could result in over 500 Israeli soldiers killed and over 1,000 wounded.

The third option is to uphold the status quo; to continue to hope that the rockets will miss and ignore the fact that they are getting larger and larger, stronger and stronger, and more and more accurate. But this option is not an option for the people living in Sderot. Something must be done; the world cannot, must not, remain silent.

Here are some things you can do to help Sderot:

--Go to sderotmedia.com and learn more about what's going on

--Send the above link to friends

--Contact your local Jewish federation to see if there's a special fund for Sderot; if not, set one up

--Lobby your congressmen and senators and alert them to what's going on in Sderot; if they already know, ask why nothing is being done to help

--Visit connectionsisrael.com and buy a gift basket for a Sderot family

--Simply raise awareness of the lives these people are living; they're just like you and me, except when a siren goes off, they only have 15 seconds to reach safety.

Ben Freed is a 19-year-old from Ann Arbor, Mich. He enjoys long walks on the beach, candle-lit dinners and Marvin Gaye music. He always abides by his credo of "Love, Peace and Zionism."