48.0°,
Overcast Avi Fertig: Sderot’s kids are children, too
By Avi Fertig
Issue of Jan. 9, 2009 / 13 Teves 5769
Hamas’s unsurprising cancellation of its loosely defined cease-fire last month brought me back to 1984. I was in the sixth grade. And every Tuesday, just before 8:00 p.m., I’d pace near the television practically hyperventilating with anticipation for that week’s episode of The A-Team to begin.
I can still recite, verbatim, with clipped military precision, the classic voice-over intro about a group of softhearted crack-commandos sent to prison in 1972 for a crime they didn’t commit. Watching reruns years later, I was crushed to discover that my grade school nirvana was actually a formulaic snore.
Turns out that you can set a clock to The A-Team’s predictable story arcs and cartoonishly-cliche dialogue. I’m concerned we can pretty much do the same with Israel’s current military operation in Gaza.
When the news broke, I could practically hear the scripts being unrolled. It didn’t take long to pollute the news cycle with weepy reports about civilian casualties, humanitarian crises, disproportionate force and more of the same ho-hum hysteria.
From Israel, I heard about ground incursions, deterrence, and fighting to the bitter end, and just assumed it was a matter of time before Israel agreed to yet another suicidal cease-fire. On that end, so far so good.
Another predictable phase of this perpetual motion lunacy is one self-righteous reprimand so cynical it just blows my eyelids. The winner in this round is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Condemning Israel for its excessive use of force, the Secretary-General tipped his cards saying, “The frightening nature of what is happening on the ground, in particular its effects on children, who are more than half of the population, troubles me greatly.”
All human suffering is tragic, no matter who’s in the crossfire. And such high-level concern for Gaza’s children is surely commendable. I’m just baffled by the Secretary-General’s contemptible lack of concern about the fate of Southern Israel’s children, to whom random rocket fire is merely part of the daily weather forecast.
I spent a day last spring representing The Jewish Star (read my report here) with a group of journalists invited to learn firsthand about the conditions there. In Sderot, the rocket's red glare is neither a song, nor a holiday spectacle. An approaching rocket often means that someone's home, or perhaps someone's family, is about to be decimated.
We saw one blast hole after another, and spoke to a roomful of children who described their haphazard, surreal lives. These are little kids who have lost homes, family members, friends and certainly their childhoods.
Sderot could use a little predictability. Instead, her residents live from one Code Red to another. The hours in between are spent shivering in bomb shelters, or trembling beneath concrete reinforced canopies. The Code Red alerts can come at any moment, at any time of the day or night. The only predictable thing in Sderot is the miniscule 15 to 20 seconds people have to run for cover.
After spending five emotionally draining hours there, it occurred to me that my odds of being hit by a rocket in Sderot were far greater than being splattered with plummeting bird-poop in Woodmere. The trauma of childhood in these circumstances will haunt these children throughout their lives.
It would be truly miraculous for Sderot’s children to lose the reflexive urge to nervously glance upward, searching the horizon for vapor trails. Maybe, one day, they’ll lose their dread of arbitrary destruction racing unseen through the glistening night sky.
So why should the least possible scenario here be a ranking member of the UN acknowledging their undeserved suffering?
“May you live in interesting times” is a notorious curse attributed to the ancient Chinese. Notorious for good reason. Apart from 80s-era television, the upside of predictability is stability, security and normalcy. The children in Sderot need predictability, and I pray the current military operation will bring it at long last.
Avi Fertig is a freelance writer and communications consultant in Woodmere. He visited Sderot for The Jewish Star in April 2008.
