Sderot Media Center is a new website that is trying to get the word out. But the media isn’t listening. Here’s an idea for us all: Send letters to your local news and TV stations with the URL to Sderot Media Center, and especially to this article, which is an account by an American of what it’s like to be in Sderot during a rocket attack. It’s the one I excerpted last week. It needs to be seen, again and again.
The first ‘TSEVA ADOM’ alarm went off as I was across the street from my office, borrowing a friend’s computer on the fourth floor of an apartment building. Like usual, we stepped into the corridor – the safest place in the house – and waited. 15…14…13…I had gotten to twelve when I heard the screaming. A type of scream I couldn’t recognize, half laughter, half terror, complete madness. 11…10…it fell. Maybe a block away at most. Everyone in the apartment raced outside, and it wasn’t until 30 seconds later – when I woke from my daze – that I realized the screaming hadn’t stopped. I was about to step outside to join the rest when, ‘TSEVA ADOM’. Again. 15…14…I had barely reached 13 when it crashed, shaking my entire body – half a block away.
My phone rang: it was my boss Natasha, telling me to immediately come back to the office, as the fourth floor of any building was not safe. I grabbed my roommate Jackie who had come with me for the day, curious about my work in Sderot, and together we ran back across the street, as quickly as we could – into the office. Natasha looked us over, then asked if we had heard the scream. She explained that a young mother was pushing her child in a stroller, when the first ‘tseva adom’ alarm went off. Rationally speaking, she would have had enough time to pick up her child and rush with him into a nearby basement. But instead, she toppled over the stroller, child inside, and herself fell to the ground – screaming. She did not cease until Natasha and the others who ran out of the apartment lifted her and her child, and carried her into a neighbor’s apartment. How often have you read about Sderot’s ‘anxiety victims’? What do you picture – heightened blood pressure, breathing at a faster pace? No – it is this woman’s body, convulsing, flailing. It is her inability to think or move rationally – to protect her child. She was only able to collapse, hitting the ground, as if the tremor of her beating fists would keep away the Kassam.
Please help get the word out. Email these links to your favorite bloggers as well. If the world media won’t do it, perhaps a grass-roots campaign will. The Palestinians have been rocketing Sderot for six years. More than 6,000 rockets have landed in Sderot. More than 2,000 were fired after Israel evacuated Gaza. More than 140 rockets have been fired in the last six days.
There have been exactly zero UN resolutions regarding Sderot. No emergency sessions have been called by the UN to investigate the Sderot attacks. The UN, in fact, has never to my knowledge so much as mentioned Sderot. The new Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, issued exactly one line in a statement recently that doesn’t even mention Sderot by name:
Equally unacceptable is the firing by Palestinian militants of rockets into Israel, targeting and injuring civilians.
He finds it “unacceptable” that the Palestinians are rocketing Sderot. He doesn’t “deplore” or “strongly condemn” it. He simply finds it—unacceptable.
Well, I do too, but I’m not the head of the United Nations. I’m just a blogger, asking for your help, to try to get the world to start doing more than simply saying tsk-tsk to the terrorist rocketing of Sderot—for six years.