If they are dreaming that somehow they will be able to ignore the presentation of facts as a counterweight to a 600 page report filled with information, they need to wake up. It is also in the interest of objective justice that they present counter-evidence. There can be no acceptance by Israel of crimes by its own soldiers. Their investigations can avoid the bias that Goldstone permitted in his research, but they need to be authentic investigations with real outcomes – whether the parties are innocent or guilty.

The problem for Israel now is that Goldstone doesn’t want his efforts wasted. He has decided that this report should not end up in the dustbin of history. In light of this, he had his daughter provide Israeli newspapers with a heartwarming tale about his Zionism and her passionate love for Israel. After buying his bona fides as a good Zionist and Jew (she mentioned he was visiting her for Rosh Hashanah), today Goldstone wrote an op-ed in the NY Times (so that a certain US President would be certain to see it) in which he stands by the objectivity of his committee and actually justifies their flawed mandate. Then he presses hard for international bodies, the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council, to take steps that follow his report’s recommendations.

I assume Goldstone is doing this because he realizes that Israel is going to use all diplomatic tools at its disposal to try to bury this report. They do have some good points to make. The original mandate from the UN Human Rights Council was deeply flawed because it placed the blame on Israel prior to the investigation and it limited the dates under the committee’s purview just to the war itself, thus depriving any serious discussion of the environment and causes leading up to the war. While the report restricted itself to those date limitations, the commission had no problem attacking Israel on subjects that are unrelated to Gaza, which is very odd. Also, the report accepted the testimonies of Palestinians even as it admitted that they might have felt threatened, which leads to some absurdities like the claim that the Commission didn’t know to what extent Hamas combatants intermingled with civilians.

There are many other points that Israel could raise in objection to the report including the fact that apparently Israel’s Foreign Ministry did provide Goldstone with a 160 page report about the war and its origins, a report he apparently ignored in his report. Also, there is today’s story in Yediot Aharonot told by a Sderot man who decided to testify before the Commission, and felt the judges were not really attentive as was proven by Goldstone’s falling asleep as this Israeli was testifying.

But countering claims such as these is not the reasons that Goldstone is taking an offensive posture regarding his report. He’s doing it because the biggest argument Israel is going to make, and it will be made behind closed doors, is that if Israel is going to be held to the standards laid out in this report and if the conclusions (i.e. war crimes) are upheld by a serious organization like the Security Council, then every member of NATO and especially the three superpowers, USA, Russia and China, need to be concerned because they are guilty of at least the same actions as Israel in their wars, and probably to a much greater degree of culpability than Israel.

Now here is Goldstone’s chutzpah. Until I read this, I was on the fence because I had not read much about him. Now I have lost all confidence in him. He is talking about ways to punish Israel (he also mentions Hamas, but as you will read, he is focused on Israel):

The International Criminal Court and the exercise of universal jurisdiction by other countries against violators of the Geneva Conventions are among them. But they all share one overarching aim: to hold accountable those who violate the laws of war. They are built on the premise that abusive fighters and their commanders can face justice, even if their government or ruling authority is not willing to take that step.

Pursuing justice in this case is essential because no state or armed group should be above the law. Western governments in particular face a challenge because they have pushed for accountability in places like Darfur, but now must do the same with Israel, an ally and a democratic state.

Failing to pursue justice for serious violations during the fighting will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy.

Did you read that? The crimes of Darfur are like Israel’s in Gaza.

Unadulterated chutzpah.

He writes,

In Gaza, hundreds of civilians died. They died from disproportionate attacks on legitimate military targets and from attacks on hospitals and other civilian structures. They died from precision weapons like missiles from aerial drones as well as from heavy artillery. Repeatedly, the Israel Defense Forces failed to adequately distinguish between combatants and civilians, as the laws of war strictly require.

Israel is correct that identifying combatants in a heavily populated area is difficult, and that Hamas fighters at times mixed and mingled with civilians. But that reality did not lift Israel’s obligation to take all feasible measures to minimize harm to civilians.

This he compares to Darfur!!!

And then he compares, as he does in his report, Hamas to Israel:

Unfortunately, both Israel and Hamas have dismal records of investigating their own forces. I am unaware of any case where a Hamas fighter was punished for deliberately shooting a rocket into a civilian area in Israel — on the contrary, Hamas leaders repeatedly praise such acts. While Israel has begun investigations into alleged violations by its forces in the Gaza conflict, they are unlikely to be serious and objective.

In his report he claims they aren’t equal and Israel still controls Gaza.

Goldstone appears to have a difficult time differentiating between defensive and offensive actions, between targeting of civilians and targeting of combatants that results in the death of civilians, between those who seek to fight in this way and those who did what they could to avoid fighting in this way. For example, his report actually acknowledges the small warning bombs that Israel dropped on building to inform the inhabitants to flee before attacking the buildings…and calls these precautionary measures which not only warn the civilians but also the combatants hiding among them…a crime.

He concludes with righteousness and indignation:

As a service to the hundreds of civilians who needlessly died and for the equal application of international justice, the perpetrators of serious violations must be held to account.

Yes. This is why Israel has to respond with facts, to prove that few of the hundreds of civilians died “needlessly.”

The world will now have to decide what to do. It could certainly put Israeli leaders and army commanders on trial for Gaza and using the methodology Goldstone used, they will find these soldiers and politicians guilty of war crimes. After all, if as a judge you know that an enemy is hiding among civilians but continue to blame the side trying to avoid civilian casualties that they are guilty anyway when civilians are hurt, then there is no defense here. This also means, however that there is nothing an army can do to protect its country’s civilians other than to do nothing. You apparently just have to let the Hamas bombs keep falling on your head without much recourse to protecting your own population.

The Israelis claim to have tried to minimize civilian casualties, but they had to deal with the Hamas fighters hiding among civilians. This is what the world will have to decide. Is Goldstone right or is Israel right? Because if this logic pertains to Israel, it also pertains to Russia, China, NATO and especially the United States.

War is impossible, according to Goldstone, between a group and a state. He knows Hamas uses certain tactics such as mingling with civilians, but then dictates that this does not absolve the country fighting in these impossible circumstances of not hitting the civilians. This philosophy actually provides cover for Iran’s Israel strategy of bleeding it slowly from Lebanon with Hizbullah and from Gaza with Hamas. They can bleed Israel as small guerrilla groups, but Israeli responses have to be so cautious as to be virtually sterile – an impossibility in war.

I do believe those little despotic countries running the show at the UN Human Rights Council finally have the West by the balls.

It took a Jewish judge to put them in this beneficial position, with Israel as the punching bag. God praise the shill.

There are conclusions that can be drawn from this. The first is that maybe I was wrong that Israel should have left Gaza. Had it remained, then as a belligerent occupation under the auspices of UNSCR 242, they could have stayed there indefinitely just like in Judea and Samaria. Of course, extrapolating from this, it may be that leaving the West Bank will be militarily impossible. If there are attacks from there and Israel responds, it will be accused of war crimes again.

The second conclusion is the other possibility, which is that I was right to support the Israeli departure from Gaza, but I was also right to wish that any time Palestinians attacked Israel, there would have been a robust Israel military response instead of the constant diplomatic and media appeals for the rockets to stop. That would have prevented a large scale incursion by Israel and would have prevented Hamas from gaining the time they needed to prepare for this war.

The third conclusion drawn from this situation is that giving the Palestinians a “cease fire” was a grave error because it enabled them to plan for the war and improve their resources, as they did with the increased range of their rockets.

I’ll bet there are lots of people, people close to the centers of power, up tonight in Beijing, Moscow, Paris, London and Washington, DC, cursing Israel, cursing the Palestinians, cursing Goldstone, cursing the UN and cursing the Human Rights Council. There are also some people in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem who are doing the same. All of these people are wondering one thing: how to escape an impossible situation?

In today’s Globe and Mail, Naomi Klein, a well known Canadian author whose leftist views have found a considerable following, wrote an op-ed explaining what the protesters who wrote an open letter attacking the Toronto International Film Festival actually meant by their letter.

To explain the “protest” letter, Klein writes about the recent Gaza war, putting into another person’s mouth the phrase “war crimes” (so that it’s not coming directly from her) and of course not mentioning any context for the war such as the thousands of missiles and mortars that were launched at nearby Israeli civilian communities from Gaza over a period of years.

I happened to be visiting Sderot for a couple of those missile attacks, including one that went over where I was hiding (and shaking in fear) and landed a mere half a mile away. I can inform Ms. Klein that the feeling that Palestinians are playing Russian roulette with your life is highly unpleasant for tourists like me, but for those who have to live with it regularly, it is personally devastating. One of the families that generously invited me into their home subsequently lost it to a rocket and only by a miracle did nobody die. Still, Israel waited for years before finally responding to the attacks with its incursion into Gaza. War crimes indeed.

Continuing her obscured coverage of the situation, Klein continues:

“Israel is refusing to co-operate even with a toothless UN fact-finding mission, headed by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone,”

But she neglects to mention why Israel is refusing.

The reason that Israel is refusing is that the mission’s mandate as spelled out by the ridiculously biased UN Human Rights Council (recently headed by a human rights stalwart country such as Iran) gave Goldstone a mandate to investigate only a range of dates that precluded looking into the thousands of rockets and mortars launched at Israel. In fact, the Council only gave him a mandate to investigate Israel and not its enemy, Hamas, even though Hamas made it a point to fight only from urban areas. Even after Goldstone attempted to negotiate the terms of of the investigation, and despite assurances from the Council’s head that the mandate terms would indeed be changed, in a later public statement it became clear that none of the mandate terms had changed.

Irwin Cotler, a well known lawyer specializing in international law and former Justice Minister of Canada has written an excellent essay about this investigation. It is called, “The Goldstone Mission – Tainted to the Core.” Cotler writes about the mission’s mandate:

Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson stated that “the resolution is not balanced because it focuses on what Israel did, without calling for an investigation on the launch of the rockets by Hamas. This is unfortunately a practice by the Council: adopting resolutions guided not by human rights but by politics. This is very regrettable.” Asked to head up the mission before Goldstone, Robinson refused.

Not mentioning any of this, Klein continues to fudge the topic by criticizing “Israel’s desire to avoid scrutiny for its actions in the occupied territories.”

Really? Here is Cotler again, giving a sample of the bias that has Israel refusing to participate in this sham investigation.

The UN Human Rights Council – a UN body systematically and systemically biased against Israel. For this is a Council that has a special and permanent agenda item targeting Israeli violations of human rights, and another agenda item for the rest of the world – thereby singling out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment. This is a Council that targets some 80% of its resolutions at one member state, Israel, while the major human rights violators enjoy exculpatory immunity. This is a Council that has had more emergency “Special Sessions” directed against Israel than against all the other countries of the world combined. This is a Council that excludes only one country – Israel – from membership in any regional grouping, thereby denying it international due process.

Never mind the facts, Klein is on a mission herself. The next point of her op-ed is to link Tel Aviv’s 100th birthday celebration to this supposed cover up of the investigation and other issues pertaining to Israel’s conflict with the Arabs and accuses TIFF of participating in a plan the Israelis have to promote Israel’s “prettier face” by sending cultural emissaries overseas along with their work.

She neglects to mention, of course, that it is political operatives such as herself who constantly tarnish Israel’s name with selective information as shown above that force Israel to present a “prettier face” abroad. Actually, she also neglects to mention that many countries use public relations to extend their “prettier faces,” even those that are involved in wars. Nope, Klein wants to talk about Israel.

(To continue, please click on the link!)

While TIFF independently selected Tel Aviv for its program, as its co-director Camerson Bailey has publicly stated, it did so in a truly celebratory year for this 100 year old city and therefore it is not surprising or sinister that Israeli diplomats would view inclusion in a world-class film festival in a positive light. Just because she can quote Israeli diplomats being openly glad that Toronto will focus on Tel Aviv, there is still no basis to Klein’s claims the TIFF is complicit with Israeli propaganda even when she hedges by saying they were complicit intentionally or innocently.

She writes, “Let’s be clear: No one is claiming the Israeli government is secretly running TIFF’s Tel Aviv spotlight.” This begs the question, why did her letter and John Greyson’s letter both bring up Israel’s “Brand Israel” campaign as well as only the names of media organizations headed by Jewish names in their letters?

Klein protests that the fault with TIFF is that its description of Tel Aviv “as a ‘young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity,” matches Israel’s stated propaganda goals to a T.’

Um, yes, because it happens to be the truth. Even if Ms. Klein doesn’t approve of this reality, it is the truth.

What isn’t the same between the two cities, of course, is that Israel was bombarded by Gaza for years after having exited Gaza. Even those activists who claim that Gaza was a prison because Israel did not allow its border crossings to be open to all movement, cannot deny that the crossings served the purposes of Palestinian terror groups…one of which became Gaza’s legitimate government (well, legitimate only as far as it goes since they did drop some Fatah men from rooftops of buildings just to buttress their election victory). Those rocket and mortar bombardments from Gaza do take away some of the similarities between Toronto and Tel Aviv since many of Tel Aviv’s residents have family and friends in the areas being bombarded by the Palestinians while other residents are soldiers who have had to fight in Gaza to attempt to put a stop to the Palestinian attacks.

And then Klein gives us the most delicious misdirection of all. She writes. “There are some wonderful Israeli films included in the program. They deserve to be shown as a regular part of the festival, liberated from this highly politicized frame.” How funny! Needless to say, she and her cohorts are the ones who politicized what was a depoliticized celebration of the film culture of a city called Tel Aviv.

She adds,

“Contrary to the many misrepresentations, the letter is not calling for a boycott of the festival. It is a simple message of solidarity that says: We don’t feel like partying with Israel this year.”

Well, that’s not exactly true now, is it? Greyson, who is one of the listed co-authors of the “protest” letter, did boycott the Festival and this letter is an attack on Israel’s very existence, not to mention every aspect of its society. This “protest” letter was formulated with the clear intent of twinning Israel with South Africa and of obscuring Israel’s legitimate and hard security needs by comparing them directly to South African apartheid. To suggest that a letter which emphasizes (falsely as we’ve noted already) that Israeli society resembles apartheid which was eliminated from South Africa through boycotts, is not about boycotting Israel may show how clever Naomi Klein is in using a turn of phrase, but it doesn’t fool anybody. It certainly didn’t fool the Toronto Star.

Ms. Klein is on the warpath. Her target is Israel. She is very intelligent and very knowledgeable. She clearly likes to win and she thinks she knows how to win against Israel. Her plan, it seems, is to attack Israel by obscuring the real nature of her attacks and to use her reputation and attractive media presence to push her points home and to gain followers. At every turn, however, she also paints Israel and its supporters in the worst possible light.

What Ms. Klein is doing with TIFF is no accident and is part of a plan concocted by her and, it seems, a small group of Jewish anti-Israel advocates from Toronto. [UPDATE! In a later post, I identified that this group may also be working with Palestine House in Toronto] In fact, I wonder whether they are behind the attack on the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition taking place in Toronto. In a recent public talk (start watching around minute 9:00 if you want to get to the juicy part) given to them when they launched this group last year, 2008, Ms. Klein said to her predominantly Jewish audience that it’s understandably difficult for some of her listeners to take the necessary steps to boycott Israel and to maintain the anti-Israel stance she was promoting. After all, she said, many of the people in the room had grown up with lies about Israel and the conflict; lies often told by family members and spiritual leaders. Parents, grandparents, rabbis!

That is one tough but very interesting tactic, often used by cults to distance their recruits from their past and ensure the recruits stay true to their mission. In fact, some Ultra-Orthodox Jewish kiruv groups that bring secular Jews into their fold often tell their new recruits that their parents are wrong-doers because of ignorance and have raised them wrong according to the Torah. They recommend treating the parents with great reserve because, for example, they may not keep kosher properly.

For Klein, it isn’t kosher for the parents of her cohorts and recruits to disagree with her views about Israel or Palestinians. They MUST be wrong. Their assessments about Israel MUST be wrong. They told their children lies about Israel! It’s really quite telling to see her attempt to eliminate other voices about Israel. When she says this to her Jewish audience, she says it after a pause, sounding serious and somber. The poor audience doesn’t even know what hit them – those poor victims of a massive misinformation campaign conducted by their own parents…

This is one tactic, but it resembles the general strategy which is reflected in the letter to TIFF and now in the Globe and Mail op-ed: eliminate dissenting or disagreeing voices by demonizing them. Even if it’s one’s parents. Thus, at TIFF, Israeli filmmakers’ work is connected to “destroyed Palestinian villages. ” Greyson blamed the TIFF organizers for creating a situation where an imaginary picket line has been created for their viewers just because these Israeli films were being shown as part of this TIFF program.

This is how Klein and Company are trying to shut down voices at this film festival and at others to come. Some of the films shown at TIFF are critical of Israel, but even they are not kosher according to Klein because they are the fruit of an apartheid-like country and its propaganda mission.

The truth, however, is not on the side of Ms. Klein and her cohorts, which is why they have to resort to attempts at oblique censorship. They don’t want people to attend the films and if they do, they want to shut down the filmmakers’ voices by deliberately connecting those voices to horrific crimes that are attributed to Israel. Anybody watching the entire program would see films, some of which received Israeli state funding, take critical positions against Israel and its society. Why shut these down?

It is also why an op-ed by Ms. Klein in the Globe and Mail resorts to denying what is plain for everybody to see (“We’re not boycotting, just seeking to celebrate,” she writes of a “protest” letter that compares Israeli actions to those of a country that was brought to its knees by boycotts) or that conveniently ignores pertinent facts like, oh, 8000 rockets launched at Israeli civilian communities.

The bottom line, however, for Ms. Klein and activists who join her is that the Palestinians have refused peace and their own state 5 times in the past 75 years, including just last year when Olmert offered to internationalize Jerusalem. Those are facts.

Today, the Palestinians could be sitting on a state that shares Jerusalem with Israel or with the world, that encompasses all of Gaza, 97% of the West Bank and additional land within Israel, that is launched with tens of billions of dollars of reparation money, that enables the Palestinian economy to thrive, that would probably have removed most and possibly all of the Jews from their midst, and that would have brought peace to the Palestinians, to Israel and to the entire region. Those are facts as well.

It is also a fact that Fatah, the party behind the Palestinian Authority, which currently leads the Palestinians in the West Bank, recently voted to keep the refugee camps open so as to maintain this important symbol. Too bad about the people living inside them and never mind that this symbol is no longer true. They also voted, by the way, to absorb a group that was responsible for many key terror attacks against Israeli civilians in the past decade.

Yes, ignoring these facts, Ms. Klein and her friends would prefer to support those who have avoided peace and continue to seek to destroy Israel – and there are no two ways about it since Hamas was elected in Gaza and their charter calls for Israel’s destruction (check out clauses 32, 22 and 13 for fun reading), denies any Jewish historical connection to the Israel and calls upon the fake book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as their source for how Jews behave. They and Fatah (here is the PLO charter – check out clause 20), which stands behind the Palestinian Authority that leads the West Bank – Judea and Samaria – both deny Jewish history in Israel and use coded language in their meetings and charters that imply or directly demand the demise of Israel or the demise of Israel as a Jewish state.

Codes are not just for them, however. Ms. Klein’s letter to TIFF also uses coded language that seeks to undermine even the legitimacy of a city like Tel Aviv, which is a city built not on the ruins of Palestinian villages, as they would have us believe, but on the dreams and hard work of secular Zionists who built that city over decades from the dunes up, and then defended it with their blood after they were attacked by the Palestinians. The first attack on Jews after the 1947 UN vote for the Partition Plan (UNGAR 181) came from Jaffa in the form of a murder of 5 Tel Aviv Jews.

Tel Aviv didn’t happen the way Ms. Klein would have us believe. And the Palestinians could already be sitting on a state of their own, except that they keep stalling and delaying. One can only wonder whether Ms. Klein is teaching these facts to her family members, friends and readers. After all, she wouldn’t want to confuse them with lies about the conflict…

UPDATE!
Naomi Klein is quoted in Sept. 11 Toronto Star as saying she is not promoting the destruction of Israel.

Here are questions that somebody needs to ask Ms. Klein:

1. Are you affiliated with Palestine House, as the phone number for the media contact on the protest organizers’ press release indicates?

2. If so, why do you hide this fact in your open letters, interviews and press releases?

3. If your group is affiliated with Palestine House in Toronto, why are you involved with a group that openly advocates (as seen on their web site) a single state solution?

4. How aware are you that the timing of Palestine House’s actions with another cultural event in Toronto indicates they either work with or are strongly influenced by the Palestinian Authority, whose charter refuses to concede that Israel is a Jewish state or that Jews have a history in the region?

5. Are these views reconcilable with one of your group members since you claim that your group is not advocating for the destruction of Israel?

6. Or was this simply another semantic game and what you meant was that you do not seek the destruction of Israel as a state but you have no objection to its demise as a Jewish state?

For more Jewlicious reading about this:

Is The Toronto Film Festival Protest Organized by Palestine House, an Investigative Report

A former adviser to the PLO, member of CAIA, and speaker recommended in the past by Palestine House appears in press meeting of Toronto Film Festival protest group

Response to the “protest” letter against TIFF, 2009

Response to John Greyson’s letter to TIFF, 2009

Olmert’s offer to the Palestinians

Abbas choosing to stall on peace talks. Again.

The PA did not change its charter as per their Oslo obligations. This was recently publicly confirmed before the Fatah conference by two of Fatah’s leaders including Dahlan.

Israel’s peace offer at Taba.

Six Day War Anniversary Post

I said MAYOR Buskila, not Maya Buskila

When I read the New York Times weddings announcement for Dr. Sarah Sternklar amd Marvin Davis in 1996, I had no inkling that they would produce such a mensch. Sternklar, a psychoanalyst, philanthropist, and teacher in New York, and Marvin Davis, a real estate professional who was intimately involved with the redevelopment of Times Square are the proud parents of a Bar mitzvah age young man, Benjamin Sternklar Davis.

Benjamin Sternklar Davis, a student at the Heschel School in Manhattan, gave $40,000 in bar mitzvah gift funds to the city of Sderot in Israel to fund a children‘s park. The Mayor of Sderot, David Buskila, said the Sternklar Davis can be the first kid to use the park when it is completed.

A pretty good idea. Start these emerging philanthropists young. Give kids money and then let them decide how to allocate it. Now that he is 13, I guess he can join the Jewish Teen Funders Network.

One afternoon, you come home exhausted from work and collapse into bed for a nap. Suddenly, in the middle of your nap you find yourself waking up to the sound of glass shattering – all over your back.

It takes you a moment to realize that the window above your bed has exploded and that shards of glass lie everywhere. Your dad comes racing in, picks you up and carries you outside to safety.

Welcome to a moment in the life of Ilan Dahan, a Sderot 18-year-old who slept through the siren warning of the impending Kassam, only to wake up to the rocket explosion in his backyard on Tuesday evening, May 19.

“It’s a miracle that all I got was this scratch,” Ilan says, dazedly pointing to a red mark on his back, where a piece of glass cut through.

Ilan’s family stands around in shock. His mother Shula looks at her son tearfully. “I never expected this to happen to us during the ceasefire,” she says.

The back of the Dahan’s home is covered in debris and glass, while rocket shrapnel marks the walls and ceiling of the home. An evening breeze blows through the windowless windows. Ilan’s father, Avi, stands by his son. “I was terrified that something had happened to him,” Avi says in a quiet voice.

Now imagine that, after such a rocket attack, the kind of therapy needed to get shock victims back on track is no longer available. Due to significant budget cuts, trauma therapy facilities in Sderot, which have played a valuable role in rehabilitating residents of the rocket-torn community, are now in danger of closing down.

Those who will be affected most by this recent development are Sderot’s children. The Sderot Trauma Center, which caters mostly to children and teenagers – ages 17 and below – is on its way out. Fifty percent of the center’s funding comes from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, also known as Keren LeYedidut. The organization can no longer provide the funds to keep the center going.

The trauma center treats 620 patients, of whom 80 percent are children, says Daliah Yosef, the center’s director. “I’ve already handed out dismissal letters to the staff at the center,” she said two days after the rocket attack.

The other fifty percent of the trauma center’s funding is provided by the Israeli Ministries of Health, Finance and Pensioners – not nearly enough to keep the center open.

“The harshest part of this reality is that hundreds of Sderot children will be left with no place to go for treatment,” says Yosef.

Ilan is fortunate that he is 18 and can therefore receive treatment at the Sderot Mental Health Center, which caters to adult victims. However, the Mental Health Center’s director, Dr. Adrianna Katz, says that although her center is in no danger of closing, she does not have enough staff to deal with over 6,000 trauma victim files – which continue to grow every day.

In addition to Yosef’s Trauma Center, the Sderot Shock Treatment Center, which operates under the trauma center, is also in danger of shutting down. The Shock Treatment Center opened three years ago, alongside the trauma center, to provide immediate treatment to shock victims after rocket attacks. Before then, Sderot residents had to be transported 20 minutes away to Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital or to Be’er Sheva’s Soroka Hospital.

“When the Shock Treatment Center opened in Sderot, it made treatment for Sderot residents much more efficient and easier, as they received help on the spot,” said Dr. Katz, who also heads the shock center. “Sderot residents feel more at home being treated at the center,” she added.

“Going back to the original way – transporting Sderot trauma victims by ambulance to hospitals outside the area is absolutely ridiculous,” Katz said. “The cost of transporting patients is more expensive and many times there are not enough ambulances to transport all victims, especially during episodes when there are a series of rocket attacks on the city.”

Indeed, in the recent rocket attack, the Sderot Shock Treatment Center treated all eight victims of shock, including a woman injured by rocket shrapnel. Since the Qassam attack on May 19, Dr. Katz reported to Sderot Media Center that 60 new patients have arrived to the Sderot Mental Health Center therapy treatment.

Sderot’s trauma facilities remain a vital part of the Sderot community, which for eight years has been under Gaza rocket attack. As the city’s residents continue to live within range of Kassam fire, it is the therapy and care that Dr. Katz and Daliah Yosef provide which helps residents return to a semblance of normal life.

Photo Credit: Anav Silverman

In the meantime, Ilan Dahan continues to hope that someday he can wake up to a rocket-free sky.

Photo: Anav Silverman, Sderot Media Center

There have been many questions bouncing around in the media this week. Why is Israel at war? Why are there so many Hamas men dead? Why are Hamas firing rockets at Israel? A war of resistance, some say. Israel is holding a siege against Gaza. Palestinians are starving and suffering.

And who is to blame?

Israel of course. At least that is the conclusion that emerges within the headlines of AP and Reuters news reports, European news media, and countless Internet blogs on the current fighting.

For those who seek objective answers to those questions, the unfolding tragedy of Sderot and the western Negev must be taken into account.

There has been a war of terror on Sderot from more than eight years now. During this time period, an estimated 8,000-10,000 Palestinian rockets have been fired at Sderot and the western Negev from the Gaza Strip. There was not one serious long-term military response from Israel to the rocket attacks during that time besides the closing of crossings and checkpoints.

In the meantime, hundreds of Israelis homes and properties have been destroyed, over 700 Israelis wounded, and thousands psychologically traumatized by Palestinian rocket fire. Periodically, schools in Sderot and the western Negev have been forced to close, as normal life cruelly transforms into a marathon of 15 seconds, (the number of seconds one has to escape to shelter when the Tzeva Adom, or Red Color alert is set off by an impending Palestinian rocket).

Sderot and western Negev residents have been forced to sit and endure Palestinian rocket terror to the point that there is now a generation of Sderot children who are showing signs of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as early as age three.

In a recent report in the major Israeli newspaper, Ma’ariv, Yaron Sasson writes of children in Sderot being born into a period of siren alerts, or Tzeva Adoms and the sound of Kassam explosions. These sounds of war have become part of the psychological makeup of Sderot children. It is not surprising then that psychological research conducted among Sderot residents has produced some very disturbing findings.

According to research done by Sderot’s Hosen Center, a treatment center that offers support and counseling to Sderot residents during times of emergency, there is a major problem appearing in young Sderot children, the generation born into Kassams.

Clinical psychologists working at the center discovered that many Sderot children are not developing speaking skills at a rate appropriate to their age. A normal child learns to speak around the age of one. But many children in Sderot have not even begun to speak by the age of three or even four. Those who are able to speak, stutter and cannot complete words.

Dalia Yosef, director of the Sderot Hosen Center, explains that the constant rocket fire upon Sderot has created a state of stress and panic that has dramatically impacted the development of young Sderot children.

Yosef and the clinical psychologists who work with her, counsel Sderot children from the ages of one to 18, offering treatment for a wide variety of issues.

“It is important to note,” says Yosef, “that these Sderot children have been born into a reality of constant rocket fire. The world, as it appears to them, is unsafe and scary, full of insecurity and chaos. Their sense of security has been shattered by the continuous rocket attacks.”

“These children develop symptoms of PTSD early on, suffering from sleeping disorders, nightmares and anxiety attacks. Many experience regression, going back to wetting their beds,” says Yosef.

Those children whose parents suffer from signs of post traumatic stress disorder, have even more complicated issues. According to Yosef, children of parents diagnosed with PTSD sense that their parents cannot protect them. “These kids’ problems are even more severe than kids whose parents are more psychologically stable,” says Youssef. In Sderot, 30% of adults have been diagnosed with PTSD.

Yosef explains that a young child hears the rapid breathing of his parent, when the Tzeva Adom sound and understands that his parent is frightened. “Once the child understands this, then he perceives that the world is unsafe and that his parent is unable to properly protect him,” adds Yosef. “The parent feels threatened and so does the child. Later on, this feeling of insecurity and stress affects the child in areas like speech, hindering normal speech development.”

Younger children go back to the bottle, to the pacifier, and have extreme difficulty separating from the parents. “Kids are scared to go to the bathroom or to the shower by themselves, because of the fear of a rocket strike,” says Yosef. “The situation has created unhealthy relationships within the family unit. Children as old as 12 sleep with their parents.”

Even during the recent ceasefire or days where Kassams don’t fall regularly on Sderot, the trauma and stress continue because people continue to anticipate rocket attacks. “Only a permanent long term quiet will help these children and their parents recover,” says Yosef. “The moment there is a siren alert and a rocket explosion, all the progress we have made in the treatment is destroyed.”

The Sderot Hosen Center offers treatment for children and parents together. “We give parents the tools and skills need to maintain a sense of calm in situations of terror,” explains Yosef. “Because parents are the authority figures in the family, we focus on them and try to identify ways in which they can be more relaxed in this tense environment.”

Livnat Shaubi, a lifelong resident of Sderot and the oldest in a family of 11 children, recently spent an entire day with her younger siblings, helping them find ways to cope with the Hamas war on southern Israel. After spending four days at home, exhausting Lego, board games, and playing balls, the Shaubi boy–Hananel, David, and Yehuda, ages 5, 7 and 11, respectively, created Kassam rockets from plastic bottles they found lying in the house.

“Like other Sderot kids, my mom cannot allow my younger siblings to play outside during these periods of rocket attacks. “My brothers are cooped up all day and therefore these art projects, an important outlet for their creativity, simply reflects the reality around them” says Shaubi

Shaubi told Sderot Media Center that the first words her five-year-old brother, Hananel learned to say, along with Daddy and Mommy, were ‘Tzeva Adom’ (Red Color, the name for the siren alert).

“These kids know war,” she adds. “Soon it will be the children in Be’er Sheva, Ashkelon and Ashdod, who will join them.”

And this is exactly why Israel is currently engaged in this war–to prevent the tragedy of Sderot from spreading to one million other Israelis who are currently experiencing for their first time the impact of Palestinian rocket fire in some of Israel’s major cities. Israel’s children and Gaza’s children deserve a quiet future, one with normal childhood experiences, where threats in the form of Palestinian rockets are finally laid to rest.

Here’s an aerial view of Tel Aviv, presented here just because it’s cool.

Fire trucks and ambulances lined outside the supermarket as shattered glass littered the entire area. Nine people including three young women were evacuated to Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon for severe shock.

The Qassam rocket caused heavy damage to at least 15 cars in the parking lot where it had exploded. The smell of serious gas leaks had Sderot firemen hosing the entire parking lot with water in order to prevent any fire.

Inside the supermarket, known as Victory, wine bottles lay shattered upon the floor, as shoppers made their way outside across puddles of wine and broken glass. Rocket shrapnel caused heavy damage to store merchandise, as the glass windows in the supermarket’s front entrance completely shattered.

A worker at Steimetsky Book Store across the street from the supermarket told Sderot Media Center, that she and her co-worker watched the Qassam rocket drop into the parking lot, about five meters away from the supermarket. “We saw the sparks and the smoke, and watched the rocket explode on impact. It was one of the most terrifying sights, I’ve ever seen,” said the worker, a student at Sapir College, who asked not to be named.

Another Sderot local, Shani, who works as a cashier at the Victory supermarket, heard customers yelling Tzeva Adom, and moved away from her cash register seconds before the Qassam rocket hit the parking lot. “The glass exploded everywhere,” Shani told Sderot Media Center. “If I had been standing at the register, I would have been one of those injured in terror attack.”

Over 23 Qassam rockets were fired at Sderot and the western Negev. Seven rockets hit the Eshkol Regional Council earlier in the day, and a mortar shell landed in Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council, causing no reported damages or injuries. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for all the rocket attacks.

Since the ceasefire began on June 21, over 400 Qassam rockets have been fired at Sderot and the western Negev, making the number of rockets fired at Israel during this ceasefire significantly more than the number fired in the previous Hamas-Israel ceasefire in 2007. To date, over 10,000 Palestinian rockets have been fired at southern Israel since 2001.

Photo by Hamutal Ben-Sheetrit, Sderot Media Center

The most important day in such a program in regards to the bonding experience you share with the group, is the first day where everyone gets to know one another. I had missed part of spending the first day with the group because of my work and a series of unfortunate events.

I work for Sderot Media Center in Sderot, where my work there is intense and unrelenting, usually in relation to the number of Palestinian rockets fired at the western Negev region. On the first day of Do The Write Thing seminar, the DTWT participants were actually scheduled to come visit Sderot with Sderot Media Center. I was supposed to be their guide on that day and show them the reality of the city. However, on the day the group was scheduled to come, there was a volley of Palestinian rockets fired at Sderot and the western Negev early in the morning. Due to the security situation, the group could not arrive, and I was sadly disappointed but not surprised.

Sderot is a city that is often visited by many groups of students as it unfortunately stands to highlight how Palestinian terror on a small Israeli city, located three kilometers away from Gaza, has completely disrupted normal life. The Palestinian rocket fire has instilled fear and panic among innocent Israeli civilians, as bomb shelters and other protective structures emerge throughout Sderot year after year. The work I do entails much hasbara, or advocacy for the people of Sderot and sharing their stories of quiet survival under extraordinary frightening conditions.

So it was obviously crucial for me to relate the situation in Sderot to my fellow DTWT participants whom I knew all had backgrounds in journalism and writing and would therefore have a platform by which they could relate the situation in Sderot to a wider audience. I was looking forward to having the group come and see Sderot up close and personally– the Sderot that one can never fully comprehend by simply following Israeli media and listening or reading the news.

This was not to be the case or so I thought.

However, when I met up with the group in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Jerusalem (yes, the DTWT program entails a few nights in a nice Jerusalem hotel), so many of the participants personally expressed to me their disappointment in being unable to visit Sderot. “That was supposed to be one of the highlights of the program,” one participant to told me, “to see the situation on the ground.”

Fortunately, there were many other significant visits and seminars that the organizers had carefully planned out for us. A visit to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Jerusalem Post, hearing speakers such as Benyamin Netanyahu, Moshe Ayalon and Shimon Peres during the GA Conference, and taking part in panel discussions featuring experts on critical issues such as Israeli security and peace, made the DTWT program a full and engaging seminar. Each one of us found a particular discussion, speech or seminar on Israeli politics, or other relevant issues, to be enlightening and informative as journalists and future opinion makers.

But as I indicated before, the most inspiring aspect of the Do The Write Thing seminar was meeting the participants who were journalists and writers like me and listening to them express their desire to visit Sderot and get involved in some way. After the program was over, I received so many e-mails from the DTWT participants, asking me about the situation in Sderot and when would be best to come up and visit.

It was truly encouraging for me to see how the Sderot issue had made such an impact on this group.

During the DTWT seminar, the madrichim, recognizing the importance of talking about the Sderot issue, had allotted me a few minutes during our extremely busy schedule to speak about the rocket situation and my work at Sderot Media Center.

To receive the feedback that I did about Sderot from the group, and seeing their interest grow to the point that several participants asked if they could come and volunteer in Sderot, showed me how the wave of social change and justice begins with young people who believe that making a difference begins with–us.

Over 4, 000 Sderot residents are suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD) while one third of Sderot children, ages 13 to 18, have trauma-related learning disorders.

PTSD is a severe and ongoing reaction to a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm to the person, according to the National Institute for Mental Health. People who develop PTSD may have witnessed a loved one who was harmed in a traumatic event or were victims themselves.

Symptoms of PTSD usually begin three months after the ordeal but can also emerge years afterward. Some people can recover within 6 months while others have symptoms that last for much longer. For some people, the condition becomes chronic.

“The initial symptoms of shock include an accelerated heart rate, dry mouth, limbs ‘falling asleep,’ a sense of fainting, seeming paralyzed or even emotionally detached,” says Gabi Schreiber chief of psychiatry at Ashkelon’s Barzilai hospital.

Dr. Adrianne Katz, head of the Sderot Mental Health Center says that the shock impacts the victim’s ability to function for months after the experiencing a Palestinian rocket explosion. “Many rocket terror victims suffer from depression, sleepless nights, severe anxiety, and have trouble going back to a regular routine,” she says.

The NATAL study showed that almost 50% of Sderot residents know someone who has been killed in a Palestinian rocket attack, while 65% personally know someone wounded in an attack. Over 90% of Sderot residents have experienced a Palestinian Qassam explosion at some point-whether it be in a neighborhood, home, school, business or other residential setting.

Dr. Mina Zemach and the Dahaf Polling Institute conducted the research in order to compare Sderot to other communities outside of Palestinian missile range. Sderot residents made up the test group, while residents of Ofakim, a town of similar socio-economic makeup to Sderot but not under rocket attack, served as the control group.
The study revealed that three times as many Sderot residents had gone to a spiritual counselor (such as a rabbi), and a family doctor than did Ofakim residents.

Dr. Roni Berger explained that there were several reasons why Sderot residents suffered from higher degrees of trauma than residents other Israeli communities within rocket range. “The fortifications in Sderot are poorer, and the population is weaker as well. The social unity is smaller. It’s a population who felt, and still feels, abandoned.”

In addition, 45% of the Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip target Sderot according to IDF intelligence.

Although adults in Sderot showed significantly higher levels of trauma and stress in the study than adults living in other Gaza vicinity communities, children of Gaza vicinity communities did not fair so differently from Sderot children. Close to 75% of children living in Gaza vicinity communities, ages 12-14 suffer from symptoms of PTSD compared to 86.6% of Sderot children.

“Only a minority of those suffering from PTSD actually seek help,” Dr. Roni Berger told Sderot Media Center. NATAL, a non-government organization seeks to reach out those Sderot residents who otherwise would receive help. “NATAL’s staff has been going door to door for the past two years in our mobile units, visiting Sderot families and offering them social support,” says Dr. Berger. “We teach these families how to cope with the stress and panic that result with each rocket attack.”

“In a way, this is much more effective then simply providing residents with a psychological diagnosis,” adds Dr. Berger. “NATAL health professionals give Sderot residents the skills to relax. One of the most important things is for the residents to learn to talk about their experiences [with rocket attacks].”

“Unfortunately those residents who don’t know how to cope, become worse,” says Dr. Berger. “Those who do cope ‘well’ are also not immune to trauma symptoms-they also pay some sort of psychological price for living under Palestinian rockets and it may manifest itself in strained family relationships or tension at work.”

The constant downplay of the psychological impact of Palestinian rocket fire in the international and Israeli media has unfortunately shifted important focus from the reality on the ground–Sderot residents after eight years of Qassam fire are gradually becoming psychologically crippled by the constant trauma of Palestinan rocket attacks. One of the most ironic phenomenas is that the concept, post trauma is not even relevant to Sderot residents. The constant renewal of rocket attacks has not allowed Sderot children and families to recover from past Qassam barrages. This constant state panic and stress that plagues Sderot residents is a continuing ordeal that remains theirs alone.

Palestinian Rocket Destroys Sderot Home

December 19 is a significant day for Israelis civilians living on the other side of the Gaza Strip.

It is the day where the Hamas-Israel ceasefire officially comes to an end and the question to whether Palestinian rocket fire will resume on Israelis civilians living in the south, will officially be answered.

The question has been answered–to some degree–a little earlier than expected. After Israel entered the Gaza Strip to blow up a Hamas dug tunnel intended for the killing or kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, Hamas fired a massive barrage of rockets-over 60–upon Israeli civilians through November 4-5.
Several more Palestinian rockets were fired at Israel throughout the past week, with a barrage of Qassam rockets fired at Sderot and the Eshkol region on Sunday, November 16 and Monday, November 17. The ceasefire to this effect has been violated, two and a half weeks into November, more than 80 times by Hamas with the firing of over 80 Qassam and mortar rockets at Israelis civilians living in the Negev.

Hamas’s Ceasefire Violations

But the firing of Qassam and mortar rockets are not the only violations carried out by Hamas during the course of this ‘ceasefire.’ While bomb shelters and other forms of protection have emerged alongside Sderot homes and playgrounds, Hamas has engaged and supported the rearming of its army, production of rockets, smuggling money through tunnels, and training its soldiers for combat and abducting hostages.

It is clear that on Hamas’s end, the aftermath of the ‘ceasefire’ is one that entails the continued terrorizing of Israeli civilians in Sderot and the western Negev.

As early as July 2008, a month into the ceasefire, Palestinian terrorists continued producing rockets and conducted training exercises for newly recruited militants. In a rare video obtained by Reuters back in July, Palestinian militants of the Popular Resistance Committee (PRC) are shown preparing and stockpiling rockets for future use against Israel. The video shows masked Palestinian gunmen stirring explosive material against the backdrop of newly made rockets.

The Reuters video further portrays Palestinian militants, known as the Gaza Qassam Brigades, in field combat exercises, training to use machine guns, grenades and snipers.

According to the IICC, Hamas has thousands of rockets in stock, ready to be fired at Israel ‘s Negev cities and communities.

In another video, released also in July by Hamas and reported on by Haaretz, Hamas operatives are seen participating in advanced military training exercises in the southern Gaza Strip, the area in which the Gush Katif settlement block was located before Israel’s 2005 disengagement from the area. The Palestinian militants are seen practicing military maneuvers learned in combat training in Iran.
In addition to training Palestinian soldiers, Hamas invested its energies during the ceasefire to train young Palestinian children to hate Israel and the United States in a special parliamentary summer camp. According to Haaretz, the summer camp’s main objective was to train these young Palestinian children to become future militants.

Palestinian women in Gaza were also not forgotten. Dozens of women in the Gaza Strip also underwent military training, primarily in combat and suicide missions. During the ceasefire, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad allowed a Lebanese TV correspondent to film and interview women terrorists. According to the IICC, the women are trained for both offensive and defensive maneuvers. On a defensive scale, these Palestinian women are trained to fire small arms, launch rockets throw grenades, and attack IDF soldiers, as well as blow themselves up near IDF soldiers using explosive belts.

In the past, Hamas, the PIJ and Fatah have used women to carry out suicide bombing attacks in Israeli territories and attack IDF soldiers during operations in the Gaza Strip.

In August, PRC operatives invited CNN and other network reporters to Gaza, for an exclusive video interview and photo-op of the progress made in their ongoing rocket production. The PRC presented a new advanced form of rockets called Nasser-4, which can travel up to 16 miles ( 25 kilometers ). The extended distance enables the rockets to reach Ashkelon, which has a population of 120,000 and Ashdod, which has a population of 200,000.

The PRC also revealed in the video, Palestinian operatives training to conduct raids on Israeli army bases and capturing Israeli soldiers. Indeed, the PRC was one of the Palestinian terror organizations behind the abduction of Gilad Schalit two years ago.

While international community may not consider these videos as blatant evidence for serious ceasefire violations, the videos do make it clear that Hamas and other Palestinian terror networks are continuing to construe a terrifying reality for Israeli children and families living along the Gaza border, and as far away as Ashkelon and Ashdod.

SO will Palestinian rocket fire resume on Sderot after December 19? It is a reality which Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups have been preparing for since the ceasefire began. These terrorist groups have had no qualms in making their preparations publicly known to the international world and Israel. After all, it is the children of Sderot and the Negev, not the politicians and Israeli Knesset members, who are forced to wait until the rocket fire resumes again.

Since early November, residents of Sderot and the western Negev have been awaken almost every morning to the sound of the Red Alert siren followed by a rocket explosion between two o’clock to three o’clock in the morning. These Palestinian groups are simply offering Sderot residents a taste of what is to come, and at the same time aiming to recondition Negev Israelis to life under sirens and rocket explosions.

Unfortunately, it is only a matter of time before Palestinian rocket fire becomes part of the daily and nightly routine of Sderot and western Negev residents. Hamas and other Palestinian terror networks have made it clear that they will strike Israeli civilians with massive Qassam and mortar rocket attacks, when it strategically suits them to do so.
Visit www.sderotmedia.com for the latest videos of Sderot.