Israel on Canadian college campuses; an up-hill battle

by Noam Bedein, Director of the Sderot Media Center, www.SderotMedia.org.il

Presenting the human side of Sderot, Israel and the western Negev would seem innocuous enough, as it is the only region in the western world where rockets and missiles target a civilian population. The people of southern Israel have their own story to share.

Yet after a 10-day visit to Canadian college campuses, organized by Hillel Canada and the CIJA umbrella organization of Canadian Jewry, I discovered that even Sderot residents must fight for their legitimate right to live in the land of Israel.

The purpose of this trip was to balance the after-effects of the “Gaza narrative”, exactly one year after Israel's 21-day Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip.

On Canadian college campuses, the challenge became to justify the very existence of the city of Sderot.

This was best exemplified by an article published in a Winnipeg student newspaper, penned by a Palestinian-Canadian sociology student. This student amazingly attacked the credibility of another student for sharing her experiences visiting Sderot. This student had described her shock at the ’15 second’ alarm, known as the “Color Red,” which warns Sderot residents of only a few seconds to escape to safety from the time the missile is fired from Gaza to the time it explodes in Sderot.

The Palestinian student showed little sympathy for Sderot under fire:

“Sderot’ is actually a settlement on the Palestinian land of Najd, an illegally occupied territory stolen from Palestinians. It is a town created on the ashes of an ethnically cleansed and defaced Palestinian village....You want to talk about ‘terror’? Najd’s Palestinian villagers were expelled on May 13th, 1948 by Israeli forces before Israel was even declared a state.”

Here is a well-educated student born in Canada, with Palestinian descent, that calls the Israeli town of Sderot an illegitimate “settlement” constructed on the ruins of an Arab village abandoned during the 1948 war. Indeed this same student makes no acknowledgement of the historical fact that between 1951-1953, the Jews that settled in Sderot were from among the 850,000 Jews expelled in masses from Arab countries in the Middle East. During and after the 1948 war, 670,000 Palestinian Arab refugees were fled or forced from their homes.

Indeed, this Canadian-Palestinian college student is not the first to rationalize the thousands of aerial attacks and terrorizing of Sderot and southern Israel civilians.

“You know why Sderot is under rocket fire? Because there was an Arab village called Najd,” began a BBC reporter in an interview. I recall the reporter sitting in our Sderot Media Center office trying to find a ‘reasonable excuse’ to justify rocket fire against a civilian population.

Ironically, most Israelis/Jews do not even know that Palestinians and their leadership define Sderot as an illegal ‘settlement,’ while under international law it is undisputedly a city in the State of Israel.

Indeed, the first question I often ask student audiences during presentations is the following:

“If Sderot is a settlement and two miles northeast of Sderot lies the ruins of the Arab village called Najd, which the Palestinians say had a population of 30 families, who now live in the United Nations refugee camps in Gaza, what’s the justification for Jews to live in Sderot or anywhere else in Israel?”

The challenge today is to first actually ask these basic questions, before throwing around answers or solutions for the modern Arab-Israeli conflict.

“What is our right, as Jews and as Israelis, to this country in our homeland? Do we have any rights to this land at all?”

This is the way I was able to get across and present Israel’s perspective to Muslims, to pro-Palestinians, Israel critics and to the international press. By asking this basic question, we ask everyone to realize that Israel is the only independent country in the world whose legitimacy as a state is being questioned.

The leadership and governing bodies of the Palestinian side do not recognize Sderot's establishment in the first years of the creation of the Jewish state, while most Israelis/Jews have accepted a two- state solution.

As another Canadian-Palestinian student expressed himself during my presentation at Carleton University in Ottawa, quite matter of fact:

”You Jews dreamt to go back to your home land after 2,000 years... Why do you think we will stop teaching our children to dream to return to our homes in Al-Majdal (Ashkelon) only after 60 years?”

In other words, educated Canadian born Palestinian students living comfortably abroad, view Sderot quite simply as an illegal settlement and do not recognize the Jewish State of Israel. They do not accept my existence as an Israeli. So does the opposite apply to a Palestinian raised in a United Nations refugee camp, who has not been given any solution or hope for the past 60 years- (even though the UN has resettled more than 50 million refugees worldwide since World War II), will that Palestinian recognize my existence as an Israeli?

Instead, Palestinian education focuses on the preparation of the Palestinian people for the ‘right of return’ to homes and villages from 1948 in Israel which no longer exist. Homes and villages for example in and around cities like Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, and more which have all been under terrorist missile fire.

“So, what’s your solution to this reality?” asked students on each of the Canadian campuses that I visited. In the hundreds of presentations I have given in the past three years I always answer, “I’m not here to present you a solution, I’m here to present the problem.”

The answer to that logical question is that there may not be any instant “solution.” Yet that should not exempt students from knowing the reality of what people in Israel have to cope with - and, in the case of Sderot, that their unique miraculous rocket reality is like no other in the world right now. Rockets have become a daily routine of life in Israel, where one civilian population is being targeted by rockets, rocket-launchers take cover under another civilian population on the other side of the border.

Can this definition of terrorism be understood from a typical 5-second daily news broadcast in Israel in the past four years?

“Two rockets fell outside of Sderot today. No injuries, and no damages,” is how the typical broadcast or news update would read, followed by a weather report in Israel.

These five-second news reports have now tallied up to 311 attacks and including 20 different types of rockets, Iranian missiles and mortars fired from Gaza towards southern Israel, since the END of the military operation in Gaza on January 18, 2009.

If things were truly clear about our rights as Jews to live in Israel, I would not have found myself providing a testimony to a Jew, Judge Richard Goldstone in Geneva. I was allowed a 30-minute presentation where I described to the Goldstone Commission the eight-years of life under rocket fire and concluded by raising my hands in front of them:

“I do not have enough fingers on my hands to count the amount of times rockets exploded only 10 meters from a kindergarten packed with children...”

“Why do we have to wait until a kindergarten or classroom full of children suffers a direct hit by a rocket, in order for us Israel, to have the international support and sympathy to do what is right to protect our own citizens?”

This was the question I put forth to Judge Goldstone and the rest of the panel of UN judges, which was met only with stone silence.

The time has come to raise these questions to college students around the world, and to provide them with proper and accurate answers for them to stand up for Israel and for themselves as proud supporters of Israel.

By generating such awareness, we promote peace without instant solutions and we force the world of public opinion to acknowledge the real barriers for peace, beginning with the continuing refusal of the Arab world to recognize the legitimacy of Sderot and of Israel in their neighborhood.

Noam Bedein is the director of the Sderot Media Center.

The Philadelphia Bulletin: IDF Says Rocket Fire Down, Hamas Threat Present

by David Bedein

JERUSALEM - Exactly one year after Israel’s incursion into Gaza, assessments are being made of the results of the operation.

There has been a 90 percent drop in rocket fire at Israel since the end of its military operation in Gaza, according to figures assembled by the Sderot Media Center for Information in the Western Negev and also by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Spokesperson’s bureau.

The figures show that since the last of the soldiers left the Gaza Strip, 282 rockets were fired at Israel, but only a very small number exploded in populated areas.

In February, immediately after the operation, 88 rockets were fired at Israel, in March, 76 rockets were fired, and then the fire dropped significantly.

In June and July, for example, only three rockets were fired at Israel and, in November, 13 rockets.

Since the end of the operation, the IDF attacked 143 targets throughout the Gaza Strip in response to high-trajectory fire. Among the targets were tunnels used for arms smuggling and for smuggling activists. The majority of the attacks took place in February and March, when the rocket fire was greater.

The IDF believes that the quiet in the Gaza Strip in the past year is fragile, since Hamas continues to operate without pause underneath the surface and is renewing its smuggling practices through Philadelphi Road and by sea.

The IDF also continues its preparations for a future threat against the home front. The IDF Home Front Command is preparing to brief the population living at a distance of up to 60 miles from the Gaza Strip for a possible confrontation. The IDF does not rule out the possibility that Hamas has rockets which could reach that population area.

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The Philadelphia Bulletin: Gaza Rockets Strikes Sderot

by David Bedein

Attack Occurs after Netanyahu Meeting with Obama

A Qassam rocket fired from Gaza slammed between two homes around 5:30 p.m., local time, yesterday. The Tzeva Adom, Color Red siren, blared twice in the city, sending residents fleeing to area bomb shelters. After the second Color Red siren, an unusually loud explosion sounded throughout the city.

The sound of the rocket explosion shocked no one more than Ilan Dahan. Ilan was sleeping when the Qassam rocket crashed into his backyard, right outside his bedroom.

“I slept right through the Color Red siren,” said Ilan. Ilan, dazed and shocked, walked into his bedroom. His bed was full of broken glass, from a window right above the bed, which shattered from the impact of the rocket slamming into the ground.

“It’s a miracle that all I got was this small scratch,” Ilan told the Sderot Media Center. A piece of broken glass struck Ilan’s back, leaving behind a red mark.

Both of Ilan’s parents were home when the rocket struck. His father raced into Ilan’s bedroom after the rocket struck, picked his son up and carried him outside to safety. “At that point, I didn’t even realize that the rocket hit right outside our home,” said Ilan, who is 18 and getting ready to enter the army.

Shula, Ilan’s mother, looked tearfully at her son.

“I never expected this to happen to us during a cease-fire,” she said. The family was sitting outside in the front of the home to cool off from the heat of the evening when the siren sounded.

“We didn’t react quickly enough to the siren,” said Shula. “If we had reacted, we would have raced to the back of the home where our new shelter is located. Most likely, one of us would have been injured because the rocket exploded right outside the shelter.”

The back of the Dahans’ home suffered severe damage from the rocket blast. Broken glass and debris littered the floor, while holes from rocket shrapnel marked the ceiling and walls. Outside, the Dahans’ shelter was also covered with shrapnel marks.

The rocket explosion also damaged the home next to the Dahans.

Family members from both sides suffered shock, as did neighbors further along the street. Several people were treated for trauma on the scene.

The rocket attack comes as the Sderot Mental Health Center is shutting down. Dr. Adrianne Katz, the head of Sderot Mental Health, told the Sderot Media Center that the mental health center is closing due to budget cuts. The Sderot Mental Health Center has provided therapy treatments to thousands of Sderot trauma victims and has 5,500 patients on file.

The Gaza rocket attacks on Sderot came in the wake of the meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama in the White House on Monday.

During a White House press conference after the meeting, President Obama said: “[T]here is a recognition that the Palestinians are going to have to do a better job providing the kinds of security assurances that Israelis would need to achieve a two-state solution, [and] gain additional legitimacy and credibility with their own people, and delivering services.”

Mr. Obama also called the situation in Sderot unacceptable and recalled his experience visiting the city during last year’s presidential campaign.

When Mr. Obama visited Sderot last year, he stated in a Sderot press conference: “I will work from the moment that I return to America, to tell the story of Sderot and to make sure that the good people who live here are enjoying a future of peace and security and hope.”

The president emphasized Israel’s responsibility to protect its citizens.

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing,” Mr. Obama said.

Yesterday marked the fifth month since the Hamas-Israel cease-fire in mid-January. Since then, over 210 rockets have been fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza at Israel.

See this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
See this story at Israel Behind the News