Jerusalem Watchman

Earlier this week, a handful of journalists and I huddled together with Chava Gad and her little boy in the hall of their Sderot home. For five long minutes,  as Kassam rockets from Gaza exploded nearby, and between the staccato sounds of the “Red Color!” alert, I listened to Yanai’s small, frightened cries. When the danger was over, and after Chava and Yanai had taken medication to calm their clearly shattered nerves, we sat in their living room where she shared her story and her feelings about the situation facing her family and her nation.

Normally, the media slants interviews in a particular direction, or uses selective quotes to communicate what the reporter - rather than the interviewee - wants to say. I have decided to run Chava’s interview pretty much without adding comments of my own. I think it conveys pretty well what an ordinary individual in that relentlessly rocketed town is going through. If her account is similar to many others in Sderot - and I think it probably is - then the number of casualties from the last eight years of rocket attacks is way, way higher than reported by the medical services.

What I did feel to do was rework her words and sentences into more readable English, so this is not a verbatim transcript, although it is everything she said herself. This is Chava’s story.

It’s very difficult to live here in Sderot because you saw, five minutes ago, when the rockets started…you wanted to interview me outside and I told you , “OK, Just with open doors” [and then the alert was sounded].

The children don’t go to play outside; like in a normal neighborhood - no football or hide and seek; the children here are staying at home. If I allow my son to go outside and play it is only if I go with him and stay outside [myself]. Children here are in stress; they sleep with their parents, sometimes not only in the same bed but between the mother and the father. It has destroyed our private life. It’s destroyed everything in our life.

I am not working. I was manager of the office [but] I’ve stopped working because I am not able to concentrate. I was not sleeping in the night and in the day I could not concentrate. Before it happened I was able to type a letter in Hebrew or in English. And now to type a small letter is difficult for me because I am not able to concentrate - I have to think about where I put each finger on the keyboard.

So it hurts you financially. It hurts you mentally. You saw how many tablets I take; what happened to me, how I started to shake. I’m shaking less now because the tablets started to work.

I see a psychologist once a week; I go to psychiatrist once every two weeks - he has to see if the tablets work; if he has to give me more or change them all the time. I am not sleeping well in the night. Even when you take a tablet to sleep you don’t allow your body to relax completely. All the time you have one eye open and one ear open to hear. My husband tells me that I scream in the middle of the night “Tseva adom! Tseva adom!” “Color red! Color red!” - that I have nightmares. I wake up in the morning all wet from sweating in fear.

It destroys your life.

I take my child - my son - its one minute’s walk from here to his school; I take him to school in the morning and I take him from school; I do not allow him to go by himself. And it happened to us last week, last Friday, that we go to school; no, this Sunday, I think it was… We were on our way to go to school when, with no alert sounding, five or six rockets exploded. We threw down his school bag and whatever we had in our hands and ran home. We were screaming and crying and I called my husband: “Come quickly; the rockets fell without an alarm. Both of us were shaking; both of us were crying; unable to breathe. Because, if you have the alarm, you wait for the bomb. But if it’s a rocket without an alarm you are not anticipating it and the rocket causes inside more stress, and all the muscles in your body are tensed.

Three weeks ago, I was sitting playing on the computer when I heard the explosion and I just started to run. Yanai was in the shower and I wanted to run to him. My husband was watching the television. There was the explosion and then you heard the alarm. “Color red!” And after another three or four minutes another explosion - it was the rocket that took the leg off Osher Tuito - the little one [A ten-year-old who had to have his leg amputated - Ed] .

All the house as shaking and I fell over here [points] and I cut my leg. I did not break it but I was screaming from the pain over here and my son was screaming in the bathroom and my husband didn’t know where to run - to me or to the boy. I told him, “Go to the baby.” He went to Yanai. Then he called my daughter and said “I have to take her to the hospital” because he was sure I had broken my leg. So we went to the hospital and they told me that it wasn’t broken, but I had to go on crutches for a week.

Four days later I was sleeping over here, and the rocket fell on this building, on the third floor above us. The miracle is that the warhead didn’t explode. But the noise was so terrible and we all had pain in our ears. I just put my hands on my ears crying “the pain the pain, the noise the noise” and they took me to the hospital again to check. Thank God that nothing bad happened to my ears.

The children here talk about this a lot. Yanai asked me, “Do I have to die?” He said, “I don’t want to die.” He told me, “I love all my shirts, even the old ones.” I asked him, “Why are you saying this? I am not going to throw away your shirts.” And he said to me, “If one of the rockets kills you, I have to sit in shiva [seven day mourning period]  and they will cut my shirt [Jewish tradition for mourners].”

You don’t know what to answer, what to tell them. What do I promise him? That I won’t die from the rocket? That nothing will happen to me?  I try not to cry because he is next to me and it is very difficult, these things he says to me - that he doesn’t want me to die; that he wants me to be at his bar mitzvah and his wedding; that he will be very sad if I die; that he will miss me; that he will never laugh again if I will die. These are very difficult words to hear from a child of nine. No-one on the world - except those who live where there is war - will understand this.

Yanai asks me, “Why does it happen? Why are the Arabs so bad? Why do they want to kill us? We want peace.

When I try to teach him that even in the Gaza Strip you have innocent children and innocent civilians he says, “If they are innocent, why do they go to military summer camps? You never send me to military summer camp, with a uniform; with weapons, and they are younger than me.”

Or he asks: “If they are innocent citizens - why is the mother blessing her son when he goes to carry out a suicide attack and kill innocent citizens in Israel?”

He was with me when we watched television news and you saw a mother holding her baby and she said, “My dream is that my son will be a terrorist.”

Yanai asked me, “What? Is she mad? She wants her son to die? She doesn’t love her son? What kind of mother doesn’t love her son? What, it’s a baby and she wants him to die?”

And I said, “No, it’s not like that…” and I tried to change it for him. So I try to teach him love. I try to teach him peace, but when a child grows up like this, it’s difficult. And when I hear him say, “I prefer that all the Arabs will die…”

Hopeless. It makes me feel hopeless. You just want to cry all the time… you hear the alarm and it’s like Russian roulette. You don’t know where it is going to fall. You don’t know what to do. You are hopeless and…

A lot of people ask me why I don’t leave Sderot. Last week I spoke with my sister and she said to me, “Rent a house in Ashkelon.” I said, “the rockets are coming to Ashkelon.” So where do I go? To Ashdod? The rockets will fall in Ashdod too. The Arabs say all the time they won’t rest until they have destroyed all Israel.

I grew up in the moshav [collective farm] where most of its people were Holocaust survivors. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. My name is Chava - the name of my grandmother’s little sister that was murdered in Aushwitz. So where must I go to? Back to the ghetto? Where to go to if I leave Sderot?

I supported the [2005] Disengagement from Gaza, from Gush Katif. The Palestinian government promised, “Give us Gush Katif and there will be peace.” And I am an optimistic person. I really hoped that it would be peace. Everyone in Sderot was screaming at me, “No! Why do you say the Disengagement is good?” I answered, “They promise it will be peace!” And even our mayor, Eli Moyal, told me: “I am going to run after you and tell you all the time, ‘I told you so.’” We had a lot of argument for I supported the disengagement but he didn’t. And now, when we have parents’ meeting with the mayor, he all the time tells me: “I told you so! You have something else to say?”

I really wanted to hope that there will be peace one day. And I am in confusion now because on one side they tell us they want peace but on the other side they send their children to military summer camp; they teach them hate in school; they teach them that Israel does not exist on the map - there is only Palestine; that the Jewish people are the devil; that we want to destroy their life. They teaching hate in the school, in the house; in every place.

And you don’t know whether you believe in your heart that they are innocent civilians or not. Or to what you see in the real life that all the time they teach them hate, hate, hate.

The Palestinian government got a lot of money; millions of millions of dollars from all around the world. This money was meant for building factories.

If I give you money to build a factory, and you build a factory, your people would have work, a salary, a way to live. But if with this money you build palace for yourself…. They are corrupted! The Palestinian government is corrupted! They have special cars; they have palaces of gold with a private swimming pools and private helicopters; with special food imported from abroad. They buy weapons to use against us ….they don’t use the money for a factory, so their citizens are starving! And I think that unless and until there is a revolution in Gaza to change the government - there will not be peace.

[As an IDF helicopter gunship passes overhead on its way to Gaza] We want protection, to protect ourselves. In the United Nations they say what Israel is doing in Gaza is bad. But I have to protect myself; I have to protect my citizens!

Last week we went to the synagogue for Shabbat. We came home and sat at the table. My father was here. He began to say a blessing over the bread and wine, and we started to run. He tried to quiet us, saying we are not allowed to talk and to move when he is saying the blessing. But I don’t care about the blessing, just “run to the shelter!” We return after the alerts stop. We start the blessing from the beginning; we finish; we just start to eat and we have to run again. It happened that we ran four five times to the shelter….

I want people to know that we are living here in a long war. Even the Second World War wasn’t so long. We are living here like eight years. Even the Holocaust wasn’t this long. We feel here like we are living in the Holocaust - the children here feel like they are living in the Holocaust now…You saw what happened to my son, how he could not breathe when the rockets came in earlier.

It is very difficult to live but, I will survive. I am sure I will survive. I have to. I have wonderful children. I have a gorgeous husband that after 20 years of marriage we are still in love.

He supports us now that I do not work, but he does not have a high salary and we have a mortgage to pay on the house and the bills and food - he does not earn enough. It puts you into debt - which we never never had before. I have not worked for almost three years, and my debt is almost 40,000 shekels. I don’t remember when I was without a car and with so many debts. I was working with a good salary; able to buy for my children everything that they want; now I am not able to buy what they need.

We are the simple innocent citizens here in Sderot, and the simple citizens in Gaza are innocent. If the world really, really really wants to help the citizens in Gaza, then don’t send money to the Palestinian government. If you really want to help, take food and give to the simple citizens in Gaza because they are starving, and the Palestinian government does not give them food. When you are starving and your children are hungry and you don’t have what to give them to eat it makes you crazy. Give the simple citizens food and money - directly to them; go house to house, I know it is difficult, but it’s the answer - because when they are not hungry there will be peace.

I am upset with my government. They are like my parents who, when I asked them why I could not behave in certain - perhaps unacceptable - ways, said, “what will the neighbors say?”

That is the trouble with this government. Instead of protecting their people they ask, “What will the world say?” They are responsible to take care of their citizens. I gave two years of my life to the IDF. My husband was 18 years in uniform. He was on the Lebanon border; on the Egyptian border; he was in Gaza. When I was in the army I was a paramedic in the field, and if one of my soldiers was hurt I had the tools to take care of them. The army gave me tools to take care of them. Now they don’t give me tools to take care of them; I don’t know what to do.

I believe in God and I believe in peace, and I am sure that one day there will be peace. I am sure that one day there will be peace and quiet; I really want to believe in it, that these bad years will stop and there will be peace in the world.