Sderot, close to Gaza

June 22^nd

Up with the sun at 5:45 in order to savor the full glory of the early morning desert light.  We drove many kilometers shooting video footage, taking advantage of our snazzy vacuum-pressure camera attachment that sticks anywhere onto the hood of the car.

The light was perfect, the land rugged and redolent of time and timelessness, and we were virtually alone on the roads. Bliss.

After a hearty Bedouin breakfast including homemade bread, we drove north to Sderot, the town that recently gained unwanted notoriety for being the target of thousands of missile attacks since October 2000. We had been invited by Michal Shamir, an artist and professor at the Sapir College Art School, to give a presentation to her students there. They seemed very grateful for our visit as they do not have a chance to meet international artists very often. This school was founded only 4 years ago and caters to recent immigrant families from North Africa, South America and other groups of students who have been traditionally excluded from educational opportunities in Israel. What was fascinating to us was the discussion that ensued after our talk, when we were asked about the purpose of our trip to Israel. In that little classroom was a whole cross-section of opinions and experiences that embody the complexity of the conflict that we were curious about. It was especially interesting to meet a young woman who lives in a settlement in the West Bank not out of any religious or ideological reason but simply because the government provided her family with incentives to move there and build a  life there at a fraction of the  cost that it would take in more established areas of the country. This is a fact easily forgotten when we tend to think of the settlers as messianic religious zealots.

Parked outside the art department are 2 concrete shelters in order to escape the barrage of rockets that have been fired by Hamas during the past 9 years. The Israeli military has established a rocket-warning system that gives 21 seconds to the citizens of the town to run for cover. Some people never make it and we learned that 3 students from the college had died in rocket attacks in recent years.

At the end of the day, Michal took us to have a solemn view of Gaza from the edge of the town, not much further away than Manhattan is from New Jersey with only a couple of sheep fields separating them.

Unlike in Tel Aviv with its beaches and bars and cafes, daily life in Sderot is filled with reminders that this is, in fact, a country at war. Here on the border with Hamas, there is no cafe where residents can congregate, no where to sit and hang out with friends. Everything happens with extreme caution.