Sderot

[A/N: I am cleaning out my Edit Posts page. Over the next few weeks, I will publish the half-finished works I deem publishable and throw the rest away. This one, I think, is publishable.
It was first drafted on 4-4-10.]

So tell me, when was the last time you turned on the TV, went to your favorite news station, and saw the commentator blaming Israel for launcing missiles at some other Middle Eastern country? Ok, so maybe not recently, but you've seen it before. You know you have.

So, did the commentator ever tell you the other side the story? Like what provoked Israel to attack in the first place? Israel does not just go around randomly lobbing missiles at other country for the fun of it. (If you have believed this in the past, then you have confused Israel with the rest of the Middle East.)

No, when Israel finally goes on the offensive, it means that they're tired of having missiles fired into thier own country. Case in point: Sderot, Israel.

From the UK's Daily Mail:

And suddenly it comes, a noise like the slamming of a heavy door as a sleek, six-foot-long Qassam rocket bursts into the cloudless blue sky.

Its trajectory is marked by a trail of white smoke as it curves towards the town. Almost simultaneously, sirens begin to wail.

A woman's urgent voice repeats the words, "Tseva Adom, Tseva Adom," over public address loudspeakers.

In Hebrew this means, "Code Red".

It signifies a missile is on its way.

Sderot's jittery residents have no more than 15 seconds to take cover before the rocket hits.

On this occasion, they will have to wait there for a long time.

For the next 72 hours Code Red alerts will sound almost continuously; Islamic militant groups in Gaza have begun raining the first of more than 100 rockets on to the town during a terrifying three-day attack.

Most miss or fizzle out.

But there's always a few that find a target.

How would you feel if this was your town? From Ron Mossad's blog:

Welcome to Sderot, Israel, population approximately 20,000. The scene you just read is one that has been repeated basically on a daily basis since March, 2002....

But Sderot isn't just a thumbtack on a google map showing the latest rocket strike in the perpetual hell of Middle East reality. It's a real city with real people that I had the privilege of visiting this past January. Palestinians fired four mortars at us while I was there. Luckily their aim was off and the mortars all landed in their own territory - no code red for me.

Seems like a lot of people are protected by, as Steven Crowder put it, "The God-given gift of Islamic Terrorist ineptitude." To bad not everyone's that lucky all the time.

And yet, despite the PTSD and seemingly perpetual choas that surrounds the city of Sderot, it's just a normal place ... well, other than the rockets, of course. Back to Ron Mossad's blog:

If you follow Israeli news you read a lot about traumatized residents of Sderot with PTSD or children that have developed panic attacks as a result of incessant Code Red alerts...but in a way, seeing how relatable the people were, affected me more than reading about victims of attacks. These people aren't superheroes, they're just regular human beings like you and me who want nothing more complicated than to be able to get out of bed in the morning WITHOUT BEING SHOT AT BY A BUNCH OF IRANIAN-FUNDED, OVERSIZED BAZOOKAS.

They have jobs, they drink tea, they send their children to school, they go out drinking (a local pub was selected by Haaretz as serving the "best cocktail" in Israel), they even produce the Bissli snacks - popular with so many American Jews - at the Osem plant right outside town. In short, this could be quiet rural town in South Jersey or Pennsylvania or Michigan or Kansas or Oklahoma or wherever. You could have had the luck of being born here instead of wherever you grew up.

The only difference is that if you had been born here, [rockets] would be falling on your head on a nearly daily basis for the past eight straight years. This is what would have been raining down on you 20, 30, 50, A HUNDRED times per DAY before your government finally decided to act against the perpetrators. This is what the rest of the world would expect you to endure falling on you as you drove to work or waited with your child for the bus or lay in bed considering what to do with your holiday weekend.

I really can't imagine what it must feel like to have missiles lobbed at you every single day. and these people live with this day after day.

So next time you hear that Israeli soldiers are being blamed for some skirmish over in the Middle East, remember Sderot.

because everyone feels bad for the Muslims who are having thier homes destroyed by the Israelis, but the mainstream media will never report on Sderot.