For Dayton tour, visit to Sderot presages Operation Pillar of Defense

Photos and Story by Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

“Try not to step on the sh–,” says Ron Sinai, a guide with Mabat Touring Services, as he leads members of the Dayton’s Jewish community trip into a street-level bomb shelter in Sderot on the morning of Monday, Oct. 29.

“Come in everybody,” Ron admonishes. “Stop being American. You’re in Israel. I know it’s hard, this place is full of sh–. But there is no other way to do it but doing it in here. This is no game.”

Half of the group has gone to Masada. The other half is here, navigating around what they hope is animal excrement to stand in a public shelter and learn more about this town of 24,000 less than a mile from Hamas-controlled Gaza, and how it sustains a constant barrage of rocket fire from terrorists.

When the tour bus pulled into Sderot, an official warned Ron that two rockets had already been fired from Gaza that morning; corralling the 20-plus Daytonians into the shelter was for their safety.

In a city lined with boulevards of trees, we stand in a fetid concrete slab.

“It doesn’t matter that these people are going to work every morning, sending their kids to school, they’re in constant threat,” Ron says. “And this is not a make-believe threat. This is what we call a 15-second threat.”

He refers to the time between when terrorists fire a rocket to Sderot and its impact. Here, Code Red sirens are a constant.

“Can you run in 15 seconds into this place?” he says. “What happens when you’re in a bus? What happens if you’re in the middle of a shower? Sh–ing? F—ing? What kind of life do you have, always calculating 15 seconds?”

With Iron Dome technology, Israel is now able to take down approximately 90 percent of rockets that would otherwise land in populated areas.

“And that’s why the amount of casualties is almost nonexistent,” Ron says. “It doesn’t mean that the fear is not there. How can you raise kids in that ‘what if?’ There are kids who were born into this kind of life. I’m sorry to tell you their life is cruel. And they are blaming their parents.”

Members of tour groups, Ron says, don’t always understand why the residents of Sderot don’t leave.

“Their answer (Sderot residents) is, ‘Leave? Where to? So we leave here, they’ll aim to Tel Aviv. That’s exactly what they (terrorists) want. They want us to get up and leave. It’s ours. As hard as it is, it’s ours.’ And I do think that these guys are heroes of modern Zionism.”

Gazans have been firing rockets at Sderot for 12 years. In 2005, Israel’s government, led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, evacuated Jewish settlers from all of Gaza.

“We evacuated every single Jewish house, person, dog, grave out of the Gaza Strip,” Ron says, “they will have their own leadership, their own freedom and their own self-governed area, and they will leave us alone. We didn’t just leave Gaza. We left them with a billion dollar yearly revenue in agricultural capabilities. We left the technologies of greenhouses, computerized technologies that they knew how to operate because they used to work for us. Entire markets in Europe were waiting for products to come out of the Gaza Strip. Five minutes after we left, they took those pipes that built those greenhouses and made them into rockets.”

Ron next takes the group to the Sderot Police Station. On display in an open courtyard, beneath the buzzing of drones over Gaza, are some of the rockets fired into Sderot.

“Today, the modern rockets are no longer homemade devices,” Ron explains. “It’s military-style engines, professional pieces of work coming from Iran and Hezbollah.”

Ron says he’s heard the alert for incoming rockets more than a hundred times. It still frightens him.

“What happens when you’re in the car driving and there’s no bomb shelter next to you?” he says. “You have to run out of the car, lay down flat on the ground. What happens to you in the middle of the night? Who do you save first, yourself or your kids? Now you run in to wake the kids and you’ve got 15 seconds to wake them up, drag them out, bring them into a different room of the house — I’m not even saying you have to get out of the house, which in some places doesn’t even have the bomb shelter. Can you grab your three kids at once? In the middle of the night, when you have to wake up, what kind of a sleep is it? Nobody here sleeps deep sleep. You can’t. It’s too scary.”

Sixteen days later, the Israeli government launched Operation Pillar of Defense to halt rocket attacks from Gaza. During the eight-day operation, the IDF targeted more than 1,500 Hamas launching sites; Hamas fired 1,400 rockets at Israeli civilians, reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.