Day Seven - Sderot, Gaza, and into the Negev Desert

This morning we woke up rather early.  All exhausted from going through the tunnels in Jerusalem the night before, we drug ourselves to breakfast, onto the bus, and then enjoyed the long drive to our next destination.  And by enjoyed I mean we all slept as much as we could.  These kinds of trips are always so slammed with amazing things that it is hard to catch a break.

            Our first destination was the town of Sderot (Steer – oht).  Sderot is literally less than a mile from the Gaza border, from where all the Palestinian shelling comes.  Israel has one of the most advanced anti-missile systems in the world called the “Iron Dome.”  It is capable of shooting down missiles while still in the air.  This innovation has saved countless lives and gives more stability to life in much of Israel.  However, because Sderot is SO close to the border, not even the Iron Dome system can protect it. 

The only solution for residents is to build bomb shelters to protect themselves.  In fact, there is a warning system that detects the heat signature of rockets as they are launched.  A siren sounds in Sderot, and the people of the town have about 15 seconds to get inside of a shelter before impact.  Residents drive with their windows down to make sure they can hear the sirens.  If one sounds, they must immediately find a safe place to hide until the impact.  Schools are usually fortified, at least in part to protect children.  Bomb shelters are discretely built into pieces of playgrounds to protect kids in case of a siren during their play time.  We were told horrifying anecdotes of parents having to flee their cars and having to decide which child to save first.  We heard of an incident where children were forced to run into the school building on the first day of school because of a rocket siren.

Noam Bedein, of Sderot Media Center

Our guide through this area, Noam Bedein, is the founder and director of the Sderot Media Center, which is the authority of all media for Sderot.  He informed us that in the past 9 years since Israel has pulled out of the Gaza territory, 24,000 rockets have been fired into Israel.  Of those, 8,600 have been fired into Sderot.  Noam describes the lives of these people as a “Rocket Reality.”  He explained that each bomb shelter built costs about $25,000.  Moreover, a total of about 100 million NAS (Israeli currency, or $25 million) has been invested into the Iron Dome system.  All of this money that has been invested in safety and defense could have gone to community development, education, or any more positive investment.  Yet because of the tensions with their neighbors, the Israeli government feels little choice but to continue to fortify and build up its defenses.

Nathan (THE Ohio State) and the rocket collection at the police station.

Noam explained that despite this adversity, Sderot is still growing.  During our visit we could see cranes constructing high-rise apartments.  He said that the town of Sderot has become a hot bed for psychological study, as it has the highest concentration of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the country.  Noam also explains that with all the hardship that we can observe in Sderot, conditions for civilians in Gaza is likely much worse.  Their government feeds off of the aid network set up to help those suffering, and there is little accountability for funds.  In fact, much of the concrete given to the Gaza territory to help it rebuild has been theorized to have been used in the creation of the Hamas tunnel network used to attack Israel. 

This tube on the playground is fortified with 17 inches of concrete on one side to serve as a
provisional shelter for children at play.

Noam shows us drawings done by kindergartners about the rockets and wanting peace
so they can play with Palestinian neighbors.

Needless to say, this morning of the trip was tough to swallow.  The whole time we spent in Sderot, it felt like a calm before an impending storm.  I think we all expected a siren to go off any second.  The most recent siren had been less than a week before our visit.  I cannot describe the sensation of being in that place.

After meeting with Noam, we went to an indoor playground sponsored by JNF.  This facility is meant to be a safe place for kids to relax after school.  They had all kinds of games for all ages of children.  The structure is also fortified with three or four different shelters, so that in the case of an attack, kids and easily get safe and then get back to their play.  Speaking to some of the JNF staff there, it was gut-wrenching to think about how commonplace it was for the children's play to be interrupted by these scares, and then for them to casually be able to run back to their games.  We were even told of an anecdote where a girl exclaimed that it would be her turn after the next siren.

For lunch, we stopped at a place outside of town where Iftah told us he used to eat when he was a part of Operation Protective Edge with the IDF.  

It was just a couple shops attached to a filling station.

The barista in the coffee shop (left) told me it was the first americano she ever made for an "Americano."
We commemorated with a selfie.

Natalie (THE Ohio State) trying to stay warm, with Gaza behind.

After lunch we drove out of the city to an area where we could stand on a hillside and see a large portion of the Gaza strip.  On the hillside was a monument to a young soldier killed in combat.  The monument was hanging wind chimes that could resonate with remembrance for the fallen.  Nearby we could hear the steady gunshots of Israeli Defense Force soldiers practicing at a firing range.  I couldn’t help but think this was intentionally set up close enough for the residents of Gaza to hear the firing.  It was cold and very windy. 

The strong winds certainly made an eerie sound with these chimes.

The "infamous" Gaza strip.  It just looked like another city.  Yet about a kilometer away, Iftah pointed out where
one of Hamas's tunnels led over to the Israel side for attack.  An IDF soldier was kidnapped there
and the body was never retrieved.

Our next stop was a farm that was close by that practices organic growing practices, even out in the desert.  There was a vegetable identification quiz for Alex and Melanie and we learned about the growing practices used there. We saw inside their green houses and even got to pick some peppers!

Ryan (UNF), the animal whisperer per usual.

Fragments of rockets that have landed on Shaked farm.  Including pieces that can be identified as American
or interceptors from the Iron Dome.

Alex (Flagler) just crushing at naming some veggies.  Melanie (U Penn) did quite well also.

Iftah points out a small bomb shelter in the middle of the greenhouses. 

We tried to cram in as many people as possible for "fun."

Rows of green houses and then straight ahead is the wall blocking off Gaza.  Quite close.

A rare photo with the photographer (me), Abida (U Alabama-Birmingham) and Terryn (Airforce)
enjoying the fruits of our labor.  Well not much labor, but yeah....

Finally, to round out our day, we were invited to dinner in a Bedouin community.  The Bedouins are a minority group that has traditionally been nomads throughout the desert.  They are of Arabic descent, and those that are religious practice Islam.  In recent years they have begun to create settlements, and the daughters of the family with which we ate all attend major universities in Israel.  Kher Albez gave us a nice history of the Bedouins and then helped us understand some of who they are today.  He cited their struggles to integrate into Israeli society, but how he is working as a social worker to try to solve those problems.  I think one of my favorite aspects of this trip is getting to know so many minority groups in Israel.  I know this probably is not the case for a typical tour group.

Our host, Khez Albez, speaking to us.

Rushing the bathroom when first arrived.  A line wraps around the perimeter of the living room and out the door.

The abandoned shoes of those in search of lavatories.  

Nice after dinner hangs with Melanie! (U Penn)

We finished dinner, continued on our way, and arrived at a beautiful kibbutz in the middle of the Negev dessert.  It is called the Kibbutz Kramim.  It had wifi in every cabin.  Enough said.  Goodnight!

Some additional notes from Noam Bedein, the journalist from Sderot:

You wrote down the numbers and figures correctly.  One thing though- it was 500 million US dollars investments in bomb shelter up to 4.5 KM from Gaza.  The Iron dome shells, 100 million NIS the cost of the 8 day military operation of "Pillar of Defence" during November 2012.

Day Six - Masada, Dead Sea, Western Wall Tunnels

Just a couple camels filling up.

We got up a little earlier today because our first destination is further outside the city.  Today we are going to Masada, which is a mountain fortress out in the desert.  To get to Masada, we actually passed through the West Bank.  It was painless and honestly somewhat anti-climactic.  We drove through a portion of the desert and finally arrived at the base of the mountain. 

The desert, date farm on the right, and Masada on the left side.

Chase (Pace U) and Nathan (The Ohio State)

Leaving the guest center on the "Snake Path" up the mountain.

            This mountain was one of nine fortresses built by King Herod, and it eventually became one of the favorite fortresses of Israel because of its isolation.  To get to the fortress, we walked up something like 800 steps (Someone said that.  May need to fact check that).  Regardless of the number, it was an intense hike.  Not all of us survived.  Just kidding.

Couple things to note here.  1) Girl on left hiking the mountain in leather pants and boots.  Must be so sweaty.
2) Jared (Airforce Academy) talking to said girl in Mandarin Chinese.  No big deal.  Turns out she was
a grad student at the Wharton School, U Penn.

           

I was a little hot from the hike so this was as close as Abbie
(UNF) wanted to get for a photo at the top.

The top was beautiful and looked like a small city.  Iftah told us the story of the final battle that took place at this fortress against the Romans (not during the time of Herod, later).  The Romans could not attack the fortress directly but laid siege, trying to starve the Israelis into submission.  However, it was to no avail.  After many failed attempts to scale the walls, the Romans built a ramp up to the fortress and then wheeled a tall machine with a battering ram up to the wall to try to break it down.  The Israelites fortified the stone wall with wood to give it elasticity to defy the battering ram.  However, the Romans took note of this and then set the wall ablaze.  On the final night of the battle, the Israelites knew they were about to fall.  The men met together and agreed on a course of action.  They went to each of their respective homes and killed their children and wives.  Then they returned to the center of the fortress and 11 men were selected to kill all the others.  Then they cast lots to determine who would be the last to live and have to kill himself.  When the Romans came into the camp the next morning, it was silent and all the Israelites lay dead.  However, one woman and child survived and helped to document the story.  There is speculation that perhaps there was no man in their household.

            This story is very significant to the history of the Jews, as the men of Masada are seen as never yielding their free will to the Romans.  During the Holocaust a narration of this story became popularized to try to motivate the Jews to not give up, coining the phrase, “Masada will not fall.”

            The fortress and the ramp stand today, and offer beautiful views of the nearby desert.

Alex (Flagler) rocking my scarf.

Iftah tells us the story at the top.

Steven (Duke) loving the view of the desert.

Maddie (Gonzaga) pumped for the hike down!

           

The Dead Sea on a rainy day.

From Masada, we went to a kibbutz near the Dead Sea where we ate lunch.  From lunch we proceeded to a beach resort where we were able to get in the Dead Sea.  This is one of those surreal experiences that I think you always imagine yourself doing some day, but don’t ever actually see it coming.  Along with those experiences also comes a dynamic of anti-climacticism.  We got in, walked through the shallow mud out into the water, and literally as soon as you lean back, the 33% salt salinated water causes you to float.  It was dark and overcast, and rained for a good portion of the time we were in the water, which was not totally consistent with what I imagined.  We rubbed the mud all over our bodies and then rinsed off.  Pretty amazing!

            From the Dead Sea we drove back to Jerusalem.  At our hotel we had a session with Arab-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.  This talk proved to be incredibly interesting.  Being Arab-Israeli, the only difference between him and the true Palestinians is essentially geographically where he lives.  He lives in Jerusalem instead of the West Bank or Gaza, and he has full Israeli citizenship.  However, when we asked him to identify what ethnicity with which he most belongs, he listed “Arab, Israeli, Palestinian, Muslim, but in no specific order.”  This is not exactly typical, but he explained why he feels this way. 

As a young man, Toameh worked for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (the “terrorist” organization that was led by Yasser Arafat for many years).  After working for some years, Toameh went to Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study journalism, and he never went back to work for the PLO.  Since then he has served as a liaison for international media agencies, meeting them in Jerusalem and then escorting them into Palestinian territories to meet with leaders.  Meanwhile he also writes for a paper called the Jerusalem Post, which tends to be moderate and critical of any extremists.  He attributes the failure of peace processes so far to a failure to educate peace to children in Palestine.  Over a decade of incitement has demonized the state of Israel to Palestinians.  He criticizes Palestinian leadership for not actually having control over its people and not actually representing them.  At the end of all of this, he believes that the international community cannot much help the situation, that Israel has actually sewn some seeds for peace but is still not perfect, and the Palestinian people need to overthrow the Hamas and Fatah in order to begin shifting the culture towards peace.  This Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel perspective is very interesting and different from the view I would gather from the media.

Finally, at night we went to the Western Wall Tunnels.  When the Mamluks occupied Jerusalem, they constructed arches surrounding the Temple Mount to expand the city.  This left much of the original walls around Jerusalem built by King Herod buried under the street level.  Charles Wilson discovered the buried segments of the Western Wall in 1864.  There have been many further excavations that have revealed areas leading all the way to the bedrock of the northwest corner of Temple Mount. 

The tunnel got pretty tiny.

Alex (Flagler), Terryn (Airforce), Clare (UNF), and Sneha (Brandeis) in front of where the walls King Herod
built meet the bedrock of the Temple Mount.

One last look at the Western Wall.

After a long and exhausting day, we returned to the Prima King hotel.  It’s probably safe to say no one had trouble sleeping.

Day Five - Yad Vashem

            Today we spent another day in Jerusalem, but not in the Old City.  We woke up, had breakfast, and then engaged in a debrief conversation in a conference room at our hotel.  We consistently have really amazing conversation about racism, culturalism, political activism on our campuses, and also directly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It is awesome to have 32 college students in one room from such different backgrounds.  I am constantly challenged to consider the beliefs of others and think critically of my own tendencies.

            After our (at times heated) debrief, we got on the bus and rode to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.  It is built into the side of Mt. Herzl, where the military cemetery (equivalent of our Arlington National) is, a cemetery for major leaders of Israel, and finally Theodore Herzl’s resting place.  Herzl was a playwright and court journalist that worked on the Dreyfus Affair in France, and in reaction to the anti-Semitism wrote a futuristic fiction book about a Jewish state in Palestine. 

Triangular prism on the left is the main area of the memorial.

            The memorial is a triangular prism that cuts through the mountain.  Throughout the memorial, you walk from one end to the other in a zig-zag motion through about a dozen large rooms with all kinds of artifacts and video footage from the Holocaust.  We were not permitted to take photos in the memorial unfortunately, but that also allowed me to just be steeped in the emotional toll of the experience.  Obviously I’ve been educated on the Holocaust my whole life, but it always powerful to experience it again.  A couple of things stood out to me in the memorial.  One was Nazi propaganda footage from the Jewish ghettos in Poland.  One thing was all the videos of children sitting out on the street, already mal-nourished, before ever going to one of the famous camps.  A specific video showed a brother and sister where the sister was continuously touching the face of the her brother, trying to wake him.  I’m not sure I had ever seen this footage before and it forced me to look down in shame.

I snuck a shot of this piece of art before we entered the memorial.

            Another powerful moment for me was the story of  a Polish family by the name of Uma.  The parents of the Uma family had six kids for their own, but in the midst of the Nazi’s ghetto creation and concentration of the Jews, the Umas decided to commit to hiding and caring for six Jewish children in addition to their own children.  Living in a small town, word eventually spread, and the SS were informed of this hiding.  One day, the SS busted into the home, not even giving the children time to hide themselves.  The SS lined up all 12 kids and told the parents to pick out their own children to save them.  The Umas remained silent.  The SS asked once more, but the Umas still refused to elevate the value of any one child’s life over another.  Finally, the whole family paid the ultimate price.

            I had never heard this story from the Holocaust.  I’m not exactly sure why it was so personally powerful to me, but I believe I related the story to one of my siblings that participates in the foster care system.  I imagined this circumstance as applied to the lives of her and her husband, and I was so thankful for the Umas.  Their decision to honor the life of each child the same demonstrates a kind of love that incurs extreme world-change but on a personal level.  I hope for this kind of love in my own life’s work.

This is a picture from the exit of the memorial.  A very somber moment for our group.

          We left the memorial and went to lunch in a bustling nearby market.  As promised by many friends that have been to Israel, the food here is absolutely amazing.  I find it impossible to deny myself shawarma.  Haha

Abbie (UNF) and I feeling like rockstars.  Cool.

Maddie (Gonzaga) holding up the map for our lesson.

After the market, we got on the bus and Iftah gave us a tour of the Security Barrier that divides the land of Israel from the “occupied” territory of the West Bank.  The barrier is a large wall at some parts, just a fence at others.  Some compare it to the Berlin Wall, or a contributor the “apartheid state” aspect of Israel.  Palestinians living on the outside of the wall cannot readily get access to Israeli hospitals or schools.  This means that the quality of life for Palestinians suffers greatly from the barrier, as Palestine is not really a fully developed state with complete infrastructure, but just an occupied territory of the state of Israel.  We stopped at multiple checkpoints and discussed the difference of emotions towards the wall depending on which side you live.  The benefits to Israelis include reduced direct acts of terrorism in Jerusalem and mainland Israel.

The Security Barrier from a distance.

Iftah telling us about the other side of the wall being graffitied and defaced by the Palestinians.

Our final meeting for the day was with a man named Bassem Eid.  Eid is a Palestinian that leads an organization called the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.  His organization has worked for multiple decades to defend the human rights of Palestinians against oppressive Israeli legislation as well as (most recently according to him) against oppressive Palestinian legislation.  His perspective was interesting, as he is Pro-Palestinian and not Anti-Israel, which seem to be a common pair.  Most of his talk was more about combatting Palestinian self-oppression rather than Israeli oppression.  After talks like this, I always draw near to my friends in the group that are more sympathetic towards Palestinians than Israelis.  I love hearing their opinions, as they often challenge my somewhat optimistic views.  They appreciated some aspects of the presentation while disagreeing with other points. 

After this meeting, we had a traditional Shabbat (Sabbath) dinner and Oneg Shabbat.  Oneg Shabbat is a time of fellowship after dinner where everyone unplugs and just enjoys each other’s company.  We sang songs, played games, and even had a small “fashion show.”  Pictures/technology were off limits.  Once Shabbat was over, we dispersed, reconnected to wifi, and then eventually went to bed!