Fun and Fear: A Revival of Rockets and Purim in Israel

What an interesting week in Israel. So many things have happened. It all began on tuesday, when my program took us on an interesting field trip to Sderot--the city in Israel that is the closest to Gaza.

I have written about Sderot before, but I still hadn’t had a proper tour of the city. Therefore, I will give my personal experience visiting in a few words. Sderot is the hebrew world for boulevard, which is interesting, because I didn’t see so many boulevards, I saw many many bomb shelters. Since residents only have 15 seconds to make it to shelter after sirens go off, the shelters are placed on every street corner, in nearly every home. Even in one of the playgrounds, there was a giant caterpillar shaped bomb shelter that children could run to, and often do. We had the opportunity to speak with one of the residents who lives there and heard about his stories of rockets falling, not having enough time to make it to a bomb shelter, seeing rockets fall in front of his own eyes, and the fear that residents of this town live in.

However, they refuse to leave. If they can be ran out of town by the terror, than it has done its job. The residents know that if they run, they might as well be pushed into the sea. It is a very difficult life, but a very important one. Even with war being an aspect of everyday life, residents choose to stay, amazingly. Even new neighborhoods are being built for immigrants to the city. This city is not dying away, it is growing. It stands in the face of danger, and says “You can try to scare me, to kill me, or to run me out of town, but I am not going. This is my home.” It is truly amazing.

After our meeting, we were taken to the police station to take a look at the rockets that had been retrieved. There were hundreds of them, but those we saw were merely a fraction of those that have hit the town. It left me with a strong impression.

It is amazing that the story of Sderot is not told. The story of Gaza is every where, but the strikes there are all directed at terrorists with an extreme amount of precision, retalitory to rocket attacks on civilian populations in Israel. Gaza militants fire from civilian areas, taking refuge in preschools and homes, in order that when the retalitory strikes come, more civilians die and they can gain face in the media. Further, they fire towards civilian areas indiscriminantly. Luckily, Israel puts billions of shekels into keeping their citizens safe with the Iron Dome system which intercepts Qassams in mid air, in shelters placed strategically all over the border cities and towns, and for the military response which typically causes the rockets to stop, at least temporarily. Sderot is the only city in the world where rocket attacks are carried out directly onto civilian areas on a daily basis. These are not opinions, they are the facts of the situation.

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Anyway, on to the rest of my week. It was easy to forget about my visit to Sderot within 24 hours, because the festivities for Purim had just begun. Purim is the Jewish version of Halloween, but instead of focusing on the scary, it focuses on the miracle of the Jewish people's ability to survive. We wear costumes to disguise ourselves just like the characters in the story of purim--which I will leave out for length's sake.

During Purim, Israel is a massive party. Literally, regular life shuts down, and suddenly the entire country is in Party mode. There are street parties everywhere, music in day and night, people dressed up in costume, plenty of drinking, and plenty of fun.

Tuesday night, two days before Purim properly began, Tel Aviv had a flash mob--specifically a MASSIVE ZOMBIE WALK. Somehow, I got the invite and decided to dress up, put on my undead face, and roam the streets of Tel Aviv with thousands of people, climbing over vehicles, invading pubs and restaurants, climbing on top of monuments, and overall creating massive hysteria in the heart of this lively city.

My Wednesday night--the eve of Purim was pretty interesting as well to say the least. It is customary that on Purim, one drinks enough so that he or she is unable to tell the difference between good and evil (Haman and Mordechai), thus I can assure you, I may still have had my wits about me, but I definetly had the holiday spirit. I went to a party on a roof, invited by a few friends I met from couchsurfing, then I went to a street party behind the nicest dessert restaurant here, Max Brenners, then I hung out with some strangers and went to a club, and then I went home. It was very fun.

Aaand, the next day, my friend Jake and I took a bus deep into the heart of the desert to a place known as the "Desert Ashram." For Purim weekend they were having a festival, the Galactic Rave, where one could meditate, participate in workshops about interesting hippie love and strange ideas, dance your heart out on the dance floor to some of Israel's finest trance music, and meet fun loving people from all over this tiny country.

It was an amazing time. Jake and I went on some interesting walks into the desert, heard some beautiful jams with ethnic instruments from around the world, and had an experience that will be difficult to forget. On Saturday, it was time to go home. I got a ride back to Tel Aviv with some friends of mine from couchsurfing, and on my hungover ride home I had an interesting conversation with my friend next to me. Tsur turned to me during our 4 hour ride home and said, "Isn't it amazing that in such a tiny country, where you can drive north to south in just 7 hours, there is so much to see." He was talking specifically about the nature--the mountains of the golan and the upper Galil, the Jordan river, the rolling hills of the lower Galil, the Green Judaean mountains around Jerusalem, the farmlands and cities next to beaches, the arava desert, the judaean desert, the largest crater in the world, the lowest point on earth (the dead sea), the southern mountains, and dolphin reefs in eilat.

I thought about that quite a bit. It isn't just the nature. It's the people. You can walk through druze, arab, christian and Jewish communities here that are as lively as they were 2000 years ago. You can go to a place like ashram where Israelis that have traveled in the far east and india bring back their experiences and a new way of life. You can party like its New York in Tel Aviv, and you can visit the temple mount of ancient Israel just 45 minutes away.

It is amazing how small this tiny country is.

And just as all this was going through my mind, Israel was under fire just 45 minutes south of me. In the midst of the Purim festivities, over 130 rockets fell on southern Israel. As a result, school in all over southern Israel was closed, and 200,000 students will be staying home until further notice. As I was partying in my pirate costume, children in Sderot, Ashdod, Beer Sheba, Yavne, and many Kibbutzim, were being crowded into bomb shelters while still in costume.

All the while, the Post Trauma hotline at Natal's PTSD center had a 300% increase in calls.  While Tel Aviv was partying, our neighbors in the south were in fear of their lives.

It is terrible. The lives of children are being disrupted every day by the rockets eminating from the Gaza strip. Israel is doing everything it can to stop the terror, but it is a difficult battle to fight. We need everyone's help, we need solidarity. War can't be the only solution, standing together as two peoples who live in fear is enough.

As I said earlier, and I will say again, the story of the communities in Israel under fire needs to be told. The people need help, and the terror must stop.