On Saturday, just before noon, David Tadagi from Sderot and Adi Trabelsi from Netivot met for their usual group get-together at a coffee shop at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. They have a standing date with a group of friends. By the time I said goodbye to them, only one friend had arrived. Trabelsi told me that fortified shelters were being built in homes along the Sderot-Netivot axis, but if a mother wants to go to the store 300 yards from her house, what is she to do when the sirens go off, he asks. At dawn, the Color Red siren sounded again, warning of an incoming rocket. The residents of the area have stopped counting the sirens. They hear dozens every day. In Sderot, no one sets foot at the marketplace. They don't set their tires there either. Here and there you can see someone rushing for service at the synagogue. Angela Mordechai and her husband -- the neighborhood barber in downtown Sderot -- happened to be on the street because they were on their way back from the hospital with their nine-month old baby. The baby didn't feel well, so they ventured out to the hospital for some tests. Had it not been for the medical emergency, they would not have left their apartment. They refrain from meeting up with friends. They spent their weekend sleeping in the fortified shelter. They are angry. Angela was born in Sderot and she has now endured 15 years of Qassam rocket fire. Even the Iron Dome anti-rocket system has been moved away from Sderot (I was later informed that the Iron Dome system is working at full capacity now, and further developments are in the works to better protect civilians from short range projectiles). The residents of communities surrounding the Gaza border believe wholeheartedly that if ministers and their families were habitually subjected to Color Red warning sirens, the Israeli military response would be far harsher. They also believe that a large-scale ground incursion in Gaza could eradicate terror. During my visit, I also found the facilities designed to protect civilians in various states of neglect. I accompanied the Mordechais into a bomb shelter nearby and we were welcomed by a terrible odor. There is no maintenance. "This is good, compared to other facilities," they told me. After having endured a few dozen Color Red sirens myself, I began to understand how hard it is to go back to the familiar defensiveness. True, the Iron Dome system helps, and the shelters fitted into each apartment save lives, and with time one tends to forget. But the local residents are not willing to go back. "You have to understand," the Kfar Aza group explains to me, "they arm themselves more and more extensively from one round of fighting to the next, and fighting them becomes harder and harder." The residents of the communities surrounding the Gaza border are asking, more than any other Israeli citizens, what will happen in the end- They see a correlation between their situation and the recent riots in Israeli Arab towns in central Israel. The weakness displayed by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza encourages masked Arabs to riot in other places, they argue. There is no doubt that there is a grain of truth to their argument, even if there isn't any way to verify this correlation. The people are paying the same price that the residents of Kiryat Shmona and its neighbors in the north had to pay prior to the First Lebanon War. If the policy of restraint led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz is able to restore the calm for a year or two, the outcome will be better than that of the most successful Pillar of Defense-style Gaza incursion, which could not guarantee calm for long. But it is difficult to convince the residents of the south. Furthermore, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman made an appearance at the height of the escalation, sounding war cries and suggesting aggressive solutions, and to the people under fire, his promises sound rather tempting. But the government would do well to send three or four ministers to live in Sderot, Netivot, Ofakim or Kfar Aza until the heavy rocket fire subsides, to see what it is like to live in the land of the Color Red sirens.
