Hof Ashkelon Is Their Home in the Shadow of Mortars from Gaza

The question comes up every year: Why do you stay in arguably the most dangerous corner of Israel, the settlements adjacent to the Gaza Strip?

It was the turn of eight women, social workers and trauma care first responders from the Hof Ashkelon region, to respond this year to the heart-rending, oft-repeated question that over a two-week period came from students of Westchester Hebrew High School, staff of Westchester Jewish Community Services, Congresswoman Nita Lowey and members of the Westchester families that hosted them for a fortnight.

Fourteen days of touring, eating and shopping their way through New York and Washington, DC, ended Sunday. But that’s not why Shalom Yisrael of Westchester brought them to America. The goal was to help the helpers maintain and refresh their balance in a turbulent part of the world, at perhaps its most hazardous, impulsive and unpredictable point.

The women are no different than the 16,000 other residents of Hof Ashkelon, a region along the Mediterranean coast south of Ashkelon and north of the Gaza Strip. They are mothers of three or four children. One is a grandmother. Social workers and office workers. Their children go to school. Some are in the military. A few are married. No different than any group of women from the 19 communities of Hof Ashkelon (or the 56 previous first responder women of the prior seven years hosted by Shalom Yisrael from the Sha’ar Hanegev and Eshkol districts that also border the Gaza Strip).

Except, when conflict arises others have the freedom to scoop up their families to leave for safer quarters. These women have made a commitment to stay on sacred ground and help others cope with the consequences of terror.

They are not right wing zealots. They want to live in peace with their neighbors. But they will not cede an inch more of territory. Two of them—Esti and Corinne—already had homes taken from them when Israel abandoned their settlements in the Sinai and Gaza in the hope that peace would ensue. Ceding land won’t happen again, not after Hamas turned their former communities into rocket and mortar launch pads.

Hof Ashkelon is a beautiful part of Israel. Its inhabitants are more than just neighbors. They are united in determination to work together to secure a stable environment for their families. Yet, they know when—not really if, just when—the random mortar attack escalates to full scale hostilities their homes and settlements will be uninhabitable because Hamas has inventoried rockets more powerful than before.

They stay for a simple, primal reason. It is their home.

If they give it up, the border region will become the next district down the road, subject to the same intermittent bombardments they sustain, they say. No. The border stays as is.

Everyday life in Hof Ashkelon is different than in the rest of Israel. Showers are shorter—nobody wants to get caught full of suds should an alarm be sounded. Long past the age when they shouldn’t, children wet their beds. While traveling inside cars, seat belts are not worn, windows are left open, radios are turned off—with seven to 15 seconds warning before a mortar can land, one doesn’t want to have to tussle with undoing a seat belt to exit a car and lie down by the roadside with hands wrapped around one’s head, or worry about reverberations from an explosion shattering glass, or miss an alarm because the radio drowned out its warning.

On the other hand, life in Hof Ashkelon is by choice, as is service as a first responder. Before joining the first responder team Inbal had to commit that while other residents might leave during a conflict she would stay. Shalhevet and her family moved from the city of Ashkelon to Zikim, a kibbutz on the coastline less than two miles from the northern border of the Gaza Strip. When her daughter clings to her leg and pleads with her to stay home, Idit must overcome a normal, motherly response. She must leave her home to help others deal with trauma.

It is difficult not to think of these women and their colleagues, Tsipi, Mali and Ronit, as heroes, but that is the last descriptor they would attach to themselves. They are, simply, part of a people trying to live in peace. Their job is but one performed in defense of their homeland.

They arrived back in Israel Monday afternoon. The Shalom Yisrael 2017 program has concluded but funding needs for this year and future programs remain. Please consider making a donation. 

Send your tax deductible donation to:

Shalom Yisrael

c/o Murray Forseter

11 Brad Lane

White Plains, NY 10605

The links below are to previous posts about visits sponsored by Shalom Yisrael and Gilda’s and my visit in 2011 to the Sha’ar Hanegev region along the northeastern edge of the Gaza Strip: 

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2016/05/along-border-with-gaza-life-is-anything.html

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2015/05/living-with-tension-along-troubled.html

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2014/05/ordinary-lives-lived-by-extraordinary.html

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2013/05/building-community-in-eshkol.html

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2012/05/rocket-women.html

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2011/07/gazing-over-gaza.html

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2011/05/well-deserved-rest-relaxation.html

Along the Border With Gaza Life Is Anything But Routine

It’s been a little more than a week since they returned home to a mostly quiet border. They’re back in their gardens, their kitchens, their places of work. The routine and the out of the ordinary are known to them. Muffled noises from beneath the ground very likely come from another tunnel from the Gaza Strip being built by Hamas. The pounding sound at night is the exchange of artillery fire between ISIS and the Egyptian army. A red alert means you have 15 seconds, or less, to seek shelter before a rocket launched from Gaza may land in your backyard, or worse.

“They” are eight women from the Eshkol Regional Council of Israel who spent two weeks in the New York metropolitan area and Washington, DC. The Eshkol district encompasses 32 communities housing 14,000 residents on 190,000 acres east of the southernmost 40 kilometers of the Gaza Strip and seven miles along the northern Sinai border with Egypt. 

They came from kibbutzim and moshavim as guests of Shalom Yisrael, a Westchester, NY-based organization celebrating its 30th year of bridging connections between Israeli citizens and their American counterparts. During the first 23 years of its existence, Shalom Yisrael (then known as Zahal Shalom) sponsored wounded veterans and civilians. For the last seven years guests of the organization have been women who serve as trauma care first responders and security officials in their respective home towns.

How do you react when a door slams shut? If you’re like most people, you’re startled. You turn toward the sound, quickly ascertain the origin of the noise, and go on with your life.

If you lived in the Eshkol region, the bang of a sharply closed door might engage a condition we in the United States have come to recognize as PTSD. Post traumatic stress disorder. Years of rocket barrages from mortars and missiles launched from the adjacent Gaza Strip, coupled with almost nightly artillery clashes between the Egyptian army and ISIS in the nearby Sinai Peninsula trigger rapid heart beats and feelings of “we’ve been here before.” 

“Before” means a time of war, last experienced full time two summers ago. 

“In the first morning that I woke (in Westchester),” said Yehudit, a 46-yer-old responsible for the administration and security of her moshav, Yated, “I heard strange sounds, sounds that I had forgotten, sounds that I had forgotten from my past. And when I paid attention I understood that these were the sounds of the tree leaves and the sounds of birds. And I heard the sounds of silence and tranquility.

“Suddenly I was really frightened because I understood that I am already used to waking up to the sounds of explosions. And that’s a bad sign.”

Their everyday life has been transformed. Truck traffic has vastly increased on the region’s roads from deliveries of building material to Gaza, though the flow recently has been tightened because of Hamas’ tunnel building activity (http://nyti.ms/27J4IF6).

No one wants to be caught in an embarrassing situation in case of a rocket attack, so short showers are taken. Before entering the bathroom a towel and robe are laid out just in case a quick exit is required. 

Nira’s 13-year-old son chooses to sleep in the family’s safe room rather than his own bedroom. Not every residence has a safe room. The government supplies a safe room for homes within four and a half kilometers of Gaza. Those living further away have safe rooms only if they pay for them on their own, at a cost of roughly $10,000. In those areas, the only government-provided security is a shelter for kindergarten children. 

Safe rooms are needed because the heralded Iron Dome missile defense system, jointly developed by Israel and the United States, cannot protect them. They live too close to Gaza, so close, in fact, they can see Hamas training exercises. 

They long for a return to a time when they interacted freely with the citizens of Gaza. They are convinced Gaza residents want to live in peace as well, but Hamas does not let them. Before Hamas took control of the strip, many Palestinians worked on their farms—60% of Israel’s produce is grown in the region. Israelis had their cars repaired in Gaza and bathed on its beaches. 

Israelis have a reputation of being a stubborn people. Even during the 2014 conflict, when one-third of all the rockets that landed in Israel fell in the Eshkol region, elderly citizens in the district refused to abandon their homes. Instead, every day they came to the senior center. 

The Shalom Yisrael guests displayed their own mettle. 

“When I landed in New York two weeks ago,” said 58-year-old Yael of Kibbutz Urim, the head of occupational therapy at the senior center, “the weather was pretty cloudy, raining, and I thought to myself, if I can get used to missiles I can get used to rain. 

“But to missiles and noise of war you never get used to, and you get used to rain because the rain grows a future, and noise of war destroys the future for peace.”

Wherever they went, from visiting high schools to meeting with U.S. Representatives Nita Lowey, Eliot Engel and Susan Davis, the same question kept surfacing: “Why do you continue to live there?”

The answer, Yehudit said on her last night in Westchester, could be found in a poem written by Ehud Manor:

I have no other country

even if my land is aflame

Just a word in Hebrew

pierces my vein and my soul—

With a painful body, with a hungry heart, 

Here is my home.

Some Things I Wonder About

Here are a few things I wonder about:

I wonder when restaurant and retail operators will determine the time is right for an increase in the minimum wage. Just as restaurateurs fought smoking bans inside their establishments on the pretext it would drive down sales, only to be proven wrong, they continue to argue that an increase in the minimum wage would hurt business. I cannot remember a time during the last 35 years when merchants and restaurateurs did not lobby against pay hikes, when they did not counsel the time was not propitious.

Yes, some stores and food establishments might suffer, but not because salaries were higher. They’d possibly go out of business because they were inefficient operators, or their locations were marginal, or their service and product were sub-par. 

I wonder when politicians will come to their senses and realize giving a few more cents to workers would benefit the whole economy.

Driving Gilda to and from work since she broke her wrist in mid-August has vastly increased my exposure to Sirius radio. Aside from the near 45 mpg fuel economy we have been enjoying in her Ford C-Max, we get to listen to Sirius. Often, it’s the BBC World News, but when we want music Gilda usually chooses the Pulse station. I sometimes opt for Bridge but she switches the station to one of her favorites. Until she explained the songs on Bridge, such as “Please Come to Boston” and “Dream Weaver,” were too melancholy, I never realized so many indeed were downers, which got me to wondering if the Bridge station wasn’t sending out a subliminal message to would be suicides that jumping off a bridge usually does the trick.

News reports continue to emphasize U.S. and allied aircraft are having limited results blunting the ISIS offensive in Syria and Iraq. Often, it is reported, ISIS has tanks and other heavy artillery while its foes have simpler, less impactful weapons. Which got me to wondering, how is it that with smart bombs and laser-guided drone attacks the allied coalition hasn’t been able to knock out the ISIS ordnance. It’s not as if these big guns are hiding. Newscasts clearly show them. Even if they were inside cities the U.S. (and Israel) previously demonstrated the pinpoint precision of aerial forces. So why the negligible results?

Regardless of political party it seems off-year congressional and senate candidates rarely want to be seen with the president, even if they share the same party affiliation. It’s happening with Obama and previously with George W. Bush. 

But I wonder why almost all political ads on TV, radio, billboards and printed flyers fail to identify party affiliation of the candidate. It’s particularly vexing when the roadway landscape is bedecked with all manner of political signs that leave one scratching one’s head about a candidate’s red or blue color. You’d think all Republicans would want to make sure they are not mistaken for an Obama supporter.

The failure to identify party affiliation can affect even the most tenured of elected pols. My U.S. representative, Nita Lowey, has served in Congress since 1989. She is the ranking minority member on the Committee on Appropriations. She is no slouch. Yet the flyer that arrived at our home over the weekend included absolutely no mention of her Democratic Party affiliation. I couldn’t tell you who is running against her, but, then again, anyone not familiar with Lowey couldn’t tell you her party alignment by looking at her literature. 

I ran this by my good friend Marty who’s okay with my posting this—I wonder why movies and TV shows invariably portray accountants as short guys and architects as tall, mostly sophisticated gentlemen.

Ordinary Lives Lived by Extraordinary Women

They live ordinary lives. Three are special education teachers, one an elementary school instructor. Another practices Chinese medicine. One’s a retired nurse. A seventh a midwife. The eighth is an occupational therapist. They are women of modest professions, living modest, ordinary lives.

And then an airplane or a helicopter flies overhead and they wonder if an attack is imminent. Or they hear, make that feel, an explosion that rattles the foundation of their homes. Was it a rocket or the vibrations from a powerful Egyptian charge meant to destroy an underground Palestinian tunnel from the Gaza Strip into the Sinai?

They're home now, back on the kibbutzim delicately nesting next to the southern tip of Gaza, on the border with Egypt. For the two weeks spanning the end of April and the beginning of May, these eight women came to America as guests of Shalom Yisrael. Why? For some well-deserved rest and relaxation, for aside from their ordinary day jobs, they are trauma care first responders when the ordinary lives of their fellow kibbutzniks become anything but ordinary when bombs and rockets hail from across the border. 

Most everyone who met them, including Congresswoman Nita Lowey, wanted to know why they lived on the edge of peril, why not in a more secure spot in Israel. The Eshkol Regional Council from which they come is the most targeted land area in Israel. When rockets are launched from Gaza, they have perhaps 15 seconds to seek shelter, assuming an alert is sounded. They are too close to Gaza to be protected by the Iron Dome missile defense system. Houses are being retrofitted with safe rooms. 

Yet, they do not dream of leaving. Their response echoed what we have heard time and again from people in our own country. Their choice is no different than that made by Americans living in tornado alley or along the Gulf Coast ravaged annually by hurricanes or the Rockies that even in the second week of May was treated by Mother Nature to globs of snow. Or those who warily watch waters rise above levies each year to wash away homes. They live there because it is their home, whether they grew up there or recently relocated. It is beautiful, they said. With a real sense of community. That helps explain why the population of the Eshkol region has grown 35% over the past five years. 

The region is important agriculturally. Sixty percent of Israel’s produce is grown in the 32 communities of the council that shares a 24-mile border with the Gaza Strip and a seven-mile border with Egypt. They live 90 minutes south of Tel Aviv but don’t lack for culture. Within the 190,000 acres of the Eshkol Regional Council, its 14,000 residents enjoy 10 art galleries and museums, nature and heritage sites, youth and elderly recreation centers, and a 930-seat cultural hall. 

They strive to live a normal life in an abnormal place. Sometimes, neighbors hear voices from under their homes. Quickly they call the military. Tunnels from the Gaza Strip are a constant concern. It took a few days, but the women soon acclimated to the sounds most Americans take for granted. They realized they didn’t have to look up when a jet streaked overhead, though, to be honest, even Americans twist their heads at the whop-whop whirring of helicopter blades. 

For five years I have been involved with Shalom Yisrael, a volunteer organization that for 29 years has hosted Israelis during the spring, at first soldiers and victims of terror, but for half a decade ladies such as these, women of valor and determination who leave their families when danger erupts to tend to the needs of their community. 

And yet, of the 40 women I have met, I can think of none who does not crave peace and friendship with their Palestinian neighbors, who does not want a return to the time before Hamas seized control of Gaza and put an end to commerce between the two peoples, to visits to beaches reputedly among the most beautiful in the eastern Mediterranean. 

Living as they do on the precipice of conflict, as targets of terror, they are nevertheless dovish citizens of Israel. Not for them are Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s and his cohorts’ hawkish demeanor. They don’t have a solution. They just hope one can be found. 

The ladies returned to Israel last Sunday, Mother’s Day. Normalcy has returned to my routine. What passes for normalcy in the Eshkol Regional Council awaited them. 

The addresses below are links to previous posts about the visits sponsored by Shalom Yisrael and my visit in 2011 to the Sha’ar Hanegev region just north of the Eshkol region: 

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2011/05/well-deserved-rest-relaxation.html 

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2011/07/gazing-over-gaza.html 

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2012/05/rocket-women.html

http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2013/05/building-community-in-eshkol.html

Catching Up on News and Views

With the exception of Monday’s blog, I’ve been mostly silent during the last two weeks, part of which I was pre-occupied with visitors from Israel here for  the annual Shalom Yisrael hosting of first responder-trauma care providers from the area next to the Gaza Strip. (More about them in an upcoming blog.) So let me now take this opportunity to catch up on some of the news and views stored up in my notebook, on scraps of paper and on clippings from the newspaper.

I can report that last Wednesday I demonstrated extreme tact and restraint. While sitting with the Israelis in the congressional dining room eating lunch with Congresswoman Nita Lowey, my ears perked up at the sound of an obsequiously rich baritone voice. In my direct vision, buttering a roll at the adjacent table, Grover Norquist held forth. He of the “no new taxes” pledge. He who is largely responsible for stymieing the government into uncompromising inaction, thereby subsidizing the bifurcation of society into haves and have-nots by inhibiting the development of programs to help the less fortunate while the fortunate become richer and more insulated. 

How fitting to see him eating at the public trough, bending the ear of a congressman I did not recognize. But, as I said, I was a model of decorum. Aside from pointing him out to a colleague seated next to me, and texting my sighting to Gilda and a friend, I sat there stoically silent. I'm grateful the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre wasn't with him or I wouldn't have been able to restrain myself.

The trip to Washington reinforced an old truism I had encountered during three decades of criss-crossing this great country of ours and, for that matter, much of the rest of the civilized world. Namely, the best showers often can be found not in expensive hotels but in moderately priced abodes. I was vigorously refreshed by the shower in my room at the Holiday Inn of Alexandria, VA, reminding me of a stay in the Anatole Hotel in Dallas a decade ago. 

As head of a convention that brought 1,200 guests to the Anatole, the hotel placed me in the presidential suite, 20-plus floors above ground. Beautiful accommodations. But when I sought the cleansing refreshment of a shower, I was startled. The water cycled between hot and cold every 30 seconds. And, most disappointing, the flow was, shall we say, less powerful than an elderly man’s discharge. When I complained to the concierge, I was told the problems resulted from a system that required hot water to be pumped up to the twentieth floor and above. So why did the hotel put the presidential suite on such a high floor?, I asked. Did they not like George W. Bush? He was a Texan, after all. 

As you might expect, aside from voicing my displeasure, I received no satisfaction.

Blessed Passing: More and more I’m feeling the world is passing me by, especially when it comes to technology and the inculcation of terms and figures of speech into the vernacular of everyday life. Until a May 4 article in The NY Times (“They Feel ‘Blessed’”) I wasn’t aware “blessed” had become a standard form of expression and thereby a problem for many, though not to me because of my ignorance, which is a blessing, really (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/fashion/blessed-becomes-popular-word-hashtag-social-media.html?).

Legs to Die For: I have legs most any woman would die for. Long. Thin. Not overly muscular. Pinched in at the ankles. What I don’t have are legs most men would die for.

So I have been particularly amused by the fixation some celebrities and fashion designers have displayed lately by dressing up (or down, in my opinion) in dress shorts and sockless ankles. It came to a head at the Academy Awards in the personage of Pharrell Williams (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/fashion/men-in-shorts-girls-pharrell-williams-critics.html?). 

Perhaps in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley offices shorts could pass as acceptable business attire, but I’m an old fogey for any other formal occasion, and I still believe business counts as a formal occasion. If you’ve read this far, you probably won’t mind my reprising an incident from some 30 years ago.

As an offshoot to my publication, we had launched a separate apparel magazine, staffed with its own publisher, editorial and sales teams. The publisher traveled to Los Angeles to make calls with his new resident salesman. They planned to visit Ocean Pacific the first day. OP was an emerging brand at the time.

Carl, the publisher, showed up at our LA office in our standard corporate uniform, meaning a suit. Not even a sports jacket and slacks was acceptable back then. His salesman, on the other hand, came dressed in a T-shirt, cutoff shorts and flip-flops. The contrast could not have been greater. The salesman explained that when they arrived at Ocean Pacific Carl would see that casual was the norm, that Carl would be the one whose dress would stand out from the crowd.

Sure enough, the salesman was correct. The next day Carl fired him. He had been guilty of either failing to properly uphold our corporate profile on a business call, or failing to properly communicate in advance the appropriate dress code to Carl for the OP call. Either way, he was history, one of the shortest-tenured salespeople in our company’s history.

Bird Watching: A team from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology won last Saturday’s World Series of Birding in New Jersey. The six-member team identified 218 species during the 24-hour competition. 

I have more modest expectations. My side yard bird feeders draw 10 types beyond the usual sparrows, mourning doves and black birds: blue jay, female cardinal, red-bellied woodpecker, male cardinal, downy woodpecker, cedar waxwing, chickadee, goldfinch, western tanager and nuthatch. Occasionally a migrating hummingbird stops by. 

It’s About Time: The Times finally got around to noting this past Sunday that unrest in Ukraine has prompted cancellations of vacation travel to the region. As I reported two months earlier, on March 3, Gilda’s and my Black Sea summer cruise, including stops in Odessa, Yalta and Sevastopol, was scrapped.  

Rocket Women

Long time between posts. Sorry about that ...

Just back from what has become an annual three-day trek to Washington, DC, accompanying eight Israeli women who provide social welfare services to their countrymen. A group called Shalom Yisrael sponsors their two-week rest and relaxation tour of New York and Washington. Two were from Jerusalem. They work in a shelter for battered women and children. The remaining six live in the Eshkol region along the border with the Gaza Strip. They are first-responder trauma care providers, along with being targets themselves, as are their families, to the frequent missile attacks from across the border. Over the four day period surrounding the holiday of Purim (March 8), for example, 80 of the 200 missiles landing in Israel fell in the communities of the Eshkol region. A rocket not so long ago landed on the desk of one of the women. Fortunately, it was a Saturday so no one was working. 

Israel has implemented an “Iron Dome” defense against rocket attacks, but what is not widely known is the missile shield is in place to protect larger cities, such as Ashkelon, not the small kibbutzim and moshavs adjacent to the Gaza Strip. Residents of the Eshkol district have about 15 seconds’ warning of incoming rocket fire to seek shelter. 

Here’s another fact gleaned from my time with these brave, resilient women—homes within four and a half kilometers (2.7 miles) of the border have been outfitted by the government with “safe rooms” built to withstand a direct hit (fyi—since the first Gulf War all new residential construction in Israel must include a safe room). In communities four and a half to seven kilometers from the border, no safe rooms are retrofitted to existing homes. The only government funded security is a shelter for kindergarten children. Beyond seven kilometers, everyone is vulnerable. No safety measures are provided.

If you’re as surprised as I was to find this out, you’re in good company. As they related this state of affairs over breakfast in the Congressional Dining Room to Representative Nita Lowey, the ranking Democrat of the State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, she sat with mouth agape. Clearly the success of the Iron Dome, while a source of national pride, has done little to make the lives of these vulnerable Israeli women and their neighbors any safer. 

What also emerged from the breakfast meeting was a suggestion that our government needs to do a better job explaining how foreign aid not only helps other countries but also is a direct contributor to American jobs and our economy. Almost all foreign aid monies must be spent in the United States on equipment, materiel and other goods before being shipped overseas. Foreign aid is a good example of your tax dollars at work, here and abroad.