Portlanders view Gaza retaliation
By Deborah Moon Seldner
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Most of the 33 Oregonians standing on a ridge overlooking the Gaza Strip cringed in unison at about 3:15 p.m. on May 21 when the sledgehammer
thud of Israeli artillery punctuated a polite discussion of the heightened security risk to Israeli communities bordering Gaza.
"Let's get the heck out of here," said one Portlander nervously.
Israel fired about half a dozen artillery shells into a field in Gaza in retaliation for a Kassam rocket fired from the Palestinian territory that hit a school in Sderot earlier that day. Fortunately the classroom damaged by the rocket was empty at the time because the children were in another room saying morning prayers.
Two more rockets landed outside the town, and two locals had to be treated for shock.
Eilon calmly continued his lecture noting that of the approximately 1,000 rockets fired at the Moshav in the past year, only five have hit anything other than open fields. Only one girl, who suffered a direct hit, has been killed. Other direct hits have damaged homes, but no one was injured in the other four attacks.
"We don't initiate the firing, we respond," said Eilon, calling the Israeli military response of firing rockets into the open fields from which rockets are launched "a futile exercise. They (Palestinians) light the fuse and run. We are only making holes to make it easier for them to plant trees."
Visibly angry, Eilon said that only the government's policy of targeted assassination will do anything to deter future rocket attacks. He said that Israelis care too much about what the world thinks and thus minimize their military response.
"After 27 years of comparative quiet, suddenly 24/7 we enjoy the actions of our neighbors," said Eilon, who with other members of his moshav were relocated from just south of Gaza in the Sinai to just north of Gaza when Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt returning the Sinai Desert to Egypt in 1979.
"For the price of peace we were moved," Eilon said. "Last summer the decision was to pull Jews out of Gaza for the sake of Israel. For better or for worse, 9,000 Jews were moved from Gaza. We survived it, they'll survive it too."
Eilon said the Israeli government has attempted to protect the 700 some residents on the moshav closest to Gaza by installing bomb shelters on each house, two to three 9-meter tall concrete fences between Gaza and the moshav, and a steel pipe roof over the school. However, the government has yet to build bomb shelters for the workers from Thailand who do the agricultural labor in the moshav's greenhouses that abut the wall with Gaza.
As the third artillery blast echoed across the ridge where Eilon calmly lectured, another woman said, "Let's get out of here guys."
Yet by the time the sixth blast came, most of the group had adopted the more relaxed attitude of the speaker and those who had either served in the military or lived in Israel many years ago.
Linda Ginsburg, a Florida resident who was on the Portland tour with her husband Ted at the urging of her father Esmond Braun of Portland, lived in Israel for 11 years and once learned a bus shelter blew up 10 minutes after she left it. She said she wasn't at all alarmed by the blasts. She also wasn't surprised to hear that no one had moved off the moshav as a result of the escalation in violence.
Yet when Eilon concluded his talk, no one tried to linger on the ridge and the federation mission departed with a much more visceral understanding of the bombing that must wear on the nerves of residents.