The Movement for Reform Judaism

Shalom Halevy is an angry man. Sitting in the council room of Sderot municipality Mr Halevy, the mayor’s adviser on diaspora affairs, believes the 20,000 residents of Sderot are being used as political pawns.

Addressing members of the Movement for Reform Judaism’s leadership group in a room adorned with the photos of 13 residents killed by Kassam rocket fire, Mr Halevy is quite clear.

“Life here is almost impossible. The government doesn’t want to stop the terror and is using us as pawns in a game to show the world what happens after a withdrawal. Would any other government allow this to happen?" he asked. This view has been dismissed as “highly cynical” by South African-born Lieutenant-Colonel David Benjamin, of the Israeli Army’s legal affairs department.

Situated a mere 800 metres from the Gaza Strip – or 17 seconds as the Kassam flies - Sderot, as well as the surrounding kibbutzim and moshavim of the north-west Negev, has been targeted almost daily by Islamist terrorists firing the home-made Kassams. Although the rockets cause not much more than superficial damage, 13 people have been killed, and the mental toll on the residents of this Negev town has been immense.

Students at the nearby Sapir College conducted research and found that about 75% of the residents were suffering from post-traumatic stress. Mr Halevy said: “Actually, we in Sderot think it’s even more than that. Most people don’t have shelters and we don’t know where the Kassams will fall, given that it’s such a short time between launch warning and explosion. And when people are out and about, they have to run to a public shelter – and old people can’t run…”

Mr Halevy, who opposed the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, believes that there is a political as well as a military response to the almost daily attacks. “We have to tell the Arabs that their leaders are the worst in the world, that they don’t care about their own people, their education or their health. Once they realise this, we might get peace.” 
Sderot was set up in 1951 as what Mr Halevy described as a “living wall of Zionism.” He added, wryly: “Little did they know then how true those words would be 56 years later.”

Most of the residents in the early 1950s were North African, Kurdish and Persian refugees who lived in tents and shacks before building permanent structures almost four years later in 1954. In the 1961 census, the percentage of North African immigrants, mostly from Morocco, was 87%, while another 11% of the residents were Kurdish immigrants.

Sderot grew with every wave of mass immigration – in the 60s, it was the Romanians, in the 70s, Russians and 80s, Ethiopians. In the 90s, more than 10,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union made Sderot their home. Each wave has brought its problems.

Mr Halevy said that while unemployment was, at 5.5%, lower than the national average of 9%, “at least 30 per cent of the people here are on low or very low incomes, and this causes social and economic problems. In addition, the government gives immigrants help for their first five years in the country, most of the immigrants here have problems for at least 10 years.”

The government, he adds, “has helped, but nowhere near enough. We’ve had our fill of promises, so we don’t want anymore promises.”

What he meant was that the government had promised much by way of shelters for schools and other public buildings, but had not delivered.

 But shelters alone cannot change the reality of Sderot and the rest of the north-west Negev. 

Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield, the head of the Movement for Reform Judaism, said: "Nothing can change the reality that Sderot is 800 metres from Gaza.  So we have to ensure that everyone in Sderot and the surrounding kibbutzim, the elderly, the poor, the new immigrants, understands that the Jewish people gives the highest priority without equivocation to the security of those living within the pre-'67 borders (as adjusted in the final peace settlement)."

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