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Thursday, June 26, 2008
Remembering the sea at Gaza.
“If you go to Gaza, I would like to give them a message,” Herzl Itzhaki told me this morning. “We love them like human beings. … That there aren’t just Israelis who want to fight them.”
It was a lack of communication that has deepened the divide between the two sides, he said.
Few Israelis within range of Gaza-made rockets hold out much hope that a fragile truce between the Israeli army and the militant group, Hamas, will last.
(Hours after my visit, a rocket launched from Gaza landed harmlessly in an industrial zone. It was the fifth rocket fired since Hamas agreed to the truce. Israel has responded by barring goods from entering the impoverished and isolated coastal strip.)
Herzl, who is 70, lives in the working class city of Sderot, which has been the frequent target of rocket fire from Gaza over the past eight years. Twelve people have been killed there.
The ceasefire isn’t popular in Sderot because ceasefires haven’t worked in the past, but the alternatives seem worse.
“I’m willing to take more Qassams,” Herzl’s wife, Rachel, 65, said, referring to the Arabic name for the rockets. “As long as they don’t send in soldiers to get killed.”
Herzl recalled the years after 1967, when Israelis would go the beach in Gaza and eat at seafood restaurants. Gazans would come to Sderot to sell fruit and vegetables or to work.
In the 1970s, Herzl and Rachel befriended two brothers from Gaza. They could only remember the name of one, Said.
The brothers brought them two chickens, which the Israeli couple named after the brothers. Herzl and Rachel visited Gaza and brought them pillows, a wallet for a grandmother, a doll for a daughter.
They lost touch 15 years ago.
“I would really like to find them and make contact with them,” Herzl said. “I personally don’t hate them.”
Herzl and Rachel, who immigrated to Israel from Iran and have lived in Sderot since 1955, when the city was founded, own a small store downtown that sells stuffed animals, electronic keyboards, blankets and beauty products, among other items. Business is so bad they don’t run the air conditioner unless a customer walks in. Thousands of Sderot residents have moved away, including their three children.
The husband and wife said they’ll never leave, partly because they couldn’t sell their house, but mostly because they couldn’t imagine living anyplace else.
They said they don’t expect a lasting ceasefire until Israeli and Hamas leaders meet, which they have never done. (Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and Israel refuses to negotiate directly with Hamas.)
“Both sides have to put an effort into it,” Herzl said.
Could he imagine returning to the beach in Gaza someday?
The thought seemed so outlandish, he laughed for a long time, and then answered: “Those days are over.”
