It was May 2007. I woke up one morning to read emails from friends in Israel about the humanitarian crisis that was happening in Sderot. Qassams (homemade rockets) had been fired over the border from Gaza for the last seven years at this small town in the Western Negev. Now their frequency was increasing and the resident of Sderot were subjected to fifty rockets on some days. Five thousand people (one fourth of the population) had left, and many who stayed had no where to go. It was a crisis, covered by the Israeli media all day and night for days. Sitting in my Los Angeles apartment reading the stories, I wondered how much of this news made it to the news pages in the US. I opened the LA Times. Nothing. New York times, nothing. MSNBC, nothing there either. CNN, nope. I waited for a week — that week in May– continuing to hear stories from Israeli news, eyewitness account of the crisis. At the end of the week, an article appeared in the NY Times. Its headline: IDF KILLS FIVE IN GAZA. I read through the whole article, to read about the IDF’s actions. Only the very last sentence mentioned that rockets are being fired from this area into a town called Sderot. No context. No mention of a humanitarian crisis. I was furious! The perception was that the IDF’s “incursions” were one-sided, or not all that necessary. There was nothing in the American media about the war that was being imposed on Israel from the other side.

As a documentary filmmaker I realized suddenly that I didn’t need to wait for the New York TImes. I had just spent five years documenting and creating an epic film about the heroes who led the thirty-year human rights movement to free Soviet Jews. People on both sides of the iron curtain who came together and literally changed the world. Inspired by their determination to DO SOMETHING, and not just sit on the sidelines, I realized what I needed to do. I needed to go to Sderot and tell the story of what is happening there. Not from a news perspective, but a human story about real people and what they are going through.

I found an amazing angle for my film. Sderot, it turns out, is a city famous for its music. Over the last twenty years it has produced some of the biggest Israeli bands and rock stars. A music club for teenagers, called Sderock, is run out of an underground bomb shelter in the town’s center. (Sderock was there before the Qassams, but now its location has turned out to be vital.)

So I moved to Sderot, and I am living here documenting the lives of young musicians whose music reflects the situation. When I first arrived here, I felt like I found buried treasure. I found a small town filled with warm and wonderful people. A rich mix of cultures of Jews from all over the Arab world– Morocco, Tunisia, Kurdistan, as well as immigrants from Ethiopia, and the Former Soviet Union. I found musicians and artists that are incredibly talented and interesting people. Now they are my friends, and I am experiencing the Qassams along with them. The music is amazing, and its really powerful to listen to what comes out of this situation.

Thirteen people have died from the ongoing attacks over the last seven (almost eight) years, and its impossible to count the number that have been injured. A huge problem is the terror and fear that the Qassams create. An Israeli warning system, the “Red Dawn Alert System” detects when a rocket was fired and residents of Sderot hear the air raid, “Color Red. Color Red. Color Red…..” You have fifteen seconds to get to a bomb shelter, and there you wait to hear the boom.

One of the most heart-wrenching interviews I have conducted is with Doctor Adriana Katz, the chief psychiatrist here. Over three thousand people are being treated for serious psychological disorders caused by the qassams. And the saddest thing is to see children who don’t know that life can be any other way.

The fear is different than the fear that you have of suicide bombings. Because its not about going out to a market or cafe or being on a bus. Its the fact that rockets are literally falling out of the sky, and no where is safe.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 1:31 am and is filed under life in sderot. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.