Bombs Over Be’er Sheva January 4, 2009

The last few days have seen rockets hitting Be’er Sheva for the first time in its history. The first one hit Tuesday night. I was standing in my kitchen eating peanut butter in my underwear when the air-raid siren starts blaring, and I booked it to the shelter. After that first initial adrenaline-filled incident, the other times the siren has sounded have been comparatively tame. The siren is followed by this wonderfully awful gut-clenching waiting period of roughly sixty seconds. The sound of the explosion is like a pressure valve, and as the tension felt during the siren’s wail subsides, a giddiness follows in its place. I laugh and giggle stupidly, and listen to my heart thumping.

This is, of course, all petty and silly ado about almost nothing compared with the destruction and death and suffering felt in Gaza this past week. As many as 460 Palestinians have died at the time of this post, and thousands have been wounded, with more promised to come. For this reason, writing about the difficulties or stressfulness of ‘life under Qassams’ is, in my opinion, so trivial, so insignificant as to be almost insulting. Yes, Qassams fall in our cities. Yes, it is very stressful to live in Sderot, no doubt. Do Qassams cause even a fraction of the damage to human life and infrastructure as aerial bombardment by F-15s? No. And yes, it is that simple.