WarSclerotic

Inside the education fortress we meet Zohar Avitan, the director of academic studies, who has been at the college since 1977. A lively-humoured man, his jokes are punctuated by a regular lament about the absence of his students. Avitan speaks of them with grandfatherly affection, especially the Bedouin women he says have to sneak out to classes every day lest their husbands find out. Sapir is to him ‘the wondership — the ship of dreams’, where students can find their way in life. 

Before the second intifada, Sapir had a sizeable contingent of Gazan students and ran courses inside the Strip. ‘This was back when we believed in peace,’ Zohar says. He is sad but he is not bitter. His parents, Moroccan Jews, moved to Israel when he was one and the family lived in a 32-square metre house in Sderot. He is proud of his town, recalling how it was known as ‘the Liverpool of Israel’ in the 1980s for producing a succession of chart-topping artists. 

Zohar is old enough to remember before Red Colour, when air raid sirens sounded through every street of his town. In December, a rocket landed outside his house during the Friday night shabbat dinner, blowing in the windows on the family as they prayed and ate. ‘I forgot what to do but my wife shouted at me to get to the shelter,’ he says, adding with a wry grin: ‘When my wife shouts, you listen.’

The 60,000 Israelis who live in communities adjacent to Gaza could be forgiven for holding a siege mentality but everyone we meet launches one-liners faster than Hamas can fire Qassams. Zohar jokes about two colleagues comparing the time they have to reach a bomb shelter. The man, who lives in Sderot, has 20 seconds while a female colleague from Ashkelon has 40. ‘What do you do with all your free time?’ he enquires. Later, when we are running from the second rocket in Yad Mordechai, Zohar assures us: ‘Don’t worry, the college will give you 20 credits in gymnastics for this.’

Zohar has an old man’s impatience for ideology. ‘This question of who started it. He started it; no, he started it. This is the argument of the kindergarten. We cannot live in the past; we have to build the future.’ The Palestinians, he states many times, are not his enemies. He wants one of his students to become manager of the duty free between Gaza and Israel. ‘That day, we’ll throw Toblerones, not missiles’. 

He takes us into central Sderot. It is a town of 24,000 and lies 800 metres from Gaza. Zohar introduces us to the mayor, Alon Davidi, a forty-something religious man and a smooth, easy political operator. He guides us into the municipality’s security command centre with its wall of CCTV screens and bank of telephonists fielding calls from concerned residents. The atmosphere is wire-taut; Red Alert buzzes with every fresh rocket that lands nearby. Davidi breaks the tension by saying he hopes for peace in Sderot — and continued success for the English national football team. 

I ask him about the psychological effects of rocket attacks. Israeli children living in the border communities report markedly higher mental health problems than the rest of the country. Three of Davidi’s children have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The town runs a number of programmes to help youngsters manage anxiety; his children have a therapy pet, a dog called Mocha. It helps them handle the enduring fear of the next barrage. 

Next we arrive at a bakery in the centre of town. A rocket landed the night before and struck a gas canister, incinerating the back of the shop. The stench of carbon attacks the nostrils. The baker is inside, now baking in the front of his shop because he cannot afford not to work. Out the back, insurance assessors fill out their forms, stony-faced. We drive closer still to Gaza, heading to the Black Arrow memorial that commemorates an earlier, more successful Israeli incursion. We can see the tops of Gaza tower blocks on the horizon but soon we are pulled over by the IDF. At first they agree to let us take pictures then lose patience and order us to move on. 

Ten minutes later we turn into Kfar Aza, a kibbutz directly on the border. As we arrive, some of the soldiers there shake their heads. Idiot tourists. A short walk later, we run out of road. Before us stands the electrified border fence. Only its wire mesh, and 50 metres of agricultural land, stand between us and Gaza. The kibbutzniks still farm the land but Hamas is now sending flaming kites to burn the crops, even as the children of Gaza — but not the children of Hamas — struggle to survive on supplies driven in every week by Israel. The same children have no trauma pets, no ship of dreams. Their rulers put them in front of soldiers, not the other way round. Gaza is 50 metres and yet much farther from here.