The reality of life in Ashkelon

January 6, 2009 - 1:56 PM by Harry · 1 Comment
Filed under: General

ofir-pines For the past few days I have felt that there is way too much internet “noise” in regard to the current conflict in southern Israel and Gaza. I can’t keep my head straight. I can’t keep up with all of the emails, tweets, news sites and blogs. I am being inundated with so much information that I am finding it virtually impossible to focus – on anything. I feel like I am sitting in a lecture hall with ten professors lecturing simultaneously and I’m expected to pay attention to all. Time to focus. To filter. The first thing to go was the google alerts. Secondly, I temporarily disabled several of the blogs I read daily. While I enjoy punditry, too much of it can be a very bad thing. Especially in the massive volumes that I have been digesting. At this point, I’m far more interested in the blogs that are not blogging about the conflict, but are IN the conflict.

One such blog is Focus on Ashkelon. Authored by Sigal Ariely, Director of the Ashkelon-Baltimore Partnership in Israel, Sigal describes in great detail the experience of living in a city currently threatened by daily missile strikes. She also writes about other Ashkelon’s resident’s experiences. Such as this one describing a grad attack that occurred yesterday:

Ashkelon: 19:04 There we were, a sunny Monday morning, averaging maybe one grad/hour from about 10:30 the morning. And once again, the siren wails, we run downstairs under a hallway in my mother-in-law’s house. My neice and one of my sons were with here and just as this parade of Dorots gets to the hall, this enormous “BOOM!” shakes the house. “It’s here!” my son and husband yell together. “Nobody move!” We waited for less than a minute (although you have to wait 5 but we couldn’t) and ran outside, noticing that the window over the kitchen sink had a huge hole in it and what was left was all cracked. Smoke was coming from the houses across the street and at first, we thought it was there. Then we thought it had landed around our friends’ house behind those houses and knowing Miki was alone and on the hysterical side, ran over to her house. By the time we got to the corner, sirens, ambulance, police, Home Front Command, t.v., cameramen, neighbors I hadn’t seen for years and neighbors I had never seen in my life, you name it, were already there and the police were taping the site with red tape, like the kind they use at a crime scene (well, it is a crime…). We ran across the street to Miki’s and by the time we got there, not more than 5 minutes after the grad had landed, teams of Home Front Command were already going door to door to see if everyone was okay. Amazing! After making sure our friend was okay (her husband had to leave his car 2 blocks away and walk because the street was full of service vehicles) we made our way back home but of course, I had to see what was going on. The grad had landed only a few feet from the last house on the street, one owned by a rabbi and his wife (daughter of the city rabbi) and I kept staring and repeating “It’s a miracle” because it was.

You can listen to an interview with Sigal where she talks about what life is like in Ashkelon here.

Photo of MK Ophir Pines taking cover in Ashkelon by Zev Yanai from flickr under a creative commons license.

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