[Sderot, Israel] It’s high noon in Sderot, the largest Israeli town on the outskirts of the dangerous border with the Gaza Strip.
Dozens of people meander lazily about the streets, cars drift by as if they’re not going anywhere in a hurry, and teenage kids sit on the sidewalks playing music on various gadgets.
It’s market day and downtown Sderot should be packed, the buzz of commerce heard from a mile away.
But one is hard pressed to find anyone in Sderot’s center interested in spending money.
“This is Sunday, market day, so this is the most people you’ll ever see in public in Sderot, and look!” says shoe shop owner Yanic Tahar, pointing to less than 10 shoppers wandering about the few dozen shops in the rundown market. “Thank god things are better vis-à-vis the missiles, but economically it’s the same.”
Located in the western part of Israel’s Negev desert, Sderot is a small city of some 20,000, less than a mile from the Gaza Strip.
Founded in 1951 as a transit camp for Jewish immigrants, Sderot was built on the fields of the Palestinian village of Najd, whose occupants allege they were expelled by Jewish soldiers during the 1948 War. They fled to what is now the Gaza Strip.
As Israel grew, Sderot continued to serve as a haven for new Jewish immigrants to the country. For decades the vast majority of the town’s residents were from Morocco, with a few from Kurdistan and Romania. In the 1990’s Sderot’s population doubled with a wave of Jews from the former Soviet Union. In 1996 Sderot became a city.
The city has been the target of thousands of homemade Qassam rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip, which began alongside the onset of the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising that began in October 2000. Thousands of the makeshift Qassam projectiles continued to fall on and off for eight years. At the height of the attacks in 2007 and 2008, a rocket or mortar bomb was hitting Sderot three to four times a day.
Hundreds of residents have been injured by the attacks, over a dozen killed, and the city has suffered millions of dollars in damages.
In December 2008, Israel invaded Gaza with the stated intention of neutralizing the rocket launching capacity of militant groups in the Gaza Strip to protect the civilians of Sderot and other Israeli border communities.
Levels of rocket fire at Sderot have been significantly reduced since that war.
Today there are more bomb shelters in Sderot than there are businesses. Every school in the city is heavily fortified; every bus stop reinforced with a mini-shelter, and every business or shop is within running distance of a shelter.
“This city is full of bomb shelters everywhere you look and a Qassam rocket could fall any minute,” says Saadia Cohen, 74, a resident of Sderot’s ‘3M’ neighborhood since 1955. “For now, we are absorbing the country’s problems. God willing it will end.”
“The problem is that the risk still remains,” says Elraz Azran, owner of the market’s Tovale restaurant. “We still have Qassam rockets hitting us from time to time. There’s a shelter across the street, but let’s see you run from here to that shelter in 15 seconds, and you just can’t build a million shelters.”
Azran says the rockets have mostly stopped, but the business has yet to return.
“There is less pressure from rockets hitting us but there’s more pressure economically, so we have gone from one hit to another,” he says. “Look at my restaurant. It’s noon and there are no customers. Ten years ago it was very different.”
The Sderot municipality claims that some 15 percent of the city’s population has left over the past decade, but a number of organizations have claimed the figure is as high as 25 percent. Whatever the number, many more would like to leave but are unable to sell their homes.
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), prior to the beginning of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip in 2000, there were 6,301 salaried workers, 367 self-employed workers, 603 residents on unemployment and another 3,183 receiving income supplements. The average monthly income was 3,845 NIS.
As of 2008, when the most recent CBS statistics were released, some 5,700 Sderot residents, over a third of the population, did not have regular work. Of those with jobs, over 36 percent work outside the city of Sderot.
Last year the city warned it faced bankruptcy, as the rockets had stopped and so had charitable donations that had been flooding in from around the world.
During much of the 2000 to 2008 period, the Sderot municipality was given more than $6 million in annual financial assistance from Jewish communities around the world, the Jewish Agency, the Israeli government and private Israeli companies.
Since Sderot stopped receiving these financial supplements, dozens of municipal employees have been laid off, and wages are reportedly delayed on a regular basis.
There are very few employers in Sderot. Since 2000, an international mattress factory and a number of small businesses have left the city, but there are a couple major food production companies providing jobs.
In 2002 Nestlé set up research and production facilities in the city to make breakfast cereals, and Israeli food manufacturer Osem has employed hundreds of Sderot residents at its local plant since the 1980s. Osem produces instant rice, noodle and soup dishes as well as popular Israeli snacks Bamba and Bisli.