Sderot protest / The Israel they don't belong to

In search of the nation's attention, a wandering tribe of Sderot residents has embarked upon an odyssey, tramping from one center of influence to another. On Sunday it was Jerusalem, yesterday Tel Aviv, tomorrow some other place.

In Jerusalem, the seat of political power, they saw from up close the helplessness of a state with no direction, whose politics have gone bankrupt.

In Tel Aviv, a financial power on a world scale, they saw an opulent, surging Israel, and realized how much they did not belong. Apart from Israeli identity cards and a similar language, they have almost nothing in common with that hyper-capitalistic gallop, whose central artery is the Ayalon Highway.

When Israel was troubled by the Iranian threat, it put together an impressive world coalition. It is doubtful whether any other country has such mobilization and persuasion powers as those that Israel set into motion against Iran. Yet when it comes to a godforsaken development town in the heart of the deserted, wounded Negev, the state has given up.

The people of Sderot and the South feel that had this happened somewhere else, in the central region, for example, the country's energies would have burst forth just to solve the problem. Nothing can persuade the residents of the South that this is an unsolvable military or political problem. Those demonstrators in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, whose parents were sent in the middle of the night to settle the desert in the '50s, are convinced that they are doomed to this incessant hell just because they are seen as second- and third-grade citizens.

Their feelings of deprivation are such that they have stopped believing the state when it says in its defense that it has no solution. Why should they believe a state that has turned the Negev into its backyard? Why should they believe a state that robbed their self respect and stuck them at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder?

The town they live in is falling apart before their eyes. They built it from scratch and turned it from a peripheral township to a sort of desert pearl. But in recent years it has retreated into the despair that had been its lot in its early days. Thousands have left, the local economy is collapsing, the streets are deserted and there is no hope in people's eyes.

Just a one-hour drive separates two extremes of the new Israeli zeitgeist. It divides those who knew how to stake their claim from those who were dispatched to a remote wasteland on the desert's edge.

The failure to stop the Qassam rockets is to a large extent a metaphor for Israel's incompetence regarding the southern communities. Had their residents a sense of mission, they may have found the fortitude to cope with the military threat. But in a reality of soup kitchens, closing factories, fleeing residents, growing unemployment, economic distress and a bleak future, it is doubtful whether stopping the fire would bring joy to their lives.