When the sirens go off, the residents of Sderot have 15 seconds to scatter to the nearest bomb shelter before the rockets aimed at the Israeli border town with the Gaza Strip slam into a neighborhood. In a video distributed by the Sderot Media Centre, kindergarten children practise the well-rehearsed survival technique of fleeing from the playground into a bomb shelter, where they await the inevitable explosion, the sound of which they blot out with singing.
Since he moved to Sderot two years ago, Noam Bedein has experienced 3,000 such rocket attacks. The 26-year-old came to town to study at Sapir College, but his studies have taken a backseat to a life's calling that has turned the young Israeli's life – and the world's understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – upside down.
Bedein was in Vancouver as part of a North American visit to raise awareness of Sderot and of the Sderot Media Centre, which Bedein single-handedly started and which is now a crucial source of information for international media about the realities of life on the border of the Iran-backed, Hamas-governed Gaza Strip.
"When I got there, there was no public office or governmental office dealing with the human crisis, with what people have to live with on a daily basis," Bedein told the Independent. "Therefore, I established the Sderot Media Centre, which is today the only media advocacy centre in the whole Negev that is dealing with international media and with communities abroad and our purpose is to present and express the human face of Sderot and the western Negev in as creative a way as possible in order to create awareness."
The privately funded Sderot Media Centre is part of what Bedein said is a media war that Israel's enemies are winning. Fighting international apathy and sympathy for the Palestinian cause, Bedein said he is also challenged by the Israeli status quo, in whose interest it is to downplay the sometimes daily attacks on Sderot, because the situation implies that the Gaza pullout, which was implemented by the Israeli government with backing of the international community, has been a failed policy.
"In the past three years, ever since the disengagement, ever since Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, almost 7,000 rockets have been launched toward the whole western Negev," Bedein said. "According to the air force commander of Israel, 97 per cent of these Kassam rockets are being fired from among civilian populations in Gaza. Rockets are being fired from behind the homes, behind the residential areas, from behind neighborhoods. So if Israel wants to defend its own citizens by hitting that target in Gaza, civilians are going to get killed. So you've got civilian casualties, you've got the entire media focus on those casualties. When there's more media coverage outside the country, there's more sympathy for the Palestinian cause. When there's more sympathy for the Palestinian cause, this gives the terrorist networks the legitimacy to launch rockets toward Israel."
While the scenes of devastation left by Israel Defence Forces incursions into Gaza are splayed across the world's TV sets, the impact of constant rocket barrages, which have killed 12 Sderot residents, are less effective visually, from a propaganda standpoint.
"Mainly in Sderot, we're dealing with psychological effects," said Bedein. "How do you show psychological effects in the media? That really is the challenge.... How do you express a reality of rockets exploding right next to you? Having 15 seconds to run for your life.
"Once you've experienced a rocket exploding nearby, your life is going to change from that moment. The next time you hear that siren going off, after you experience a rocket exploding nearby, it doesn't matter if a rocket falls in Sderot or outside of Sderot, you're sure the rocket's aiming right for you," he said. "That's the psychological effect."
Bedein has become a photojournalist and, through his lens, the madness of the situation is easily visible.
"When you see a playground and a bomb shelter in one frame, you understand how this reality is completely absurd," he said. "And the question to ask is: What other Western democracy in the entire world would tolerate even one rocket being launched toward its territory?"
Hamas, which is the government of Gaza, as well as other Palestinian terror groups, use Iranian weaponry and explosives, smuggled through Egypt, to terrorize Sderot.
Sderot, with a population of fewer than 20,000, and the entire western Negev, which has 45,000 residents, has been under daily rocket attack through much of the period since the disengagement. While rockets have decreased since a June ceasefire was agreed to by Hamas, the stockpiling of weapons and explosives is increasing over the border. So is the range of the missiles being launched, according to Bedein.
"Today, the range [has] already increased to 250,000 Israelis under threat of rockets. Hamas is already getting the development of missiles coming from Iran to reach all the way up to Ashdod, putting in range half a million Israelis. This is what Hamas is doing."
More than 10,000 rockets are waiting on the other side of the Sderot-Gaza border to be launched when the ceasefire ends, with more than four tons of explosives smuggled into Gaza, said Bedein.
Bedein, who claims his politics are neither right nor left, raises the spectre of a similar onslaught of rockets landing all over Israel if a Palestinian state were to parallel Israel.
"The Gaza-Sderot reality is a live example of what could happen to the entire centre of Israel if you set up a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967," he said. "Nothing to do with politics, this is a reality we all have to take into consideration. To have a solution, you have to understand the problem first of all."
At its root, he said, the conflict is one of intent.
"While we are teaching our children to grow up with peace and hope, the other side are growing up with schoolbooks that literally say there is no room for the Jews in this country, there is no history for the Jews in this country," said Bedein.
Bedein has spoken with European parliamentary members, who believe that the attacks on Israel are legitimate pressure to bring a resolution to Palestinian statelessness, leaving aside the fact that Sderot is in Israel proper and could be interpreted as a "settlement" only by those who seek the end of Israel.
"By making it legitimate, having an excuse, a reasonable reason for rockets being launched toward civilian populations, that is the root of the problem itself," Bedein said of the world's reaction – or lack thereof – to the Sderot crisis. "There is no reason or excuse that could be given for a reality of launching rockets toward a civilian population or to hit civilian population."
As much as it's comfortable and easy to talk about simple options, Bedein contends, a two-state solution is untenable until Palestinians are willing to live in peace.
"According to their Palestinian schoolbooks and maps, the Palestinian state is the entire state of Israel on the borders of 1948," said Bedein.
The full transcript of the Independent's interview with Bedein appears below. The Sderot Media Centre is online at www.sderotmedia.com.
Pat Johnson is, among other things, managing director, programs and communications, for the Vancouver Hillel Foundation.