Rallying for the Cause

Day #2 “ Rallying for the cause”

Tuesday August 2nd 2005

One favourite game that we like to play whilst on the road is to try and estimate the size of crowds at demonstrations, meaningless and a way to try a pass time whilst standing around doing nothing.

If anything epitomises the boredom of my job then last night was one of those nights, the anti disengagement movement had called for the Jews of Israel to come together and oppose the pullout from Gaza less than two weeks away now.

Claiming that they could get a crowd of one hundred thousand, five hundred buses and the nation to support them. The only fly in the ointment in this scenario was that they had called the rally for sunset in the town of Sderot. Now I am sure that none of you know of the vast metropolis that Sderot is, it’s only claim to fame is that it is the closest town to the edge of the Gaza Strip, and over the last few years of the Intifada it has been the favourite target for the Kassam missiles fired by the Palestinians to annoy and terrorise the Israelis.

These rockets are home made pipe bombs with no guidance or science involved, but have claimed many lives. So imagine a large crowd tightly packed into the park of Sdereot will naturally be a target that Hamas would find hard to resist.

Back to the crowd, the hundred thousand did not turn up, only a hundred or so buses arrived and the TV Networks of Israel gave the demo no major coverage. I stood there for four hours not understanding a word and trying to avoid conversations with racist right-wingers.

We estimated around ten thousand turned up, enough to cause total traffic chaos on the small streets of Sderot, and the Police and Army outnumbered the protestors.

One of the Palestinian cells did fire three rockets, two landed inside Gaza killing one Palestinian child and injuring others, and the third in a field miles away from Sderot.
No one will ever know the name of the Palestinian child who was killed by his or her own, it will be put down as a statistic in the struggle.