If Daley thinks he has problems . . .
Mayor of Israeli town hit by rockets puts 'crises' of local governments in perspective
All mayors grapple with the particular problems facing their communities. For Richard M. Daley, it's the budget, lately, plus school violence and parking meters.
For Sandy Frum, the village president -- we don't have a mayor -- in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, where I live, there is road repair, building a new water tower and of course parking. Though we don't have parking meters, parking is still a fixation in our community.
I truly believe that if Jesus Christ came to Northbrook to establish the New Jerusalem and appeared before the board of trustees to get the required zoning variance to build a golden dome to house his Second Coming, that the discussion would very quickly devolve into an argument over parking -- how many pilgrims is Jesus expecting to arrive to bask in glory on a daily basis? How many will use Metra and how many will drive? Where will those cars park?
But neither Daley, nor Frum, nor any mayor around these parts faces the difficulty confronting David Bouskila, who stopped by my office this week to discuss a unique problem -- the nuisance and danger posed by rockets being fired into his town from a neighboring community.
"The children cannot sleep at nighttime," he said.
Bouskila is the mayor of Sderot, an Israeli town in the Western Negev. It has about 19,000 residents, and is located about a mile from the Gaza strip. With the second intifada, in 2000, Hamas militants in Gaza began venting their unhappiness by blindly firing crude rockets into Sderot.
"They launch it not because they hate anyone from Sderot personally," Bouskila said. "But because we are part of Israeli sovereignty. We are not an illegal settlement -- we are part of the U.N. division of 1948."
Some 8,000 such rockets hit Sderot in the next decade, killing 13 people, which might not seem like a lot if it isn't your town. But if put into the context of local problems, if you think of how worked up residents of any community get over almost any issue, then pretend that 13 residents who died randomly over the past decade died because of the problem, and then suddenly you can feel a trace of the anxiety felt in Sderot.
About 20 percent of its residents moved elsewhere, even though real estate prices there fell 50 percent (Imagine the listings: "three bedrooms, two full baths, finished basement, convenient to schools; not too many rockets landing nearby . . . ").
A third of the residents of Sderot are children, and Bouskila is in America to thank the Jewish National Fund for building a secure playground in an old warehouse, so the town's children can play -- something they can't do outside because of the threat of death from above.
The play center has reinforced bunkers on either side.
"The children can play, and in a few seconds go to the side and be safe," he said. "It's very nice. You cannot understand how the children smile, how happy they are."
There are children in Gaza, too, and we talked about them.
"It's not only the children from Sderot who suffer," he said. "It's the Palestinian children who also suffer. But they don't suffer because we want them to suffer. They suffer because their leaders don't care about them. They could give them better lives, but their leaders choose not to give them."
Actually, their leaders are split -- with the corrupt-but-cooperative Fatah in the West Bank, and the terrorist group Hamas in charge of Gaza. Hamas was successful in getting the United Nations to condemn the Israeli incursion into Gaza early this year -- some 1,500 Palestinians died -- as a war crime. Bouskila doesn't see it that way.
"Israel is silent for eight years," said Bouskila, whose predecessor quit his job because he felt Sderot's citizens were not being protected. " We took action after eight years. We said we have the right to defend ourselves."
That's a hard sell around the world, where automatic sympathy to the Palestinian plight is a given among otherwise liberal elements of society, college students, academics, professionals.
Of course, believing that the Jews don't belong wherever they happen to be, along with a conviction that everything would be fine if they would only somehow disappear, is not a view invented by the Palestinians -- the Germans also used that logic. Jews were painted as a menace to world peace back when most Jews were selling rags and milking cows in villages in Poland. So, how surprising should any of this otherwise inexplicable hostility really be?
Bouskila said something I didn't know -- that Gazans are still firing rockets into Sderot, even since the war ended, though at a greatly reduced rate; only a couple a week -- not so many that the world notices, though it hardly noticed when the rate was several rockets an hour.
Unlike Chicago's mayor, who humiliated himself groveling before the International Olympic Committee, world approval doesn't mean much to the mayor of Sderot.
"Nobody can stay on the side of the strong one," he said. "If we lose, we'll be very popular. If the Palestinians go in and kill everyone in Sderot, we'll be popular all over the world. I prefer not to be popular."
Before Bouskila left, I just had to ask him: what about parking? Is it a problem in Sderot?
He seemed taken aback by the question, and for a moment didn't say anything.
"In Sderot, we have no parking problem," he finally said.
Well, that's a start.