An insight you won’t get from the mainstream news media coverage of events here in Israel.

Dear Granny and Grandpa,

I wanted to thank you so much for the beautiful card you sent me for my 18th birthday. I love getting birthday cards from you, they’re always so unique.

I’m really excited this year, I finally feel a little grown up, living in an apartment in Sderot with 7 other girls. I live in a very nice neighborhood with both religious and secular families and a lot of cute kids. (It’s great to earn some extra money babysitting).

As you probably know already, I’m teaching about Judaism to secular kids in kindergardens, elemantry schools, junior highs, and in nearby kibbutzim. The job is tiring. We work about 11 hours a day. In the mornings we’re teaching and in the afternoons and nights preparing for our next classes. We’re only four girls in this program, so it’s really hard work, but very enjoyable and satisfying. The girls I’m working with are all fun and very dedicated. Even though it’s only been a couple of months, we’ve been through so much together that it seems like we’ve always known one another. They’re really nice girls (one girl, I discovered, was with me in kindergarden- it was very funny).

We all pitch in to keep the apartment at least a little clean and try hard to eat proper meals, though it’s really hard. For one thing, food is so expensive and we get paid so little. We mostly eat bread and pasta. A lot of pasta. Pasta, past, pasta…

In Sderot itself, we’re all together twenty four girls doing national service. Some girls are counselors in high schools, some are the heads of the youth group that I used to be in, called “B’nei Akiva”.  Some are tour guides, some work in soup kitchens. I recently decided to spend some of the little free-time we have, volunteering as a counselor in a youth group for girls called “Ariel”. I’m in charge of about twenty-five screeching little munchkins. It’s weird being a counselor again (remember when I was a counselor in Beer Sheva two years ago for two years, for boys and girls around the same age as these munchkins), but I love kids! and these girls are so sweet!

Sderot is a very special city, not only because it gets bombed so often, but because so many of the people who live there are so amazing. For one thing, they’re always inviting us over for meals, and despite everything they’re going through, the fear for their houses and constant worry for their children – when they’re at school and when they’re at home, the lack of customers at their stores & restaurants, they smile and talk to you on the street.  People in Sderot are happy to share what they have. They have this special warmth in them, which helps you have courage.

About the “kassamim”. Technically, there is a cease fire, and before last week only once in a while they still shot a rocket or two just to remind us that they don’t mean it… Last year there were days when sixty rockets would fall. This week the IDF found a tunnel that the terrorists had dug next to the border in order to kidnap and kill more soldiers. When our soldiers went in to destroy the tunnel, there was a battle and they killed six of the terrorists. As revenge, they fired forty rockets towards the settlements around Gaza, including Sderot. I’ve been in Sderot when a “kassam” fell, but the experience I had the other day was a little different. At four-thirty in the morning the siren that gives us 17 seconds to find shelter went off: A voice on a loudspeaker blaring “tzeva adome” “tzeva adome” (”color red, color red”), telling us that a rocket had just been fired. My friends and I jumped out of our beds and ran to our protective room and shut the door. A second later we realized we had forgotten to wake two of the girls. Somehow they didn’t hear the siren and were still sleeping. We felt so bad that we didn’t wake them, but we all went back to bed thanking G-d that no one was injured from that rocket and that we were all! safe.

The next day, at school, we asked the kids how they felt. One little boy answered that he was tired, because like all of us (well, most of us) he woke up in the midle of the night from the siren and couldn’t fall back to sleep. This is how people have been living for the last 7 years!  I hope we won’t need to experience anymore of this running and hiding, it’s pretty annoying I can tell you. Unfortunately, everyone knows it is far from over.

I’m so glad I finally found time to write to you. I love you so much and so want to hear about how you’re doing. So, are you happy about Obama’s win?

I miss you. Do you know when you’re coming yet? I can’t wait to see you guys.

Write when you get a chance.

Have a great Shabbat, I love you guys so much!
Tzippora

Israeli children gather at the site where a rocket, allegedly fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza, landed in the southern town of Sderot Sunday, Sept. 14, 2008. Police say a rocket fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza has exploded in an Israeli town just across the border fence. They say the rocket hit an open area in the town of Sderot. It set a fire, but no one was hurt. It was the first rocket attack in nearly three weeks. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the rocket attack.(AP Photo / Tsafrir Abayov)

“Allegedly fired by Palestinian militants“? Does this mean that AP is leaving open the possibility that Israelis are firing rockets at each other and blaming it on Arabs from Gaza, which only the looniest of the loonies claim? Or perhaps they don’t consider people who shoot potentially fatal rockets targeting civilains to be “militant” enough to be called militants?

It’s not like AP can see where the rocket landed; they can only claim that the Israeli police say that the rocket landed in Sderot. It is of course possible that those notoriously unreliable Israeli police are lying and they just took one of the old rockets out of inventory and placed it there for the benefit of the AP photographer – you can never be sure! And the person who suffered from shock and was hospitalized – could be fake. You never know.

And the fact that Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for this attack? Well, that didn’t make the deadline, and only when Palestinian Arab terrorists say something can you report it as fact.

Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Jeff Halper was arrested in Sderot on Tuesday for illegally entering Hamas-ruled Gaza, police said.

Halper reached Gazan shores on Saturday with dozens of Free Gaza Movement activists on two boats aimed at “breaking the siege” of the Strip.

Halper, who also heads the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, crossed into Israel via the Erez border crossing, police said.

He was questioned at Sderot’s police station, and will be charged for violating the IDF’s Southern Command Front order which forbids Israeli citizens from entering Palestinian areas without permission, a Lachish police spokesman said.

“Halper will be taken to court tomorrow,” the spokesman said.

No doubt he didn’t plan on showing solidarity with the besieged people of Sderot while he was there.

He just better hope he gets out of there before the next Qassam attack. After all, there is a lot of Jeff Halper. He’s not that easy to miss.

From a plastic chair on his front porch Samir looked out over a garden neatly planted with rose bushes. In this house Samir, his wife, and five of their children are living a new life, surrounded by Jewish Israeli neighbours and, like them, in the firing line of the makeshift Palestinian rockets that target the Israeli town of Sderot. Last year one of these Qassam rockets fired only a couple of miles away in Gaza crashed into his garden, sending shrapnel up the front of the house.

Samir is not his real name, for this heavy-set, 52-year-old Palestinian is scared to reveal his true identity. This is his fresh start, his reward after working for more than 20 years in secret in his native Gaza as a collaborator with the Israeli security forces. “I don’t regret any of my story,” he said. “I’m very happy that I helped the state of Israel. Here everything is straightforward, not like with the Arabs. Here there is a law and there are rights.”

Many of Sderot’s residents are trying to sell their houses and move to safer towns beyond the reach of the rockets. But Palestinians such as Samir are moving in, in part because property is cheaper but also because there are others like them here, a community of perhaps 80 collaborators – they prefer to use a Hebrew word that translates as “assistants” – and their close relatives.

Most arrived before the rockets, when Sderot was simply an inexpensive Israeli town close to the Gaza border and convenient for occasional family visits. Those visits are now too dangerous and most of the Palestinians in Sderot now acknowledge they can never go home.

Samir was caught in 1994, the year that Yasser Arafat returned to Gaza in the wake of the Oslo peace accords. A friend and distant relative had given up Samir’s name during a brutal interrogation. Samir had spent years giving the Israelis whatever information he could find about the armed groups and their planned attacks, work he kept secret even from his wife. But Palestinian collaborators risk death if they are caught by their own people.

Lucky escape

Samir was lucky: he was held in jail for four years, tortured and then forced to give up his savings, sell his land and his wife’s jewellery to buy his way out of jail. Eventually one morning in 2000 he escaped into Israel and asked his handlers for help. He was given an Israeli residency permit, which he must renew every two years, and was allowed to bring out his wife and five youngest children. The five older children, who were all married, had to stay behind.

At first the family lived in Haifa and then they moved to Sderot about seven years ago. The Israeli security forces paid for the house and left Samir to restart his life.

Today his children study at the local Hebrew-language school, speak the language fluently, dress more like Israelis than Palestinians and count Jewish Israelis among their friends. One of his sons spent nearly four years working as an interrogator with the Israeli security forces at a nearby prison, questioning Palestinian detainees.

Most of those in Sderot were recruited during the years of Israel’s full military occupation of Gaza, before the Oslo accords and long before the settlers were withdrawn in 2005. Some were arrested for drug-trafficking or other criminal offences and were offered work as informants as a way to escape jail time, others were uniformed policemen working for the Israeli occupation. Few seem to have started for the money.

Samir began after his brother was wrongly accused of being a collaborator and killed in the early 70s. By giving information on the groups who killed his brother he sought revenge. “Because of what they did to my brother I decided to work for the Israelis. He was so strong, so beautiful and they killed him for something he hadn’t done.” He hid documents in his roof and speaks proudly of how for years he operated in complete secrecy.

On the other side of town is another collaborator, who used the pseudonym Subhi. He arrived in Sderot in 1996 and now runs a successful business, drives a BMW and boasts of his contacts with the “dignified people of Sderot”. He wears gold jewellery, including a bracelet engraved with Hebrew lettering.

He left eight children in Gaza. The eldest son was jailed for being a collaborator, until he escaped during the factional fighting last year, and the second son was shot in the shoulder and nearly killed, again because of his father’s work over 20 years for the Israeli security forces. “I don’t regret what I’ve done but I want my children to come out and be with me,” said Subhi, 54.

He gave little away about how he started as an informant, saying only he did not work for the money and that he believed it was the right thing to do. His experience has left him believing there can never be peace between Israel and the Palestinians. “The only choice is an Israeli military occupation to clean the area of weapons,” he said. “But I don’t believe there can be real peace.”

Some of the Israelis of Sderot, a poor town built on Jewish immigrants from Morocco and the Soviet Union, accept the Palestinians as neighbours and acknowledge their work. Many others, however, have few good words to say about them. “I don’t know how to accept them. We’re afraid that Sderot will be filled with Palestinians from Gaza,” said Sara Peretz, 58. Several Palestinian families have moved into her street. “It’s complicated. Their people are also trying to kill us.”

Several of the Palestinians are represented by Natan Shrayber, a lawyer who used to work in the Israeli security forces and is trying to bring the rest of their families out of Gaza. “Their contribution is considerable but the problem is we can’t make public what they have done so often they are seen as a burden on society,” he said. “But they have made an enormous contribution to state security: they are one of the main means of getting intelligence … no state can manage without people on the other side but the difference is that in Israel people know about it.”

Not far from Samir’s house is another Palestinian who spent years working for the Israeli security forces before he too fled Gaza in 1993. He was granted Israeli citizenship, and claims that he not only informed on Palestinian militants but also killed several members of Hamas.

“When the Israelis ruled Gaza people lived like kings,” said the man, who is aged 58. Like other Palestinians here he takes a hard line on Gaza, saying only a major Israeli invasion will halt the rockets. “Only when the army go into Gaza can they finish it,” he said. He accepts now his life is in Israel, where he boasts of his children’s good school grades and his large Mercedes car. He too understands he can never go back to Gaza. “They would make a kebab out of me,” he said. “They’d chop me into pieces.”

First of all, here is yet another video of him explaining why he supports Israel.

The Jerusalem Post also published this interview with him that underscores his humanity and ability to distinguish good from evil.

Jon Voight ever decides to give up acting, he could easily sign on as a Nefesh B’Nefesh emissary.

Unlike many celebrities, who parachute in for quick, superficial jaunts through Israel, the 69-year-old Academy Award winner speaks of the country with the passion and knowledge of an insider.

And despite focusing his week-long visit on some of the grimmer realities of life here, Voight, who is not Jewish, remains fervent in his enthusiasm for what he terms a “miracle in progress.”

“My business is story telling, and this is such a great story. To think in my lifetime that the Jews have returned to their land is simply amazing,” said Voight last week, while fighting off a cold in the executive lounge of the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem.

“One of the most impressive things is that this barren land has returned to fullness of its description in the Bible – it really is the land of milk and honey,” he said.

Best known for his roles in Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance, Coming Home and the National Treasure series with Nicolas Cage, as well as being the father of actress Angelina Jolie, Voight was visiting the country as a guest of Chabad and their Children of Chernobyl program, for which he has acted as spokesman for 15 years.

He welcomed the organization’s 80th rescue mission of children from the area of the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster, brought terror victims to a Hapoel Jerusalem basketball game and hosted a barbecue for their families, visited scenes of Kassam rocket attacks in Sderot, and attend President Shimon Peres’s “Facing Tomorrow” conference.

Like many in the entertainment industry, Voight was a regular guest on Chabad’s annual telethons in the 1980s, along with the likes of Bob Dylan, Martin Sheen and Whoopi Goldberg. But it wasn’t until he travelled to the Soviet Union to star in the 1991 television film called Chernobyl: The Final Warning that his relationship with the organization blossomed.

“I saw the damage done, and when I got back home I knew I needed to find a way to help. Chabad was having a fund-raiser for the Chernobyl children and asked me to MC. Since then I’ve been helping out with these dinners where they raise the money for these flights to rescue kids from the Chernobyl area and bring them to hospitals here in Israel to provide treatment, change their environment and save their lives,” said Voight, recalling the previous day’s welcoming ceremony at Ben- Gurion Airport for the latest delegation of 36 kids.

“There were a couple of little girls – little toughies. It’s a four-hour flight, they’ve never been on an airplane before, they’re leaving their homes without their parents and when they got off the plane, they were just such tough little wise guys, little rascals… it was hysterical.”

Voight said he derived inspiration on his visit not only from helping the Chernobyl children but by meeting 50 terror victims and their families and by visiting residents of Sderot.

“It’s very moving to be with people who have courage. These are good people, who are struggling with this challenge that has altered their lives,” he said.

“In Sderot, we went to a home which had suffered a direct Kassam hit on Saturday morning through the bedroom of the family’s young sons. Windows were shattered, tables were broken, there were holes in the wall. You look at the devastation and you say, my God, this kid must have been obliterated,” he said, his voice gaining emotion.

“But the kid had just a couple scratches on him – it was a complete miracle. And his brother’s in the next room, same thing. Everything was damaged, except some tefillin, which wasn’t touched. It gives me chills to think about it.

“In the living room, there was a broken table, with flowers bought by the father for the mother for their anniversary strewn on the floor amid a broken vase. Someone said to her that it was a shame about the flowers, and she answered, ‘Those aren’t flowers, my children are flowers,’” recalled Voight, choking up and his eyes welling with tears. “What you’re seeing in Sderot – there’s nobody on the streets. It’s a normal community, but there’s nobody outside, no kids playing. It’s like a twilight zone, the people there are terrorized. That’s what terrorism is.”

Voight said that if he were Israeli, he would be staunchly against negotiating with Hamas, and compared the plight of Sderot to that of London in World War II.

“Do I think that [Neville] Chamberlain should have talked to Adolf Hitler? It’s not different with the situation in Sderot. There were German barrages coming across into London terrorizing the London population. And that’s what’s going on in Sderot – they’re trying to demoralize that little town – that little town,” repeated Voight for emphasis.

Calling himself a former liberal Democrat, Voight recently endorsed Republican Sen. John McCain in the US presidential race. He added that he would prefer Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama, citing Obama as “dangerous.”

“He’s really extreme, but he’s always trying to say something to cover it. He’s like a Leftist from the ’60s. I was on the Left, that’s why I know who he is,” said Voight.

“He says he’ll talk to everybody [like Hamas and Iran], but it’s simpleminded candy he’s throwing to the extreme left wing. He’d be the biggest disaster for Israel – and all democracies – that I can think of.”

Being an outspoken conservative in liberal Hollywood isn’t necessarily the smartest career move for an actor. Voight admitted that political discrimination was prevalent in the entertainment industry but said he was hopeful that things were slowly changing.

“After all, if Washington is a two-party town, why can’t Hollywood be one too?” he joked.

Regarding his iconic 1969 role as naïve male hustler Joe Buck in the groundbreaking film Midnight Cowboy alongside Dustin Hoffman, Voight said he had no idea the film would have such long lasting resonance.

“You never know what’s going to happen. It was such an unusual movie. Like I told Dusty [Hoffman], it’s like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – these guys are a couple and you’re always going to smile when you think of them,” he said.

“It’s about desperate characters trying to make their way, fumbling through life while making big mistakes. And yet there’s something endearing and universal about their struggle. We’re all like that in a way. We all make mistakes.”

One mistake that Voight didn’t make was accepting an offer in 1994 to make a cameo appearance on the hit comedy series Seinfeld – a 30-second appearance that was part of a legendary episode. Based on character George Costanza buying a used car because it was previously owned by “Jon Voight,” the show turned into a comical case of mistaken identity highlighted by Voight, playing himself, biting the character Kramer on the arm as he sticks it into Voight’s taxi.

“I thought it would be fun to do a Seinfeld walk-on, then I got the script and I see my name on every page. I thought it was great,” said Voight.

“But I couldn’t’ figure out how they came up with something like that, until one of the writers came on the set and and said, ‘Would you walk around the corner here and look at something for me? Was this your car?’

“He had bought a Chrysler Lebaron on the word that it was my car. Then he found out that it wasn’t me, but another Jon Voight, a dentist. The whole idea came about because of this event in his life.”

Kept alive by countless TV reruns, the episode also returned to Voight’s life through an unlikely channel that has remained a constant presence in his life – Chabad.

“I’m at the annual Chabad telethon, and it’s the same night as a party for Planet Hollywood with Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis. So, of course there were no celebrities on this poor little telethon, except for me. They asked me, ‘Can you get us some celebrities’?

“So, I agreed to go to the Planet Hollywood party and try to recruit some participants. I get in this limo which was donated to Chabad and say hello to the driver. ‘Hi, my name’s Jon Voight,’ and he says ‘I’m Jon Voight.’

It turns out he was the actor who played Jon Voight the dentist in the episode, and he was moonlighting as a driver.

“We drive up to the party and I tell him, ‘I’m not sure they’re going to let me in – I had a ticket but I don’t know where it is.’ “He said, ‘No problem, of course they’ll recognize you.’

“Outside, there’s a tough looking cop with his arms folded – he looks like one of those guys who’s not going to be moved too much and who would go by the book. But the driver rolls down the window, and the cop looks at him and says to him, ‘Jon Voight – how are you?’ and whisks us through,” concludes the real Voight with a guffaw.

After all those years and movies, Voight indeed remains a story teller.

Via Ha’aretz, which also has this report on his visit:

Award-winning American actor Jon Voight visited Israeli victims of Palestinian rocket attacks in Sderot on Tuesday, taking pictures with children and speaking out harshly against latest truce efforts to stop the rocket barrages and Israeli reprisals in Gaza.

Voight described the southern Israeli town as a “war zone.” Sderot is a frequent target of Palestinian rocket fire.

“When I see these children, from my perspective they are traumatized children from a war zone,” Voight said. “You are on the front line.”

During his visit, he met the town’s mayor and families affected by Palestinian rockets.

Voight, who a best actor Academy Award in 1979, is also the estranged father of American actress Angelina Jolie.

On Monday, Voight met families affected by Palestinian attacks in a Jerusalem restaurant. One man sat in a wheelchair, missing both his legs after a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2002. Another man still had his arm in a sling from an attack on the now-dismantled Israeli settlement bloc in the northern Gaza Strip.

Voight, surrounded by photographers, knelt down next to children and sketched a picture of King David – a prominent Jewish biblical figure – next to a little boy. The young boy’s father was killed in a suicide bombing on a bus in 2004.

Voight said his experiences led him to believe that Israel should not negotiate with Palestinians militants for a truce. An Egyptian mediator was in Jerusalem on Monday to work on a truce proposal. Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip frequently fire rockets toward nearby Israeli communities, prompting deadly army airstrikes and ground assaults into Gaza. On Monday, an elderly Israeli woman was killed after a Palestinian rocket fired from Gaza exploded in a village outside Gaza.

“They are barbarians,” Voight said, referring to the Gaza militants. “They are relentless, looking to destroy (Israel),” the actor said. “If somebody breaks your leg, don’t give another. Don’t play this game.”

Palestinians complain that Israel is responsible for much of the deprivation in poverty-stricken Gaza. Though it pulled out of the territory in 2005, Israel controls all but one of its border crossings. Since the Islamic militant Hamas overran Gaza last year, Israel has enforced a blockade, leading to severe shortages of vital supplies.

After meeting the Israeli children, the actor failed to launch a bunch of colorful balloons tied to a bag that held prayers for peace. The weight of the bag kept the balloons skirting the ground. “God is down there, too,” he joked.

Voight was the guest of Chabad, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish outreach program that helps Israeli victims of militant attacks. “It’s like a warm hug,” said Ester Zigron, a 42-year-old woman whose husband was wounded in an attack and left partially blind and deaf.